She-Wolves
The Untold History of Women on Wall Street
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • A Washington Post Most Anticipated Book for Fall • A Next Big Idea Club Must Read • One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2024 • One of UnTapped New York’s Best NYC Books of All Time • A Town & Country Must-Read for Fall 2024 • In development with Mark Gordon Pictures
“[Paulina Bren] captures the feeling of the culture.” —Maggie Lange, Washington Post
The propulsive story of the women who sought, and gained, a piece of the action on Wall Street.
First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens—the “smart cookies” who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street’s bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night.
In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11—starting at a time when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened she’d have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didn’t finally install a ladies’ room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm.
As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bren (The Barbizon), a gender studies professor at Vassar College, serves up an enthralling chronicle of how the first generation of women to work in New York City's financial sector fought for equality. She explains that in the 1960s, New York financial firms staunchly resisted hiring women (one manager told a female applicant, "Why are you here? We'd never hire a woman"). The women's movement helped erode these barriers, but those who broke through endured almost uniformly cruel treatment. (Bren notes that Alice Jarcho, who became the first woman broker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1976, regularly found mayonnaise-filled condoms left on her desk.) Still, women invented cunning strategies to get ahead. For example, Barbara Moakler, who joined Lehman Brothers in the early 1980s, convinced her chauvinist coworkers she had a boyfriend at Goldman Sachs so that her colleagues, hoping to do business with him, would treat her with respect. Though the tales of sexism outrage, what sticks with readers will be the resourcefulness and resilience of Bren's subjects (when Doreen Mogavero was unable to find a job that paid her a fair salary in the late 1980s, she founded a brokerage that became the "first and only women-run NYSE-member firm"). It's a sharp look at the difficulties women faced breaking up Wall Street's boys club. Photos.
