Anna Melo:
Hello. My name is Anna Melo. I'm the curator for the Historical Archive and Interactive Experiences here at the New York Stock Exchange. I am joined by the manager of the archive, Dave D'Onofrio, as well as Michelle Young, author and the founder of Untapped New York. Welcome to Inside the ICE House.
Michelle Young:
Thank you.
Anna Melo:
So today we are going to be talking about women on Wall Street. Now, finance has been known for its entire history to be a male-dominated industry. And where is the heart of finance? Wall Street. So I'm really interested in talking about not just women, but also female-firsts, the first women to break particular barriers or to enter into particular businesses. And there are a lot of very fun and very eccentric characters for us to get through. So I want to go ahead and get started pretty early in the 1800s.
So I'm going to start with Victoria Woodhull, who was known as the Bewitching Broker. And she was the owner of the first female-operated financial firm on Wall Street. So Woodhull started out, her early life was pretty tumultuous. Her family was essentially a traveling group of hucksters that would sell snake oil on street corners, which taught her a lot about being a people person and taught her how to work a crowd, which ended up being very useful for her later. And she moved a lot in high society, through New York High Society especially. And she became a spiritualist. And for those who don't know, spiritualism is essentially applying the scientific principles of the industrial revolution to the afterlife and to the dead. Very interesting. Definitely a story for another podcast.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Oh, absolutely.
Anna Melo:
I'd love to talk about spiritualism. But so she became a medical clairvoyant and she would heal the sick through spiritual and homemade medicinal remedies. She ends up in New York and she ends up in the company of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Michelle Young:
Of all people.
Anna Melo:
Of all people. And Vanderbilt hires her to be a clairvoyant and speak to his deceased wife. And in her trips around New York high society, she would rub shoulders with a lot of very rich men, a lot of investors. And they would be talking about their stock tips all the time. And so Woodhull starts to tell Cornelius Vanderbilt, "Hey, your wife has given me some really hot stock tips from beyond the grave. You want to see if you want to try to apply that?" And Cornelia's Vanderbilt bites and decides to use these ghostly stock tips and they do very well for him.
So he ends up in turn turning those profits back onto Woodhull. He ends up giving her a lot of money. Herself and her business partner and sister, Tennessee Claflin, ended up making about $700,000 under the tutelage of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which is about $15 million today. And they use that money to start the first female run brokerage, Woodhull Claflin & Company, established in 1870, the first female-operated financial firm on Wall Street. And honestly, to me at least, 1870 seems pretty early for a female-operated financial firm. And I know that there are definitely some women that say that's very late because all of the first financial firm, of course, was operated by men. So what do you think about that, about the timing of that?
Michelle Young:
I mean, it still seems early to me. And we have the rise of Cornelius from Staten Island all the way to railroad tycoon. And that time period, if anyone's watched The Gilded Age still seems like a very male-dominated. And even if there were women kind of working the society, as you mentioned, in New York, there weren't that many working women like this and involved in finance. So I think she is not only the bewitching broker, but quite ahead of her time. And also want to mention that the sister, Tennessee, also having an affair with Cornelius.
Anna Melo:
Yes. That's part of how they connected in the first place.
Michelle Young:
Okay, got it. Yeah. Everything was very, very intertwined. But I thought even the nicknames felt a little misogynist as well, starting with Bewitching Broker.
Anna Melo:
The nicknames are going to be misogynistic all the way up, so we're going to get into-
Michelle Young:
When I first read that, I was like, "That's really low." And then I saw that she was actually a clairvoyant and I was like, okay.
Anna Melo:
She's literally a witch. So yes, I mean, we're going to see a lot of... And the Bewitching Brokers is probably one of the kindest monikers that was ever said to her. I won't be sharing the other ones, not on this good podcast, but we're going to see a lot of misogynistic language. And honestly, I think a lot of it is sour grapes. I think a lot of it is men being upset that the boys club has been infiltrated, and we're going to see a lot of that even as we enter into the 20th century.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. I also love that Victoria went on to do, well, things of outside finance and led part of the women's suffrage movement, first woman to testify in Congress. Real badass. Are we allowed to say that?
Anna Melo:
Oh, I believe so.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Well, we already did, so that's...
Anna Melo:
We already did.
Michelle Young:
Okay. Awesome.
Anna Melo:
No, her fingers were in every single stew. She was involved with the Free Love Movement. She was involved with the Communist Movement, a communist capitalist, believe it or not.
Michelle Young:
Oh, wow.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, figure that one out. And she, as well as being the first woman to testify to Congress, she also became the first woman to run for president. She ran for president in 1872. She did not win, but she was the first woman to run for president. And I think that, again, a first that to me feels early. Women don't even have the vote yet, and here she is.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. She seems very, very modern. Still waiting for the woman president, I guess.
Anna Melo:
Still waiting for the woman president. Victoria, we need you. So she is one of the very earliest. And I chose to start with her partially because I was desperate to tell the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt's dead wife giving him stock tips, been sitting on that one for a while, and also just because kind of it's a great place to start. She founded this brokerage firm in 1870 and we are deep into the industrial revolution. A lot of changes were happening here at the New York Stock Exchange during that time. We had just entered our first permanent home in 1865 and America became the most efficient economy by 1890. So we think that things are moving fast today, I can't even imagine what it would've been like to be a person around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and seeing the beginnings of electrifying cities, seeing the beginnings of steam travel becoming a viable way to across the Atlantic in faster and faster times. And to me, it makes perfect sense that we would see innovations like this. We would see women breaking the mold like this during times of transition.
Michelle Young:
Seems like a very exciting time. So where was the first permanent home? Was it here?
Dave D'Onofrio:
It was essentially on the same footprint. So one of the gentle jokes I tell people when I'm talking about the history of the exchange is that it took us as an organization 70 years to actually own our own home so I don't feel so bad for having been trying for only five years and failing to own a home, but it was essentially on this same footprint. Took us only 40 years to outgrow it, and then we had to demolish and just start over, bringing us into the beautiful building we're in today.
Anna Melo:
Nobody was ready for the industrial revolution to pick up, and then it just kept picking up.
Michelle Young:
Yeah.
Anna Melo:
So we're going to put a pin in Victoria Woodhull. Love your girl, but we're going to move on to our next female first. So the next lady I would love to talk about is Henrietta or Hetty, I'll be calling her Hetty Green. She is very famous for being called The Witch of Wall Street, which I think very unfairly... It's justice for Hetty on this podcast. So if you're a Hetty hater, turn it off right now.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Another absolutely flattering nickname. We've lost the be from bewitching and just went straight to-
Anna Melo:
Yeah, just straight to witch.
Dave D'Onofrio:
At least we didn't-
Anna Melo:
So we're here to free Hetty.
Dave D'Onofrio:
At least we didn't drop the W, so that's...
Anna Melo:
Didn't drop the W. Yeah, we're here to free Hetty, and you will see why very shortly. So she was known as The Witch of Wall Street, and she was also America's first value investor, and also happened to be the first female value investor because she happened to be a woman. And value investing is a philosophy defined by the discipline of purchasing assets only when prices fall comfortably below fair market value and selling them when prices exceed fair market value. So she was the very first proponent of buy low, sell high, long before some of the male writers who would then encourage some of their proteges to have that philosophy. And Hettie's power was in her patience. She was extremely risk-adverse. She would only ever buy assets when they dropped below fair market price. She would only ever sell them when she knew that she was going to be getting a lot more than she originally paid for them.
And she was somebody who would hold onto a stock for a very long time. And Hetty Green was also very frugal. She lived way, way, way below her means for most of her life. She lived in relatively cheap boarding houses. She would not go out and buy expensive jewelry. She would not go out and buy expensive clothes. And that's part of how she got her nickname, The Witch of Wall Street, because they would see her all in black all the time, and she was known for her penny-pinching. And I think that that penny-pinching has been exaggerated, I think, to the point of farcical at this point, but that penny-pinching and that fastidious nature of overseeing her finances is what made her survive the very, very tumultuous end of the 19th century. It was basically a 10-year boom-bust cycle for the American economy for several decades at that point.
And at the bottom of those busts, a lot of her male counterparts would be absolutely ruined. And their wives that were making fun of Hetty Green would have to sell their jewels in order to pay for the bad investments that their husbands had made. She never had to deal with that. She never had to worry about that because she had kept so much cash. And this is what also made Hetty Green the most liquid creditor in New York City. She lent money to banks, institutions, and even the city of New York. She was actually... So we all know about the panic of 1907, what almost spooled curtains for the American economy, and who was the guy that gets the credit for saving us from the panic of 1907? J.P. Morgan. And of course, nobody's talking about Hetty Green. But so yes, thank you JP Morgan.
Not trying to diminish what he did in order to save us from that panic, but Hetty Green was also very integral in that she lent money to the city of New York. She, even before the panic, because she was very good at predicting panics. So before the panic, about three years before, she lent four and a half million dollars to New York City in order to help them cover their operating costs. And at the bottom of the panic, when nobody else was able to extend a credit line for love or money, she was able to loan an extra million dollars to the city of New York. So Cornelius Vanderbilt, thank you. No, sorry. J.P. Morgan. I'm still stuck on Cornelius. I'm sorry. J.P. Morgan, thank you for saving America. Hetty Green, thank you for saving New York.
Dave D'Onofrio:
And correct me if I'm wrong about this. Not only did she not really get much in the way of thanks for it, wasn't she essentially also criticized for it?
Anna Melo:
Yeah. She was very heavily criticized.
Dave D'Onofrio:
But that's not just not thanks. That's the absolute opposite of thanks, which I think really just helps drive home just what a tenuous position any women of means or upper mobility were always pinned against.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually very interesting that you bring up that tenuous position because part of the reason why so many women, even very smart women would end up in tenuous financial positions is because of their husbands. And Hetty Green fell into that trap too. She ended up marrying a guy who started out wealthy, made some very bad decisions and ended up completely bankrupt, but she was very smart.
Michelle Young:
Right. She had a prenup, is that right?
Anna Melo:
She had a prenup. That's right. That's right. She had an early prenup.
Michelle Young:
Back in the day.
Anna Melo:
Ladies, don't forget. She had a very early prenup. And so when her husband absolutely ruined himself, she, with great consternation, she did not want to do this, but she bailed him out, which was five grand in order to free up the $5 million in assets that the bank was kind of keeping under lock and key until she made good on her husband's debts. And after that, she kind of said goodbye. And they didn't divorce, but she wasn't very interested in hanging out with him after that bankruptcy. She took it as a personal offense. And so not only was she kind of the first value investor, but she was the first woman to be spoken of in the same breath as the titans of finance, of Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, all of those titans of industry. And those titans are known for many things. And one of them is ruining other people and making... And other people tended to go bankrupt around some of these industrial titans. And that could never have been said about Hetty Green.
Dave D'Onofrio:
There's a reason that the word robber was put in front of baron to make robber baron. They weren't just barons.
Anna Melo:
Exactly. They weren't just barons. They were robber barons. And Hettie was not a robber baroness, and that is because she didn't have to be. She was playing the long game. She was always playing the long game. And she learned a lot of that from her childhood growing up as the daughter of a very successful whaler. And when his eyesight started to go, he had her read all of the documentations from the business. And so by the time she was 15, 15, she's more or less co-running the business, the whaling business alongside her father.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. I love that her nickname was also Princess of Whales.
Anna Melo:
Yes.
Michelle Young:
Pun on Wales.
Anna Melo:
When she met the Prince of Wales, she introduced herself as the Princess of Whales. So she had a sense of humor. Witch, she was not. Just a penny-pinching lady wearing black.
Michelle Young:
But it seemed like she had a lot of foresight. And I think there was a quote, "Buy cheap and sell low, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent." And I really liked just that mentality.
Anna Melo:
Yeah.
Dave D'Onofrio:
What I'm left wondering is just, I think of the cornerstone of the marketplace as being, like if you're buying stocks, especially if you're a day trader, it's buy low, sell high. And what was the mindset before that if she was the one of the people that brought that about?
Michelle Young:
And actually, I misspoke. Buy cheap and sell deer, not low.
Anna Melo:
Yes.
Dave D'Onofrio:
So literally, if she came up with that, what was the philosophy before that? It just seems like it was-
Anna Melo:
Buy random?
Dave D'Onofrio:
Whatever it was, it was bound to fail.
Michelle Young:
Well, this philosophy before that was a lot of speculating for the most part. But also, when I say buy low, sell high, I'm talking about buy low and then in 10 years, sell high. We're not talking about-
Anna Melo:
Yeah, yeah. Long, long time frame.
Michelle Young:
Long, long time frame.
Anna Melo:
And I guess we were just talking about Cornelius buying off advice of his dead wife apparently, so-
Dave D'Onofrio:
You were talking about the long game. That's-
Michelle Young:
That's the long game.
Anna Melo:
So maybe she really was selling something new. And so Hetty Green at the time of her death in 1916 was the richest woman in the world. She was worth between 100 million and $200 million, which is something between-
Michelle Young:
Is that in today's money?
Anna Melo:
No, that is in 1916 money. In today money, that is between two and a half and $5 billion. So she was worth the modern equivalent of $5 billion at the time of her death. And she left it all to her two children, her son and a daughter. And the daughter left nearly her entire fortune to universities and hospitals, paying it forward.
Michelle Young:
Wow.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Now compare that to some of the founders of the exchange who at their debts I think had pennies to their name. So clearly someone was doing something right and someone was doing something wrong.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. And it's the kind of financial advice that nobody wants to hear. Play the long game, live below your means, don't spend frivolously.
Michelle Young:
It's because it's boring.
Anna Melo:
Well, yes, it is boring. And that's why they called her a witch, because she was able to work this magic. She was able to create all of this wealth from what to them appeared to be nothing. But the only reason that to them it appeared to be nothing is because they were spending money like it was water. And one of my favorite quotes from her came from her father, which was, my father said, "I smoke four cent cigars and you'll never see me pick up a 10 cent cigar because if I smoke it and I like it, I'm not going to be satisfied by the four cent cigars anymore." So everybody, keep smoking your four cent cigars and make some money.
So witch, definitely not. Justice for Hetty Green, everybody. She was a incredible dynamo in the history of New York finance and is part of the reason why the city of New York had a leg to stand on entering the 20th century. And the city of New York, as you know very well and very intimately, became the most technologically advanced city in the world in the early 20th century. And none of that would've been possible if we had been so deep in the hole as we were before Hetty Green showed up to bail us out. So thank you, Hetty, for-
Dave D'Onofrio:
Thanks, Hetty.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, thanks Hetty for our iconic skyline and our beautiful city.
Michelle Young:
Yeah.
Anna Melo:
So I'll put a pin in Hetty Green, my beloved Hetty Green, and we're going to move further into the 20th century. We are now solidly in the 1900s and the next woman of Wall Street that I want to talk about is one Isabel Benham. So she was known as Madam Railroad and she was the first female partner of a Wall Street bond house, the first female partner on Wall Street. And she was a New York native. She was born in Buffalo and she attended Bryn Mawr in the late 1920s. And during her time attending Bryn Mawr, the school did not offer economic as a course. And so she went to her advisor and said, "I want to major in economics. I want to be a financier or an accountant or an economist, but I want to major in economics, so you should offer these classes."
And her advisor said, "Why don't you take up typing?" And so she started asking around her other professors and her other professors essentially said, "Well, maybe you should go home to mother and get married and have some children," which is what women are supposed to do in the 1920s. And Isabel said, "No." And she insisted, she petitioned the college mightily until they finally offered economics. And she was one of five women, the first women to graduate with that degree in 1931.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. What I found really interesting about Isabelle was the parallels to a woman that I wrote about in France in my book, The Art Spy, because Rose Valland, who is a famous female resistance member now, in World War II, she got into the best art school in France, Ecole des beaux-arts, but then learned when she got there, she wasn't allowed to take the drawing class because they were drawing from male nudes, but yet, from the record, we know that she managed to find her way into that class anyway. And so same thing, kind of the same story of women trying to be educated on par with their male counterparts. And they actually graduated the same year from grad school, at least Rose graduates in 1931.
Anna Melo:
An auspicious year.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. So when I saw Isabelle's story, I was like, this is representative of more than just her story, but it's like the women who kind of were born at the end of the 19th century and through the roaring '20s, getting new freedoms, but kind of being prevented slowly along the way by different things that people are saying, "You can't take that class," or, "You should get married." But getting that taste of where their careers and their lives can go.
Anna Melo:
Yeah. And it's partially from the drive of these women, but I'm glad that you brought up the 1920s and the roaring '20s because I think the zeitgeist of that decade is part of what was able to catapult both of the women that we've talked about as well as countless others to the positions that they ended up in, because for the very first time, there was an idea of women being more free, of women wearing short skirts and smoking cigarettes and swearing. And I'm not saying that that's going to make you financially liquid, but it's a change in mentality. And it's seeing women outside the domestic sphere, sometimes for the very first time, which I think is part of what gave the spark for these women to move forward.
So yes, so it's 1931, Isabel Benham just graduated college and we are deep into the Great Depression. And so she decides to start her career on Wall Street in 1932, the best year to start a career on Wall Street, as we know. But she was lucky enough to start her career in 1932 working for the Federal Reconstruction Finance Corp, which had just been put together due to the New Deal. And she soon landed a job working as a statistician with R.W. Pressprich & Company, which was a Wall Street bond house. And Isabelle focuses on the railroad industry. She sees the railroad industry for being the booming connector of places in America that it was. And obviously railroads had been around for a very long time at this point, but we are seeing commuter rail. We're seeing people traveling by rail. Just a couple of months ago, I went to the Poster House and they had all of these visit New York City railroad advertisements with all of these beautiful 1920s, 1930s-
Michelle Young:
Art deco style? Yeah.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, exactly, and seen as very glamorous. Come visit New York by rail, which is, I know, hard to parse today, hard to parse today, but she was able to see it for not being only useful for moving goods and for moving people who need to get from New York to San Francisco, but also people just trying to take a vacation.
Michelle Young:
It reminds me of the ads that the Hotel New Yorker and other hotels would show, that you could take the train and actually get off in the subway and go in an elevator directly into New Yorker Hotel. So train travel was like kind of this part of this whole lifestyle that was being sold at this time.
Anna Melo:
The glamorous lifestyles of riding the rails.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Right. And when that trip ended in a place like Penn Station, very different Penn Station back then, you could see why.
Michelle Young:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Our tragic loss.
Anna Melo:
A pod for another time. We can't talk about Penn Station. We're only going to talk about Penn Station. So just to finish up with Benham, I do want to talk about how well respected she was. And after three decades, 30 years of working with R.W. Pressprich & Company, in 1964, she became the first female partner in the firm's history and on Wall Street. And her advice was sought by everyone, by railroad companies and by governments. She was one of the top advisors for the British Railways when they reorganized the railways. And part of the reason why she was so respected is because she would not only read, she would also go out and ride the trains and she would see what's it like to ride this route end to end. What are their services really like? Is this really a sound investment? So she was not only very deep in the books, but also extremely hands-on. And that's something that we see with some of the most successful investors.
Michelle Young:
As an urban planning graduate and professor, that's the method that we use, right? If you're studying something, you got to go and experience it and be there.
Anna Melo:
Exactly.
Dave D'Onofrio:
And if you fast-forward to see how brokerages would start working more in the mid to late 20th century where they started employing really teams of research analysts, they would be the people that would be doing exactly that, going out, either riding the rails or going out to the factories to see what's rolling off the line to say, "All right, this really is a sound investment. I can see this aircraft coming off the line."
Michelle Young:
Yeah, it's really happening.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Yeah. So really, really sort of a early predecessor to how we think of financial research happening today.
Anna Melo:
Which is a perfect transition to our last woman of the evening, because she was also known to going out and visiting factories and production lines. But this time it's going to be airplanes because we are moving well into the 20th century. It is time to move on to the New York Stock Exchange's very own Muriel Siebert. So Muriel Siebert was the first woman to ever own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She purchased her seat in 1967, and the NYSC has been co-ed ever since.
Michelle Young:
But purchased at great, great difficulty. That was one of the stories that really struck me from this book, She Wolves, about the women on Wall Street by Paulina Bren. And I mean, all the stories are mixture of harrowing and entertaining and amazing, but hers, the fact that she was the first and was forced, what was it, that she had to get 445,000 to pay for it, I think?
Anna Melo:
Yeah. The New York Stock Exchange literally changed the rules to force her to take out this huge bank loan.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. And 80% of it had to be a loan or something, yeah.
Anna Melo:
80% of it had to be a loan. Yeah. And she had the money for it. She had the assets for it, but they were like, "No, 80% has to be a loan."
Michelle Young:
Right. And then they asked her about her personal life, things that they didn't ask any of the men. So yeah, for me, her story represented almost the culmination of all the women who had come before, but she had the chutzpah to say, "Well, I'm going to get a seat."
Anna Melo:
That's right. And she was actually encouraged to get a seat on the stock exchange because one of her clients and also a good friend, she was talking to him about how upset she was about... She'd been kind of going back and forth in different jobs along Wall Street and was very upset by the fact that she was getting paid less than the men that worked with her working the exact same job. We're talking about the 1960s. It was fully legal to pay a woman less to work the exact same job as a man. And she's thinking, "I'm making a lot of money for this business and I'm not even getting compensated as much as the guys who are doing less than me."
And so her friend says to her, "Well, you should buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, because your success at the New York Stock Exchange is determined on how good of a broker you are, not on whether you're a man or a woman." And at first she thought, "But that's impossible, but I can't get a seat on the exchange. They don't allow women." And her friend said, "They don't? Where does it say that?"
Michelle Young:
Right.
Anna Melo:
And so she goes to the library, she gets the constitution of the New York Stock Exchange. She sits, she reads the whole thing, and it's long, and she discovers... and the rule book and everything, not just the constitution. And she discovers that there were no rules against being a woman on the exchange. And that is what sparked her interest and had her start on the actually very difficult path of getting her seat on the exchange.
Michelle Young:
Yeah.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Yeah, especially when you consider that so many people come to the exchange where literally their brokerage house that they work for just foots the bill essentially. They just have a seat transferred to them effectively. So you go through our membership database and you'll see so many people, it has their name and then their price and it just says null. It's because that seat was just transferred transferred to them. Of course, there's a downside to that. That may be free, but what comes easily can go away easily as well where the brokerage says, "You know what? We're going to transfer this over to this other person that's doing a better job as we're..." Buy it outright. It can still happen, because it actually did happen to Muriel when she-
Anna Melo:
It did happen to Muriel.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Yeah, so even though she bought her seat, she still had it essentially taken out from under her at some point.
Michelle Young:
Oh. Did she get it back?
Anna Melo:
She did. Well, hang on. I'll tell the story of how she ended up leaving the exchange and then you can tell the story of her rejoining the exchange. So 1967, she becomes the first female member of the New York Stock Exchange. 1969, she starts Muriel Siebert & Company, her own brokerage firm. And for about 10 years, she was the only woman on the stock exchange. And her hard work was noticed by Governor Hugh L. Carey. And he selected her to become New York's first female superintendent of banking in 1977. And during her tenure as the superintendent of banking, none of the banks in New York shut down. And that is a lot more impressive than it might sound at first, because this is the era of Ford to New York, drop dead. New York was very, very, very deep in the red starting in 1974.
Banks had stopped underwriting our bonds. There was a very good chance that without the proper management, that all of the banks would fail. And under her supervision, none of the banks failed, but that took her away from the stock exchange for a couple of years. And when she returned to the stock exchange, she discovered...
Dave D'Onofrio:
That, well, her seat was no longer hers. So she had leased it out, because essentially you're forced, just like most people who enter political life, essentially put your business into a blind trust. So she did that. So she was no longer running her company, but essentially also had to give up her seat temporarily. And I guess without her realizing, it was written into the contract, into the lease contract that whoever leased it had the option to buy the seat out. And so that person decided, "Well, I'm going to exercise that right," and buys the seat out from under her. And then she had to go ahead and I think it was only a matter maybe of days or weeks, she goes ahead and purchases another seat.
Anna Melo:
They didn't give her the runaround this time.
Dave D'Onofrio:
No, no. I mean, not as much of the runaround. And so she had to, except for a few days, had to come back onto the exchange again through her own means.
Anna Melo:
A fighter.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Yeah.
Michelle Young:
Oh, very much so.
Dave D'Onofrio:
A fighter and a winner. So I'll say that. She also came back to, I think, a business that was in a bit of a mess and she had to clean house and start over. But lo and behold, Siebert Financial is still here today.
Michelle Young:
Okay.
Anna Melo:
That's right. And so one of my favorite Muriel Siebert stories has to do with the Luncheon Club and the bathrooms at the Luncheon Club, because the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was a private members-only dining club at the New York Stock Exchange. And the membership of the Luncheon Club was exactly the same as the membership of the exchange. And prior to 1967, all of those members were men, and the only nice bathrooms on the floor of the Luncheon Club on the seventh floor were men's rooms. And so Muriel Siebert is getting pretty sick and tired of having to go to a completely different floor just to relieve herself in her private members-only dining club. And so she petitioned the Board of Governors to install a women's room on the seventh floor and they said, "What if we get back to you never?" And essentially they just dragged their feet and hoped that she would forget about it, and she did not forget about it, as any woman who's ever had to use the bathroom will know.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Bladder pain cannot be forgotten.
Anna Melo:
It's true. And so she then says, "All right, well, if you're not going to install a women's room in my partial members-only dining club, then I'm going to put a porta-potty in your elevator lobby." And the New York Stock Exchange Board of Governors thought, "She's not going to make good on this threat." And then she rolls up a truck with a porta-potty strapped to the back down... She didn't personally drive the truck.
Michelle Young:
No, but still.
Anna Melo:
But she had a truck with a porta-potty.
Michelle Young:
The porta-potty arrived.
Anna Melo:
Yeah, the port-a-potty arrived to the front door of the New York Stock Exchange and the Board of Governors thought, "Oh, she's serious." And so they decided, "Okay, you know what? We're going to make a women's room." And the men's room was like, it was like a men's room at the opera at the time. There was lounge and an attendant and all of that fun stuff. So they cut the men's room in half and put up a wall and everything and they put up the women's room, but there was no other entrance really planned out for the women's restroom. So historically, the way that you entered the women's restroom at the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was opening up the back of phone booth number five. It was a speakeasy bathroom.
Michelle Young:
That's so cool. Well, so I mean, times have changed, but sometimes, not so much. And so you remember when the law came in that you had to have pumping rooms for women who were breastfeeding?
Anna Melo:
Mm-hmm.
Michelle Young:
So my office at the time did have one and it was the HVAC room. So I'd have to go in there and the noise...
Anna Melo:
How soothing.
Dave D'Onofrio:
No, I mean, I think almost every place I've worked has had something similar to that. And what's crazy about... Well, maybe not crazy. I think at the time, it was pretty normal, was that this wasn't the only Luncheon Club she couldn't get into. The buildings she had her offices in had similar rules where it's like she was a tenant and she couldn't go to her own essentially dining room in her office building.
Michelle Young:
It must be crazy to actually navigate your own city like that, where you're actually boxed out of places you belong to.
Anna Melo:
And I know it might seem silly to end all of these amazing stories of amazing women with the story of a bathroom, but women's bathrooms entering society was one of the first ways that women were able to enter society in the first place, because historically in the whole city, if there were only men's rooms, if you're a woman, you want to go out and about the town? Well, you can't because there's nowhere for you to relieve yourself.
So I think that that is just a small kind of symbol of the greater acceptance in society and of the greater access in society. So Muriel Siebert, the first female member of the New York Stock Exchange, and now the leadership of the New York Stock Exchange is very much female. Today in 2025, our president, Lynn Martin, is a woman. She is the second of our two fully operational female presidents. And our current chair is also a woman, Sharon Bowen. So the leadership of the Stock Exchange is now female. What comes in the future? We're going to find out.
Michelle Young:
Yeah. And I love that the... Was it the first room in the Stock Exchange being named after a woman?
Anna Melo:
Yes.
Michelle Young:
Is the Muriel Siebert Hall?
Dave D'Onofrio:
Indeed.
Michelle Young:
That is very cool.
Anna Melo:
Michelle and Dave, thank you so much for joining me for this wonderful, witchy story down through the women of Wall Street.
Michelle Young:
This was a blast. Thank you.
Dave D'Onofrio:
Yeah, a pleasure. Thank you for having us.
Speaker 4:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen, and follow us on X at ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week inside the ICE House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.