Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 24

Illustration of an elegantly dressed woman examining a length of ticker tape
to check on her stock prices, Vogue magazine, 1929.
22    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Summer 2017  | www.MoAF.org
in better paying, professional positions as
office managers, librarians, statisticians
and advertising agents. One estimate,
from 1914, had “about 200 women in the
Financial District filling posts of these
kinds.” Working behind the scenes, they
lacked the visibility and glamour of stock-
brokers, but earned good money, with
annual salaries of $2,000 or more.
The New York Times profiled one such
woman, the college-educated Beatrice Carr,
who was the manager of the financial statis-
tics and mailing departments at the invest-
ment house of Fisk and Robinson. Carr
had risen during eight years on Wall Street
from a $14-a-week position as an assistant
librarian to her current post. She believed
that new opportunities were opening up in
financial firms for college educated women,
and she encouraged such women to “turn
to Wall Street.” Her optimism was some-
what tempered by the fact that, however
well women like her were paid, men were
paid from 30-50% more “for the same
work.” She hoped that this disparity, which
she characterized as “a relic of barbarism,”
would soon disappear.
Despite Carr’s optimism, Wall Street
did not rush to create workplace equal-
ity. Some brokerage firms, however, did
begin establishing women’s departments
“to capitalize on the investment needs of
women, some of whom were both inde-
pendent and well-heeled.” Women were
frequently hired to staff those depart-
ments, creating new opportunities for
careers in finance.
The first woman to manage a wom-
en’s department at a brokerage house
was Alice Carpenter, a Boston native and
Smith graduate who was active in the suf-
frage movement and settlement work. She
managed her own substantial inheritance
so effectively that in 1914, William P.
Bonbright and Company, an international
bond house, asked her to organize a wom-
en’s department at their New York Office.
Bonbright believed “that probably
women would prefer to deal with other
women in making their investments, that
they possibly considered the investment
of money a confidential matter and that
they would talk more freely with a woman
than with a man.” So successful was this
endeavor that Bonbright opened another
women’s department in Boston in 1916,
under the direction of Margaret Stack-
pole, a Radcliffe graduate with coursework
in Economics and Psychology. Bonbright