Wall Street Women
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
Wall Street Women tells the story of the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street. Since these women, who began their careers in the 1960s, faced blatant discrimination and barriers to advancement, they created formal and informal associations to bolster one another’s careers. In this important historical ethnography, Melissa S. Fisher draws on fieldwork, archival research, and extensive interviews with a very successful cohort of first-generation Wall Street women. She describes their professional and political associations, most notably the Financial Women’s Association of New York City and the Women’s Campaign Fund, a bipartisan group formed to promote the election of pro-choice women.Fisher charts the evolution of the women’s careers, the growth of their political and economic clout, changes in their perspectives and the cultural climate on Wall Street, and their experiences of the 2008 financial collapse. While most of the pioneering subjects of Wall Street Women did not participate in the women’s movement as it was happening in the 1960s and 1970s, Fisher argues that they did produce a “market feminism” which aligned liberal feminist ideals about meritocracy and gender equity with the logic of the market.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, even as the media celebrated women as potential saviors of the economy, the financial world had removed women from senior Wall Street jobs. Most of the women who broke through glass ceilings to become leaders in finance were gone by the time of the crisis, not necessarily of their own volition, including the subjects of this lively and provocative historical ethnography. Georgetown University anthropologist Fisher, co-editor of Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, combines the detached curiosity of an anthropologist studying the folkways of a tribal village with a sure grasp of history, politics, and economics, as well as an affectionate regard for her subjects, a small group of highly successful women who entered Wall Street in the '60s. "nfluenced by the tenets of liberal feminism," they advanced their careers by playing on traditional assumptions about women cautious, caring, family-oriented that had previously been used to exclude them from leadership roles, and recast them in market terms: risk-aware, value-oriented long-term investors. By the '90s they became an active force in politics, openly supporting pro-choice women running for office. Fisher's argument about the emergence of "market feminism," a synthesis of liberal feminist values with neo-liberalist ideology that could provide new opportunities for women on Wall Street, is worthy of readers' attention.
