She-Wolves

July 22, 2024
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.