Episode 37: Women on Wall St. – with author Paulina Bren

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: Longtime listeners might remember back in season two when we interviewed Vanessa Loder about her decade of experience working on Wall Street. Vanessa told us that during those days she “cursed like a sailor, dressed in masculine looking pants and sharp blazers, and once wolfed down a seven-inch subway sandwich in under seven minutes on a dare while senior partners cheered her on.” She recalled that pulling all-nighters and working 100-hour weeks was normal and something to brag about, and that Wall Street was “a work hard play hard culture in which [she] excelled… if [she] ignored the blatant sexism.” These quotes paint a vivid picture of the environment women faced on Wall Street even in recent decades. But, of course, Vanessa wasn’t the first. Generations of women had already been carving out space for themselves in a financial world that was explicitly built by men and for men. These women’s stories are extraordinary and have too often been overlooked until now. Paulina Bren’s newest book, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street, uncovers the extraordinary histories of women who fought their way into one of the most male-dominated industries in America. These women endured exclusion, harassment, and impossible double standards, yet still managed to break barriers and redefine what power and professionalism could look like. How did they do it? And why does it matter, not just for women, but for the health of our entire economy and culture? I’m so excited to dig into these questions with the author of She-Wolves, Paulina Bren. Welcome, Paulina! 

Paulina Bren: Hello! I’m so glad to be here.

AA: Paulina Bren is a writer, historian, and professor. She’s the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free. Paulina teaches at Vassar College, where she is the adjunct professor of multidisciplinary studies on the Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the humanities, and the director of the Women, Feminist and Queer Studies Program. Paulina’s most recent book is She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street, and it was named one of the 10 best nonfiction books of 2024 by the Kirkus Reviews. We’ll be discussing this book today, as we said, and congratulations on that, Paulina. 

PB: Thank you. 

AA: That’s super exciting. I cannot wait to get into the content of the book. I wonder if first you can tell us a bit more about yourself personally, where you come from, what brought you to do the work that you do. 

PB: Could I go all the way back? Well, I think I’m an example that you can always pivot at any point in your life, in your career. I was actually born in Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain back in the day. And when I was a toddler, the Russians invaded, and my family just randomly, because you didn’t get to figure things out and do them slowly, left quickly for the UK. So I grew up in England, but I’ve been in the US since mid-high school. I entered academia as a scholar, a historian of Eastern Europe and of communism behind the Iron Curtain, because I wanted to write about the ‘70s and ‘80s, which no one had written about. I did that and then I thought, “I’m tired of this. I’ll do something else.” I’d always been a storyteller, I’d actually been a fiction writer, but I have the skills of a historian. And I found myself really interested in writing about American women in the 20th century. So my first so-called non-academic trade book was The Barbizon, which was about the women-only hotel on the Upper East Side in New York, and it tells the story of the women, famous and not famous, who resided at this hotel. And it especially tells the story of the Barbizon gal, who in many ways represents New York in the 1940s and 1950s. And the story is much longer, but that, in many ways, tells us about ambition and thwarted ambition and so forth. 

And as I was finishing the book, I became really interested in seeing, “Well, what happens after that? What kind of woman can represent really the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s?” And I found myself going to Wall Street to see the women, as I named them, the She-Wolves. And it turned out, I mean, I knew nothing. Nothing. It was a huge learning curve. I knew nothing about finance or Wall Street. I didn’t know what I’d find there. I thought it would feel like an alien world. It was interesting to see how pivotal this story was and these women’s stories were to our times, to those of us who have nothing to do with Wall Street. That’s really where I landed, trying to continue that story that I started to tell before. 

AA: That is really fascinating. I’m curious what your sources were as you were going into history that’s relatively recent. How did you feel about your research? 

PB: Well, that was also a shocker. I was already used to the idea from The Barbizon that when you write women’s histories, sources are an issue. Because often, the sources you want don’t exist. They’ve been thrown out along the way, not necessarily with evil intent, just this idea that women’s history or those women are not important. That was certainly the case with The Barbizon, and I sort of reconstructed The Barbizon through different sources, because all the guest registries and all of that, those letters, don’t exist anymore. So I was already used to that. And turning to Wall Street and an even more contemporary timeframe, She-Wolves is about the 1950s to 9/11 in 2001, so it’s really the second half of the 20th century. But a lot of my characters are particularly coming in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, so a fairly contemporary period, you could say. And yet the dearth of material, I mean, because it’s contemporary, the first thing when you start a project is to Google. You see what’s out there, what’s been written, who’s there, and so forth. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And just to give you an example, after the first disappointing Google, I headed off to the New York Historical Society, which actually has an oral history archive that they created about 10 or 15 years ago about Wall Street from the 1950s to 1980. They interviewed 55 big shots from Wall Street, 50 men and five women. Not so surprising those were the numbers. 

The surprising part was that when the men were asked, “What about the women?”, they said there weren’t any qualified women. There was nobody to hire. It’s not true. Not true. And there were other examples. There’s a really interesting book written about the ups and downs of Wall Street in the same timeframe as I write about, and it’s done through interviews in a very interesting way. Of 600 pages, two pages are an interview with a woman, and that is of course Mickie Siebert, who’s the one woman some people have heard of from Wall Street. Otherwise, the other 598 pages are all men. So as I started to see this, it became obvious that there is a real issue of invisibility here, even though these women not only existed, but they succeeded. 

AA: Wow. Yeah, that’s even worse than I expected. 

PB: Me too. 

AA: Wow. Well, I can’t wait to dive into the book and hear these women’s stories, but first I want to lay the groundwork. I think there’s a common idea that Wall Street was built by men and for men, and I’m wondering if you can expand on that for us. In what ways has Wall Street specifically excluded women, and why was it built that way?

PB: The fastest way to describe this is to point out the lack of women’s bathrooms and the fight to have them installed. I actually talk a fair amount about bathrooms in She-Wolves, because it was very relevant to these women. And it wasn’t just Wall Street, it was Wall Street adjacent as well, The Wall Street Journal. When women started to work there, there was a problem of just one tiny women’s bathroom for maybe an occasional female visitor. Luncheon clubs, all of these places had barred women. Not only were they barred– so there were two issues. Every single woman I spoke to who was sort of the first two pioneering generations, every single one had an example of how a meeting was being held at a luncheon club or the Harvard Club, the Yale Club, so forth. And even if they were actual alums from that university, the women would come to the door and the doorman would just throw out his hand, not let them through the front door, and said they had to go around the back to the lady’s door, which was near the service entrance. 

In one case, one of the women had a very sympathetic boss who said, “Fine, then we’re all going through the ladies’ door,” and he marched everybody through the ladies’ door. But of course that wasn’t always the case. There’s a wonderful story of a woman who was invited to give a keynote talk at a luncheon and a club, again, that would not let women in. So she literally had to climb the fire escape. The men had to help her into the room where she gave her talk, and then out she went through the fire escape again. So there was a literal barring of women. And then the whole issue of bathrooms. We’ll probably talk about, as I said before, the one woman people have heard of, Muriel “Mickie” Siebert. She was really one of the iconic pioneers who arrived in 1954, and by the late 1980s, she was threatening the New York Stock Exchange that if they didn’t put a women’s bathroom on this particular floor where there was a special dining hall for members such as herself and other women, that she would literally call in porta-potties. All these stories are about trying to find a bathroom on the trading floor. Men get to trade and just run to a bathroom, while women have to go through multiple floors and corridors. So when I say that women did not have access and Wall Street was built for men, I mean it quite literally.

AA: Yeah, and that makes sense. But like you said before, it’s usually not with evil intentions, right? Someone’s not designing a building on purpose thinking, “Ooh, let’s make it really inconvenient for women.” It’s just the invisibility of a patriarchal system where they don’t expect women to be working. They don’t expect women to be in finance at all, to even have the capability to do finance. It’s a world totally built for men not thinking about women. 

PB: Exactly. Absolutely. And it’s not even about evil intent, it’s lacking, at that time, the imagination, the foresight to imagine a world where women could enter Wall Street, quite simply.

AA: Yeah. Although, as I’m thinking of examples in my own life where there was ignorance more than that intent, sometimes then when women do start to enter the space, that’s when sometimes you discover, “Oh shoot, there is misogyny. They actually do believe that women don’t belong.” It’s not just ignorance. 

AA: Yeah, for sure. So, how did women start entering the world of finance on Wall Street? When did that happen? Who was it? How was it done? 

PB: I’ll refer back to Mickie Siebert here for a second, because she is the best known, but she took a path that was quite similar to women who would follow in the years after her. She arrived in 1954 from Ohio in a beat-up Studebaker and very little money in her pocket. There had been women on Wall Street before her. I don’t want to pretend like she was the absolute first one. And what’s interesting also is that there were periods of historical time on Wall Street when women were seen as useful and they were present. One example would be the 1920s, before the crash, when everybody was investing money, including women. So brokerage firms would create these salons just for women, where they could go and invest their money. They were made to look like lovely, comfortable, sort of bourgeois living rooms, and they hired female brokers to be brokers in those women’s salons, but they had nowhere to go after that. And after the crash, they were all ousted and the salons ended. 

Then you see that pickup again in the 1950s, actually, even as women are pretty much barred, I mean very much excluded from Wall Street after World War II. Wall Street is trying to, at the same time, sort of solicit their money for investment and that creates opportunity for women too, but in very defined roles. But Muriel “Mickie” Siebert took a pathway that a lot of women then followed, simply because it was the only way to get your foot in the door, and that was to come to Wall Street by accident. For these early women, it was not intent. It was literally coming to New York, needing to find a job, and clerical jobs were the jobs that sometimes paid a little bit better on Wall Street. So Mickie Sibert got a job as a sort of teletype assistant in the research department. Research departments were places where researchers would have certain industries that they were in charge of, like trains, cosmetics, and so forth. And they learned everything they could about the industry, which companies they would suggest to their brokers at the firm that they should tell clients to invest in. So she was there running between the phone and questions from clients and from brokers to the researchers. 

She’s one of these women who started to pick things up and get interested. And again, it was often these women who started to climb the ladder, and not only did they see something here that they were interested in, but often it was a lucky accident, and that happened over and over. So in her case, it was when the senior researchers were doing well and they were rewarded by being able to shuffle off some of their work onto the youngsters. And the train guy did not believe in a future of airplanes and aviation, so he handed that over to Muriel to start to learn about, and she became an aviation expert at the time that the industry exploded. I should point out that at this time, no major Wall Street firm was willing to hire women beyond the secretarial pool. So these women were coming into these little, at the time– Wall Street was so different from today, it was studded with hundreds of little brokerage firms and they were more willing to hire women. Women could multitask and they were a lot cheaper. 

So she was jumping from one to another, but every time her salary was going up, they’d bring in a young man with no experience and he’d make the same, if not more. And she was getting really sick of it. She went along like this for about 13 or 14 years, and she was getting so frustrated. And a friend of hers who was a big deal in the go-go years in the 1960s on Wall Street, he said to her, “Why don’t you buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and open your own firm? Because you need to be a member and you need to have a seat.” And she said, “I’m a woman. I can’t do that.” He’s like, “I don’t think it’s in the Constitution.” And it goes back to what you said. When the Constitution was created for the New York Stock Exchange in the late 1700s, it was sort of a cabal of these guys who had been trading in that area and they decided to set prices and regulations. They did not exclude women in the Constitution because they couldn’t imagine women. So she reads that and she realizes that she can, and there’s a seat available for like $450,000, which is the equivalent of 4 million today, and she decides to go for it. She needs a sponsor and she needs a bank loan. I won’t go into how impossible that was, but she manages, finally, and she gets $4.5 million in today’s money. She gets her little white and red enamel badge, and she officially becomes the first woman to have bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. But she does not use it to trade, which is why you usually buy it, because she knew she’d already done enough. She’d broken enough barriers and she said that she already had enough enemies, and she didn’t need to go do that. That would be for somebody else. And indeed it wasn’t until 1976 that the first woman actually went to trade on that floor.

AA: Unbelievable. 

PB: Yeah. But she followed a pattern that you then saw these women in the ‘60s and the ‘70s following the same thing. There was such an interesting group of women, these first, these pre-1980s, when, you know, in 1980 Wall Street explodes. It becomes a totally different universe. Prior to this, it’s this almost quaint little enclave in the southern tip of Manhattan, and the women who come there, who accidentally fall into it, they’re a scrappy bunch of women. They are not these MBA graduates, nothing of the sort. They tend to be working class, lower-middle class college dropouts if they even started to attend college. Not all of them, but that was a general profile. And they often had very complex backgrounds and by the time they arrived on Wall Street in clerical positions, they had a tough skin, and that was really important. That was part of it. 

AA: This is reminding me so much of Mad Men. 

PB: I know. 

AA: Right? I was really surprised, if listeners have seen Mad Men, by Peggy’s character. How she’s working as an admin in the office, just by luck has an idea, and then she gets a toehold and actually is able to work her way up in the company. But against terrible odds and terrible sexual harassment and just horrific conditions. But she just finds an opening.

PB: And also, in the same way, I knew there was obviously a story of constant sexual harassment. And by constant, I mean throughout this timeline of 50 years it was constant, constant. I didn’t want it to be the main story I was telling, but of course it’s part of the story. You can’t get away from that and you shouldn’t get away from that. But what I was not expecting, and now it seems so foolish, is the level of loneliness these women had, because they were always, at the beginning, they were the only woman in the room. That was it. Their level of vulnerability was tremendous. To have a mentor, if you’re going to have a mentor, there were only men as mentors that were available, so immediately then the rumors would begin that you’re sleeping with him if he’s your mentor. 

And then women also told me that the pinching of their backside was annoying enough, but what was really annoying, and especially on the trading floors, was when the men who were so angry that women were there wouldn’t trade with them. They would use their clerks as sort of go-betweens, like divorced parents. That’s the thing that the women said, when they were cut out of deals because men would not even talk to them, that hurt far more than anything else. It makes sense. And at the very beginning, the Financial Women’s Association was created in the 1950s by the sort of handful of women on Wall Street. And they said, the originator said that in theory, it was to network the same way that the men had the old boys network. It was starting to build up the network, but the truth was that they had nobody to go to lunch with, and this way they would have somebody to go to lunch with. So it really was that vast loneliness, you know? 

AA: Yeah. That makes so much sense. I can just imagine it. I would love you to tell us some more stories from the book. Tell us about a few of your very favorite She-Wolves. I’d love to start with Marianne Spraggins, if that’s okay, and you can choose some more that you want to share. 

PB: There are so many. And I should say that I don’t want to give the idea that it’s just a bunch of anecdotal stories of women. I interviewed a tremendous amount of women, and many are not in the book. I’d say about 20 are in the book, but it’s a handful that I really focus on. And the idea is that, yes, they have really crazy stories, but at the same time, those stories are also speaking to a moment within the much larger history and trajectory of New York and Wall Street and women and the workplace. That was really important, that they sort of link up in a way that’s not just a bunch of stories. Marianne Spraggins is a perfect example of this. There’s really this period of tension among the generations, because there’s this period of the ‘50s, especially ‘60s or ‘70s, where these women are coming. And then there’s a very new type of woman with the MBA and the Ivy League college degree coming in the ‘80s. And there’s a lot of tension between these groups. 

And Marianne is somebody who, right before Wall Street explodes in 1981, she’s kind of sensing it. She’s a woman who is Black from a prominent Harlem family in New York. She’s a lawyer, she’s a law professor, there is no reason for her to go to Wall Street. But when she was doing her degree at Harvard, she took a course on international business and they were taken into sort of the underbelly of Wall Street, sort of a little field trip, and she was mesmerized. She said that suddenly she understood power. Because of the Harlem connections and the kind of family she’d grown up in, but here she was seeing a very different kind of power. And it was very prescient, because at that moment it wasn’t that obvious, frankly. Wall Street had been on a real down trajectory throughout the 1970s recession. She just sensed that and she felt there needed to be a Black woman at the table. She quit her job as a law professor, and she wrangled her way, which in itself was a big deal, into the trainee program of Solomon Brothers. And amazingly, that year, I think it was the first year they even had any Black trainees, but they picked five candidates that year and she was one of them. But gradually the others sort of picked off, fell out, and it was only her. 

And the way these programs work is that they have lectures, they learn about everything. And as this is happening, different department heads are coming in to lecture about what they do, but they’re picking off who they want. They have their portfolios, their photos. Everybody’s been picked, everybody has a department, training is over, and she still has nowhere to go. She’s put together with this guy who was a complete racist in the Solomon Brothers. It’s funny, I’ve read elsewhere what a supportive guy he was. Not to Marianne Spraggins, he wasn’t. And they had just a blowout fight. And in that moment she realized that either she’s gotta make it big or she’s gonna go out there on a gurney. There’s no middle ground anymore. And that day she decided that instead of trying to be invisible about the shame of not being picked, she’s going to put it in everybody’s faces. So she set up her office at a table in the cafeteria right next to the cash registers where everybody, including the executives, would get their breakfast. And she sat there sort of inviting people to ask, “Hey, what are you doing here with all your stuff?” And she sat there and people gave her projects and so forth, and she was just determined. One day she was told to go interview with this guy called Lewis Ranieri for something called mortgage backed securities, which nobody had heard of. Nobody knew what the heck it was. She went and she had no idea what it was. He hired her. He was like, “Well, you sound like everybody else here. I’ll just hire you.” Well, she ended up being in the department that became the golden goose of Solomon Brothers. But her perseverance was insane, and her sense of where Wall Street was going and how pivotal it was going to be, and the fact that she wanted to have a voice there was fundamental to these otherwise very radical decisions that she made. And she wasn’t a spring chicken at that point either, so it was quite remarkable. 

suddenly she understood power

But there are so many stories. Louise Jones is another favorite of mine also. In the early 1980s, she had been found abandoned as a newborn in a phone booth on the Upper West Side. She was a foster child and the foster family then adopted her, but she didn’t realize she was adopted. She was always after money, even as a teenager, she had like a gazillion jobs. But she said to me it wasn’t the money, it was what came with it: a sense of security, a sense of power, and it was really important to me to write a book also about women who wanted power and money. So in high school, and again, this is a couple years after Marianne Spraggins begins, she’s in sort of half work, half study program in high school on Staten Island. And she gets a job also, I think, as a teletypist at the New York Stock Exchange. And she arrives there, and it was so loud in those days. Now, if you go to the New York Stock Exchange, it’s like a sleepy shopping mall on a Monday afternoon. This was a time when like 3,000 people were milling around, screaming, it’s so much noise. Trash everywhere because you can’t have garbage cans because it would be a hazard, so you just throw everything on the floor. So loud. And she said it was the first time she felt she could breathe. In all that chaos. She looked around and she was like, “I’m going to make so much *expletive* money here.” And she did. And she did. So there were a lot of really interesting people who picked up on certain things in the time and the culture. And much of it was accidental, but some wasn’t. Some instinctively understood it, as well.

AA: I want to pause there and ask about something that you just said kind of in passing, that it was important to you to tell those stories of women wanting money and power. I think that’s really interesting, because in our culture, I think we’re taught, at least how I grew up, that that was unwomanly. It’s unwomanly to want power and money. That’s kind of a man’s thing to want. So how each one of these women grappled with that and with the stigma, it’s like other fields where women were new and entering and there was resistance, but in some ways it’s unlike other areas for its extreme un-femininity.

PB: Yeah, exactly. I know the whole thing about money also, the sense of it being unseemly and therefore unfeminine, right? 

AA: Yes, yes. 

PB: It’s interesting. There’s one woman who was a very aggressive trader. She said that all the characteristics she’d always been punished for as a girl worked in her favor in finance as a trader, and she was rewarded handsomely for it. And that was exciting to her to be able to act that way and not just be told that, you know, you’re not acting in a ladylike fashion, but rewarded so handsomely for it was a phenomenon I think a lot of these women experienced. Also, I have to say, especially the early women when they were entering, the women in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, were entering an extremely brash culture in a different way than the ‘80s. The ‘80s were very brash, too. They were coke-filled and it was a different kind of brash, but the women who were really isolated, who were alone in order to survive, consciously and unconsciously, they would have to act like men. 

And a lot of women said to me, especially Alice Jarcho, who ended up being the first woman to actually trade on the New York Stock Exchange floor in 1976. By then, she was still very young, but she was a veteran of Wall Street, and she was loud-mouthed, I mean four-letter words out of her mouth, she was often horrified by what she’d become. And in fact, when people who’d been talking to her on the phone for years would meet her, they’d be shocked because she was this young, pretty diminutive woman, and they never expected that because of the way she acted. So, women did often talk to me about how they’d had to adjust to that. But the whole thing about making money, I made sure to ask the women I interviewed about that, and I found that they often said the money was gravy. A lot of it was the power. It was the power that came with it that was enticing. And also they tended not to spend the same way men did. For them, it was about knowing that they’d created security for their family if they had one. That’s a whole other issue. But if not family, for their parents, for their siblings, they were in a position where they could help anybody. And that’s often how they treated that money, as sort of this security blanket, this enormous buffer they had created in their lives.

AA: Mm-hmm. Would you like to talk more about the families? You say that’s a whole other issue, and indeed it is. Can you talk about that a bit? 

PB: Yes. There were exceptions, but the early women felt they didn’t have a choice. It was having a family or it was having a career. There was no in between. The women who came sort of young in the late 1970s into the ‘80s, they were trying to figure out how to have both and talking to each other about it, how to do it, recognizing compromises, recognizing they had the funds in a way a lot of other working women didn’t, so they could afford to have nannies. But then the question was, you know, there are so many weekend events, so many evening events. It also really often became a question of which sector do you go into if you want to have a family? The sectors where you couldn’t say goodbye at 5:00 PM, you continued well into the night. So there were a lot of questions. But I think one of the interesting things that, for example, Maureen Sherry told me, and she was at Bear Stearns and she’s this tall, beautiful blonde, and she would always be showcased as “you can have it all” at Bear Stearns because she actually had four children in a row. Every single time she said she’s coming back, but she’d come back or friends of hers would report to her that they’d already put somebody in her chair, so she’d have to wrestle her clients back after that. Every single time. But what she said, and it speaks so much to that moment when women feel they can have it all, she said that the men would always display pictures of their wife and their kids on their desks in the trading room. Proud, virile, you know. And of course, most of the wives were at home, because they were making so much money. And these women who had children who were also in the trading room also had desks, but they wouldn’t dare showcase that. They could not afford to present themselves as mothers. Even though Maureen had four children at home, it was something you were still hiding. And even if everybody knew about it, it’s just something you did not want to identify as. Whereas the men, of course, that was a plus, right? It was a plus that you’re so virile that you’ve had those four children.

AA: Yeah. That’s a double standard. It would be shocking, but I’m like, yeah, of course. I get it. I wouldn’t show my kids’ pictures either. People wouldn’t take you seriously! 

PB: Well, this is the thing. When I’ve given talks, I always emphasize that this book is, in many ways, it’s a story of women entering the workforce from the 1950s to the present. Because this is not to say that Wall Street, I mean, yes, Wall Street is sort of an uber version of all of this. But even in academia in the late ‘90s, I’m sure the early 2000s too, when you were on the job market as a woman with a PhD or finishing a PhD, you were told to take off your wedding ring, if you had a wedding ring. If you were pregnant, and often the women on the job market were in early pregnancy because they put off having children throughout graduate school because they’re told they shouldn’t have kids in graduate school, the amount of tricks that were used to hide that you’re pregnant… All of this was happening in liberal academia. So, this is a story that is not just about Wall Street, it’s not just about the She-Wolves. It’s about all of us. 

AA: Yeah, for sure. I’ve even been told that. I remember when I was thinking about going back to graduate school, which I did after my four children were a little bit older. I was talking about how I present myself the first time that I meet advisors, and the person that asked me to tell them about myself, I said, “Well, I have four children–” and they go, “Oh, I wouldn’t lead with that.” And it was really, really… yeah, and I understood why I did, but my husband for sure could have said that first. And I would like to encourage men to do that. I’m happy that the men had pictures of the families in their offices, but everybody should be able to. 

PB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these things have changed everywhere. I wouldn’t say they’ve disappeared everywhere, but they have changed. At the same time, readers of She-Wolves who are young say that they identify with the story that’s being told here. They can see themselves in it, too. 

AA: It’s discouraging to hear that. 

PB: I know. 

AA: I want to go back to a topic that we discussed a little bit with the money and power, specifically about capitalism. Because on our podcast we talk about patriarchy and capitalism being interlocking oppressive forces in society. They’re deeply interconnected, and so I’m wondering, with that connection in mind, if we are working within a capitalist system, which we are, why is it important for women to be present in our financial institutions? And it seems like that came up with Marianne Spraggins also, right? She said, “I need to be here in the room where it’s happening in order to exert influence.” Can you talk about that a little bit more? 

PB: Yeah, absolutely. I think that even if you don’t agree with neoliberal capitalism, which I’m certainly not a fan of, and you don’t agree with what Wall Street represents, you want women there. You want diversity of all kinds there. So even if, let’s say, women and people of color and queer folk who are on Wall Street, even if they buy into the promise of neoliberalism, I think the experiences inevitably offer an entryway into seeing things a little bit differently. You need multiple perspectives to make good decisions. And what’s really worrying to me is that– these days there’s so much worrying me, but one of the things that’s worrying me is that private equity, which is really the thing now in many ways, and the Silicon Valley tech industry, they’re leaving out women. They might have a cool vibe happening, but it often feels like the 1950s all over again, which is why the She-Wolves feel so relevant to me. Because when you read these stories, you know the book that came out by the woman who worked for Facebook and that Zuckerberg was trying to make sure didn’t come out, but of course that created even more publicity for it. Those experiences, I mean, we’re seeing a throwback. And in fact, when I spoke to the women of all these generations, when I would ask about progress, they would say, “Yeah, there’s been progress. There are lots of women in sort of high-level middle management, but if you look at the very top, very top, the numbers are terribly sad. 10%. That’s sort of what you’re looking at.” And the fact that the most sought-after industries are private equity and tech and AI, probably, that you’re not seeing women there for the most part is very troubling to me. So, regardless of what your feelings are about capitalism, we live in it right now, and the idea that it’s again going to come down to men and men of a certain class and of a certain ethnicity and a certain sensibility is very troubling. 

AA: It brings to mind the quote that you share from Gloria Steinem near the end of your book, where she says, “We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.” That kind of encapsulates what you’re talking about. 

PB: I have to say, I first came across that because it’s something that those women, there were a number of women who prospered very well in finance and they retired. And not because of their age, they just retired, they had enough money in many cases and want to do something different. And they are leading sort of the call for financial feminism and they’re the ones who sort of look to Gloria Steinem’s quote, and I puzzled over it for a little bit. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. What I would say it means is what you started with, the notion of money, of making money, of the power that comes with it, is seen as something that men do, as the masculine domain, right? 

And so what these women who work in financial feminism call for is that basically women vote with their money, that they invest in ways that help other women. And it’s actually an idea that’s quite similar to one that was propagated from the ‘30s to the ‘50s by a woman called Wilma Soss. For her, it was less of a feminist submission, but still somewhat. But she was trying to show people who invest that, in fact, they own the company and they have power to make change. And so financial feminism is taking this in an even more sort of feminist perspective. And I’d say it’s a tricky question because it goes back to when women got the vote, the actual vote. And suffragettes had always hoped and planned that once women got the vote, they would vote in their own interests, but that didn’t happen. They didn’t vote as a block as a sisterhood, you could say, to use an old fashioned term. They voted often as their husbands voted or voted along different sensibilities rather than some sort of women or woman-oriented sensibility. And I do worry about financial feminism in that same way, where we might keep telling women, “You could help by thinking about how you invest.” I think similarly there are problems there, because first of all, most of us, let’s face it, are not that keenly tuned to how we’re investing if we’re investing, right? So I think it can get quite difficult, I mean, buy from women-owned businesses if you can. That’s some element of that. But still, having said all of that, I’m glad that there is this idea of financial feminism, because ultimately money is power, so you really could, in theory, make change through deciding where your money goes. That’s something we all understand in terms of boycotts.

AA: For sure. And it depends what group you’re talking to. I come from a conservative religious background, that was the environment in which I was raised, and I’ve had conversations with women I know who were in abusive marriages who didn’t leave, at the very basic level, they couldn’t leave because it’s like it was 200 years ago and they had no way of supporting themselves and their children. 

AA: That’s too bad. 

PB: Yeah. And I remember, going back to Maureen Sherry, who told the story of the photos of the kids, or lack thereof, on the desks of the women with kids, she told one story. When Bear Stearns changed CEO, and again, there was a real emphasis on Wall Street because they didn’t want to get sued, because civil action suits had started, that’s a whole other thing. So HR decided that the CEO should meet with top level women from different branches of Bear Stearns all over the country and talk about these issues. So they would have these meetings, and she went into hers all revved up. They get there and there’s a classic scenario. There’s a tape recorder in the middle of the desk, it’s already running, HR is run by a woman who is not on the side of women, and the new CEO is sitting there while the women are talking, trying to express their experiences. He’s not listening, he’s taking calls, he’s putting out his cigar in an ashtray which says Financial Women’s Association, the one I talked about at the beginning that was found in the 1950s. And when women would talk about something that happened, he’d say, “Sounds like your problem.” So on the one hand you have diversity and equity committees, and on the other hand you have the reality. And that’s a harsh truth, but it’s very much part of the story. 

AA: Yeah, yeah. And I’m so glad you point that out. And it’s just good to remember that that is, like you said, that’s the reality. And it is moving forward, even if it’s sometimes stepping back and sometimes stepping sideways and it’s frustrating, but those doors being opened are real, and it is making progress. 

PB: Absolutely. This is very, very true. You know the story of She-Wolves is depressing sometimes but it’s really inspiring, and it’s honestly funny a lot of the time in a tragic comedy way. It really is, because of the absurdities that take place and the way the women would get so clever at getting past these obstacles. You often had to really outwit everybody. You had to be cleverer than everybody else. To outwit was what the other people put in your way. Some of that tends to be very amusing and inspiring. 

AA: Yes, for sure. Definitely. I think listeners will find it incredibly inspiring. Incredibly inspiring and such fun to read, such a fantastic book. And that is bringing us to the end of the conversation. I’d love to ask you, as my almost final question, we’re centering action this season on our podcast, and so we like to end each episode talking about what listeners can actually do to help create positive change. So I’d love to ask you if you have any action items that you’d be willing to share with us.

PB: What I would say, I’m not sure it’s something we can do but we can work toward it. I was thinking of this analogy recently. Wall Street is a very secretive world. It was hard to get these women to talk. The reason they’re willing to talk is because they wanted the women who came after them and who are in that world now to understand that they’re coming out of a legacy, there is a legacy, there are shoulders that they’re standing on. So I think that’s really important to recognize. If you graduate from college and you go to finance now, you’re not just being plucked in there. There’s a whole almost century behind you of these amazing women that you’re now a part of. And I think you need to recognize that. And it’s helpful to recognize that. 

And as part of that, I was thinking, there’s sort of an analogy, I don’t know if you’ve discussed this on your podcast, but certainly we discussed this in our Women, Feminist and Queer study courses. We often hear about how medical students to this day are not taught about women, they’re not taught about menopause, they’re still often taught that Black women feel less pain, which is why pain management for Black women when they’re in labor and other surgeries and so forth tends to be less than it should be, because this is what they’ve been taught, or they haven’t been taught. In the same way, I really think that in business schools, men and women who are there need to be taught. And again, we’re starting with the incredible erasure and invisibility of these women. When I started the project, there was no history. In fact, I think there’s a documentary on Netflix running right now, a new one called Titans, which takes you through all the titans of Wall Street, and I doubt they mention any women because this just continues with erasure. And I think that in the same way, those who are doing business school or business studies, they need to be taught about this history. That they’re not isolated in this moneymaking environment, that it has a history, it has structures, it has experiences that you might recognize. So when you’re in that, you might actually recognize something that you maybe read about and you didn’t feel that comfortable with, and you see it happening, you see yourself repeating it. So I think in that sense, the understanding fundamentally that we need to know the histories of women, as much in medical school as we do in business school and other professional fields. And I think that to get rid of a lot of these nonsensical ideas we have about women or the invisibility of women. As I said, when these men were asked, “Were there women?” They were like, “No, there were no women” when there were. That’s simply a fact. So that’s what I would say and what I would like to see everyone aim for. 

AA: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And in that way, reading the book is a meaningful act, to know accurate history and to bring women’s voices back in. So, thank you. Thank you for writing the book. 

PB: Thank you for having me here!

AA: Yes, yes. I’m thrilled to know this information and to share the book. Where can listeners go to learn more about your work and find a copy of the book? 

PB: For me, just go to paulinabren.com. For a book, everywhere. If you don’t want to go near Amazon, understandably– but you can, I do not judge. Bookstores, Barnes and Noble, any actual bookstore, it should be there. If it’s not, order it. It’s really everywhere. And the paperback is coming out September 23rd. I don’t have a copy yet, but I got myself this lovely bag with the new cover. And I should say, every time I write a book about women, the first draft of the front cover is pink. 

AA: Oh, how funny. 

PB: We have to push back every time. As a result, it somehow ends up green all the time. But now for the paperback, I was like, “Okay, let’s just do pink.” 

AA: Oh, that’s funny. How interesting. I love it. I like the look of it, too. That’s wonderful. Well, again, the book title is She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street. And again, Paulina Bren, thank you so much for being with us today. I learned so much from you. 

PB: Thank you so much.

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