Women in the history of financial markets

When shares and government debt became things that could be bought in London, in the 1690s, women bought them. Historians who have gone through the surviving ledgers of the Bank of England and the South Sea Company find women among the holders throughout the early eighteenth century: a minority, but not a curiosity. The proportions differ from ledger to ledger and none is given here.

Most of those holders were widows or unmarried, and the reason was legal. Under the English common law of the time a married woman’s property passed, with some exceptions, into her husband’s control. A widow or a single woman could hold stock in her own name; a wife generally could not. In England and Wales the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 changed that, and American states passed laws of the same kind from the middle of the nineteenth century.

Owning stock was one thing and dealing in it was another. The brokers who met in the coffee houses, and the exchanges that grew out of them, were associations of men, and they stayed so for a very long time.

For most of their history the stock exchanges were private bodies owned by their members. To deal on the floor one had to be a member, or to work for one, and membership was limited in number: in New York a membership was called a seat, and a seat had to be bought from someone who was giving one up. New members were proposed and approved by existing ones. No law was needed to keep women out. The members’ votes did it.

The door opened at different times in different places. Oonah Keogh was admitted to the Dublin Stock Exchange in 1925, and is often described as the first woman member of a stock exchange anywhere; that is a claim which is hard to prove and is given here as it is usually made.

During the Second World War, with many men away, women were taken on to work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as clerks and pages. They were employees and not members, and most of those posts went back to men when the war ended.

In 1965 Julia Montgomery Walsh and Phyllis Peterson became members of the American Stock Exchange, New York’s second exchange.

The London Stock Exchange admitted women as members in 1973. Its members had voted against doing so more than once in the years before. The change came as London joined with the regional stock exchanges of Britain and Ireland, some of which already had women among their members.

The law moved in the same years. In the United States the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 made it unlawful for a lender to discriminate on grounds of sex or marital status. In Britain the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 did the same for employment and for the provision of services, including credit.

These dates are recent. A woman who began work in the City of London or on Wall Street in the early 1970s began in a business that had only just admitted that she could be a member of it.

An account built on dates and names favours the people whom newspapers wrote about. Most of the women who worked in the markets before the 1970s were not members or partners: they were clerks, telephone operators, bookkeepers and the staff of back offices, and few of their names were kept.

The same is true of investors. Ledgers recorded names and holdings, and a woman who invested through a husband, a brother or an agent does not appear in them as herself. What survives is a lower bound.

Claims to have been first deserve care. They depend on which exchange is meant, on what counts as membership, and on whether anyone was keeping the record. Where this page says that someone is generally recorded as the first, it means that and no more.