Women and Wall Street: From Victoria Woodhull to “Fearless Girl”
By George Robb
For nineteenth-century American women, Wall Street posed a paradox. On the one hand, the stock market was widely condemned as reckless, corrupt, and morally dangerous—an arena thought especially unsuitable for women’s supposedly delicate constitutions. Yet refusing to participate meant surrendering access to one of the most powerful new engines of wealth in post–Civil War era. What was a woman to do?
Early financial advice manuals for women urged caution, steering women away from the stock market and recommending “safe” investments in real estate or government bonds. Best to entrust one’s capital to a male relation or family friend rather than to some crafty and conniving stockbroker. Along with authors such as John Cromwell, who warned of “an army of sharks and rascals” who preyed on gullible women, newspapers and novels were full of cautionary tales of naïve women who were financially ruined by corrupt brokers. These may have been well-intentioned concerns to protect women from financial risk, but they also served to exclude them from potentially lucrative investment opportunities.
Women’s rights advocates were ambivalent. Even as they described “the Street” as a bastion of male corruption, they still pushed to participate more fully in market capitalism. These conflicting attitudes can be found in the pages of The Revolution, a progressive paper edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the nation’s leading suffragists. Even as it denounced capitalism, The Revolution still celebrated pioneering businesswomen. In one 1868 editorial, Stanton compared the stock market to a “gambling saloon on a large scale” and vowed to “turn Wall Street inside out.” Stanton and Anthony later castigated robber barons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk for attempting to corner the gold market in 1869, arguing that such financial scandals would be impossible in a nation governed by women. Could women reform Wall Street by becoming brokers and bankers, or would they inevitably become corrupted by man’s “bank note world”?
Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin offered a test case. In February 1870, when they opened their brokerage business in New York City, becoming America’s first women stockbrokers, they were initially celebrated as the “Queens of Finance.” Like many other women’s rights advocates who saw Woodhull, Claflin & Company as a sign of better times, Susan B. Anthony described it as triumph for “working women.” In an interview with Claflin for The Revolution, Anthony argued that “the advent of this woman firm in Wall Street marks a new era” when women could “be at the head of a banking institution, surrounded by ledgers, high stools, and those evidence of masculine superiority that men have plumed themselves upon so long.” For Claflin, economic independence would free women from exploitation. Being a broker, she told Anthony, was far “better than sewing drawers at ten cents a pair, or teaching music at ten dollars a quarter.”
Male commentators and brokers were far less enthusiastic. Many characterized the “lady brokers” as foolish and inept, and their hostility grew after the sisters began publishing Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper that sought to uncover corporate fraud and crooked stock market deals. As Woodhull later boasted, “we exposed in our Weekly one nefarious scheme after another when we realized that companies were floated to work mines that did not exist…and to make railways to nowhere in particular, and that banks and insurance societies flourished by devouring their shareholders’ capital.” The paper frequently highlighted how women were financially victimized. Woodhull and her supporters helped organized the People’s Party, which fronted her 1872 presidential candidacy and championed the American worker against the capitalist cabal of “money-lenders, land grabbers, rings and lobbies.”
Along with her forceful personality and advocacy of radical causes like women’s suffrage and free love, Woodhull’s inflammatory politics made it easy for opponents to brand her as unwomanly and immoral. In a famous cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, for example, Thomas Nast depicted Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan,” with horns and cloven hoofs, tempting women to abandon their families and follow the primrose path of free love. The Cleveland Leader argued that Woodhull’s “brazen immodesty as a stock speculator on Wall Street” clearly indicated that she was “a vain, immodest, unsexed woman.”
Woodhull and Claflin breached the exclusive fraternity of Wall Street, but not for long. When their brokerage failed in 1873, the male establishment was quick to draw conclusions about the financial incapacity of women. For stockbrokers such as William Fowler, the dissolution of “the feminine firm” was “evidence [of] how unsuited to woman’s nature is such a field of enterprise.” In his 1875 guidebook, Bulls and Bears of New York, Matthew Hale Smith implied that the Claflin sisters were little better than prostitutes, enticing men to part with money through the employment of feminine wiles. Only fast women, Smith suggested, would be attracted to the life of speculation and the sordid world of the stock market.
During their brief sojourn on Wall Street, the Claflin sisters exposed its clubbish atmosphere and misogynist attitudes. The hyper-masculine world the Street endured for decades, maintaining a hostile environment for enterprising women. Many brokers’ offices replicated the masculine ambience of saloons, with free cigars, lunches, and paintings of naked women. In popular novels like Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) or Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers (1908), brokers were often depicted as sexual predators. Legendary financiers like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, and August Belmont embraced the playboy lifestyle and flaunted their womanizing. To their admirers, it was just another part of their oversize personalities. “[S]exual prowess, whether real or imagined,” as historian Steve Fraser writes, “became an enduring part of the mythos of the Wall Street titan.”
Little wonder that Woodhull and Claflin found their reputations in tatters, and the scandal that drove them out of business cast a long shadow over women in general. Other women who tried to earn their living selling securities risked being seen as indecent. One such case was Sophronia Twitchell, a women’s rights activist turned broker. She worked as an agent for the Equitable Life Insurance Company in San Francisco, where she speculated heavily, and successfully, in mining shares. In 1880, at the age of 50, she moved to New York and opened a business on lower Broadway as a broker in mining securities. Although she ran a genuine stock business and sometimes made a great deal of money, she was very unpopular with male brokers. They may have resented her success, and they certainly resented her unusually forthright manner. Tall and energetic, Twitchell became a familiar figure on Wall Street, especially for barging into brokers’ offices. Once, when a businessman ordered her out of his office, she struck him with her umbrella and was arrested for assault.
Unlike Woodhull, who was often depicted as a beautiful siren seducing the likes of Vanderbilt out of stock tips, Twitchell was mocked as an outlandish old crone. Newspapers described her as a “crazy crank,” a “nuisance,” a “human curio,” and “the Galloping Cow from Frisco.” In 1888, the New Haven Register provided an unflattering portrait: “She is a woman almost six feet tall and she is well along in years, but you see her rushing around at a lively pace in Wall Street in all sorts of weather, looking for tips and watching an opportunity to play the market to her advantage.” Seeing her as an intimidating and bewildering presence, many brokers tried to freeze her out and to discredit Twitchell as an unwomanly freak.
By the 20th century, Wall Street had become more welcoming to passive women investors, but no less hostile to active women brokers. During the 1920s, women constituted 30 percent of the nation’s shareholders, but only 2 percent of its stockbrokers. And by the 1950s, women made up half of all American investors but were still woefully underrepresented on Wall Street. Not until 1967 did the New York Stock Exchange finally admit its first woman member, Muriel Siebert. But like her predecessors on Wall Street, she endured sexist headlines like “Skirt Invades Exchange” and “Powder Puff on Wall Street.”
Deregulation of the securities industry in the 1970s led to new employment opportunities for women, especially in research and sales. Siebert herself noted that although women were coming into Wall Street in large numbers, “they are still not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There’s still an old-boy network.” In 2011, women constituted 55.4% of financial services employees, but only 16.6% of executives.
Beginning in the 1970s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought several sex-discrimination lawsuits against Wall Street firms. Brokerage houses began promoting more women, though not necessarily treating them well. Susan Antilla’s Tales from the Boom-Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street (2002) documented a pattern of discrimination and sexual harassment in the financial industry during the 1980s and 1990s. Women were paid less than men for the same positions, demoted following maternity leaves, and subject to a constant barrage of crude, sexist behavior.
Popular representations of Wall Street still perpetuate the notion that the world of high finance is presided over by greedy and priapic brokers. The Victorian incarnation swilled champagne, while his modern counterpart supposedly prefers cocaine. Gordon Gekko, the antihero of Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987), embodied the hyper-masculine culture of American finance.
The most recent battle of the sexes on Wall Street involves the dueling statues near the New York Stock Exchange. Since 1989, Arturo Di Modica’s giant bronze “Charging Bull” has embodied the power and exuberance of American capitalism. But this meaning was changed overnight in 2017, when Kristen Visbal deposited her own bronze statue opposite the bull—a defiant girl in ponytails with her hands on her hips. “Fearless Girl” was immediately celebrated as a feminist challenge to the testosterone-charged atmosphere of Wall Street. That no one had to explain this new meaning only confirms Wall Street’s long-standing reputation as a masculine preserve. Victoria Woodhull certainly would have understood, and she might well have lamented that things hadn’t improved much over the last 150 years.
About the author: George Robb is a professor of history at William Paterson University of New Jersey. He has a PhD from Northwestern University and was a Fulbright scholar in England. His most recent book is Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression.