Wall Street Women: Engendering Global Finance in theManhattan Landscapeciso_1042 262..285

MELISSA SUZANNE FISHERGeorgetown University

AbstractThe first generation of women on Wall Street has negotiated shifting gender roles fromthe fifties to the present, a period of transformation in global financial markets andbusiness as well. Over much of this period, these women increasingly used cityplaces—federal buildings, the stock exchange—to promote women’s upward mobilityon Wall Street. In this article, I focus on how two women’s networks—The FinancialWomen’s Association and the Women’s Campaign Fund (now Forum)—deployedmany tactics of visibility, including organizing events celebrating women’s accomplish-ments in male dominated industries, using the press, and more recently incorporatingfeminist performance artist’s autobiographical storytelling. The article traces the waysthe women’s networks shifted the sites of their spatial tactics in the eighties, fromdowntown financial spaces to more “democratic” professional-managerial spacesthroughout Manhattan. It also illuminates the ways the networks have increasinglyincorporated tenets of liberal feminism into their events. [Keywords: Wall Streetwomen, feminism, finance, performance, American culture]

Introduction

In 1981 the Financial Women’s Association, a network of professionalWall Street women chose Federal Hall as the site of the organization’s25th anniversary dinner. A noted landmark built originally for the

exclusive use of elite men of the city and nation, and later on the market,Federal Hall was a prime piece of symbolic territory. With their celebra-tion, the women represented themselves as an emerging financial elite ina well known masculine space in Manhattan’s old downtown financialdistrict.

Cities are the landscape of the imagination, the site of promises,dreams, fantasies, and nightmares. For Wall Street women, urban space isamong other things a landscape of the imagination where they can createand legitimate a place for themselves in finance. Here they have situatedand brought visibility to their histories and ambitions for upward mobil-ity and success. The first generation of women on Wall Street has nego-tiated shifting gender roles from the 1950s to the present, a period oftransformation in global financial markets and business. Over much ofthis period, female researchers, stockbrokers, and bankers increasingly

City & Society, Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 262–285, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2010 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2010.01042.x.

used city places—federal buildings, the stock exchange, and corporateheadquarters—to promote women’s upward mobility on Wall Street. Inthis article I focus on how two women’s networks—The FinancialWomen’s Association and the Women’s Campaign Fund (now Forum)—deployed tactics of visibility, including organizing events celebratingwomen’s accomplishments in male-dominated industries, and the use ofthe press.1

From the late 1950s through the early 1980s the women held theirevents primarily in Manhattan’s financial district, the epicenter of WallStreet. In using places important to the world of New York City finance,they capitalized on their own increasing access to Wall Street, gainedinitially as consumers and extended as professionals, and deployed mar-keting and branding strategies being used in business. During the late1950s holding events in traditionally all-male clubs on Wall Street wasamongst one of the first tactics women’s networks used to showcasewomen in finance. Ensuring that such events were written up in popularNew York City magazines was also amongst the first and arguably mostimportant strategies women used to draw further attention to themselvesas business women. They began to shift their spatial tactics in the 1980s.As the world economy changed (including the expansion of an interna-tional financial service sector through the deregulation and the global-ization of markets) the women’s networks widened their reach locallyand globally to include a small number of cities now at the apex of theemerging globalized economic space—New York and London amongthem. In Manhattan, they held events in the material spaces of anemergent professional-managerial class: art galleries and museums. Thesetransformed and new spaces for social interaction amongst business elitesappear to be more democratic and accessible than traditional men’s clubs(Zukin 1995:13). They offer a new social space for the exchange of ideason which businesses thrive (Downey and Fisher 2006:13–14). Specifi-cally they provide a new social space for the exchange of ideas aboutwomen and Wall Street.

The gendered logic of Wall Street women’s techniques of visibilityhas also shifted in recent decades. For most of the second half of the 20th

century, professional women were reluctant to publically portray them-selves and their networks (particularly the FWA) as feminist—evenliberal feminist organizations. Like many women in corporate America,the first generation of Wall Street women did not participate in thefeminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s during their college or earlyyears on Wall Street (Fisher 2006:211; Ortner 2003). They did however,benefit from the liberal women’s movement’s insistence on opening upformerly male professions, including finance. They also profited from thewomen’s movement’s transformation of the “gendered imagination’ inthe nation, from one that linked women exclusively to their roles aswives and mothers to one that increasingly aligned women with paidwork and the workplace (Kessler-Harris 2001:5–6). And part of theprofessional-managerial class, women working their way up the ladder onWall Street in the 1980s and well into the 1990s incorporated main-

Like many women

in corporate

America, the first

generation of Wall

Street women did

not participate in

the feminist

movement in the

1960s and 1970s

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stream feminism’s strategies for assimilation. They sought in their careersto “make it” in the business world (Ehrenreich 1989:216). More com-prehensive feminist agendas and techniques—protest and revolution,calling for changing or even overthrowing the corporate order, andimproving the plight of poor and African American women—proved tooradical for the first generation and their networks to incorporate intotheir identity and mission. This began to change after the millennium(Fisher 2006:225).2

Most recently, in the wake of the economic crisis, women and theirnetworks (particularly the Women’s Campaign Forum) have begun touse places in both NYC and Washington DC as theaters for politicalaction and liberal feminist performance practice (Aston 2008:ix–xxiii).They increasingly draw on performative techniques of selling, marketing,and fundraising in corporate, philanthropic, and political life. Elite eventplanning has always called for stagecraft. But recent benefit events for theWCF—a network composed of political, financial and other elitewomen—often resemble a kind of performance installation art. Likeother nonprofits in the current financial climate, the WCF is pioneeringand drawing on new techniques of visibility that, according to eventplanner David Stark (who does not work on the WCF campaign), “arealigning the mission of the institution with what the fund-raising expe-rience is like (Trebay May 2010).” The 2010 WCF benefit not onlymimetically evokes the organization’s mission to increase the number ofwomen in government, it also draws on a wider gendered discourse inAmerican culture that maintains that women are the best hope to repairin a broken financial and political system, women who might restoreeconomic and social prosperity (Fisher n.d.).

Wall Street: Downtown Manhattan as a gendered

financial space

Wall Street is New York City’s downtown financial district, aphysical place composed of small colonial streets, the NewYork Stock Exchange, and the towers of major investment

banks (Willis 2001:x). “Wall Street” also signifies an ethos and set ofpractices embedded in an intricate network of institutions, investments,and people (Ho 2009:6). Even its landscape is steeped in the history ofAmerican politics, culture, and finance. After the American Revolution,New York was the nation’s first capital. Twenty-six Wall Street was thesite of the city’s first City Hall. The First Congress of the United Statesmet in Federal Hall in the district to write the Bill of Rights. GeorgeWashington, the country’s first president, was inaugurated in the buildingon April 30th, 1789. In 1792, a group of male traders allegedly met undera buttonwood tree—on the location of what is now 68 Wall Street—toestablish a formal stock exchange. While the buttonwood story appearsto be largely legend, there was, according to historian Steven Fraser, a

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concerted effort at self-regulation during the 1790s on the part of theembryonic Wall Street community (Fraser 2005:17).

For most of the two centuries to follow, aristocrats, confidence men,and financial tycoons understood Wall Street as a male space where elitemen participated in the market, making money for themselves and theirfamilies. Despite this segregation, a few women defied gendered conven-tions and made a name for themselves early on in finance. Born in 1932,Muriel Siebert, for example became in 1967 the first woman to purchasea seat on the New York Stock Exchange (it cost $445,000). All of theother 1,365 members were men, and there was a great deal of speculationabout where she would go to the bathroom because the exchange floorhad no women’s restrooms (Lee 2009).

Although anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historianshave taken a critical view of the world of high finance, they havegenerally addressed the male dominated dimensions of the industry andconsider the market to be a space for unbound, fierce competition amongmen (Fraser 2005; Zaloom 2006:113). In particular, ethnographers haveunderstood the formal sites of finance—the Chicago Board of Trade,Wall Street’s investment banks, and the merchant banks in the City ofLondon—to be spaces in which men perform hyper-competitive perfor-mances of masculinities, and have understood these performances to bepart of the male drama of capital that construct women as inferior,“other” and/or “invisible” (McDowell 1997:28; De Goede 2005; Zaloom2006:113; Ho 2009).3 But financiers have used the urban landscapebeyond these sites, while women’s presence on city streets and in corpo-rate offices has challenged both the male-defined arena of business andthe perception that urban offices were public, male spaces since at leastthe 19th century (Kwolek-Folland 1994:94). 21st century New York, aglobal financial city, is made up of a range of partially localized assem-blages built of heterogeneous business networks, spaces, and practices(Farias and Bender 2009). Multiple and overlapping gendered enact-ments constitute the domain of finance and the city itself. Wall Streetwomen’s networks use actual material spaces to work out new discoursesand images of gender relations, finance, and women’s status. These net-works draw on business, marketing, and performative techniques to makethe case for women’s place on Wall Street.

Women’s use of the downtown financial

landscape: The 1950s through the 1970s

During the 1950s and 1960s, when the first generation of womenmade their way onto Wall Street, the world of New York Cityfinance was a male-dominated downtown space in lower Manhat-

tan (Fisher 2004). Firms, clubs, and restaurants provided male clientswith places to conduct business, socialize, and bond with male financiers.However, women were not completely absent (Mayer 1955). In practice

During the 1950s

and 1960s, when

the first generation

of women made

their way onto

Wall Street, the

world of New

York City finance

was a

male-dominated

downtown space

in lower

Manhattan

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they walked or took the subway, which they shared with men, to getdowntown to work. But they [were not considered] players in the market.As a 1958 article in the New York Times pointed out:

Exclusivity exists in spite of the fact that women play a tremendous rolein the life of Wall Street. Physically, they play a part in the sense thateach weekday the Street’s stone and concrete canyons echo to theclick-click of approximately 60,000 high-heels as secretaries, stenos,bookkeepers, receptionists, ticker operators, file clerks, messengers andpages pour out of subways and into offices.

This . . . infiltration of Wall Street has not, however, done much toopen the way for promotion and pay to the women in question or towomen in general. It is extremely unlikely that any of the faithfulprivates in the Wall Street army mentioned above—the clerical helpand receptionists—will attain any notable financial positions unless sheis able to marry the boss, outlive him and inherit his share of business(Gonzalez and Gonzalez 1958).

The New York Times reporters accurately portrayed the male-dominate hegemony in post World War II finance. But their understand-ing that women only worked as support staff, and their forecast that thesewomen were unlikely to advance up the corporate hierarchy, were notentirely on the mark. Indeed, by the time the article was published, therewas a small number of women working their way into the professionalarea of research (Fisher 2004:301). In contrast to stockbrokers, analystswere less paid and less visible on the Street and in American culture ingeneral. Brokers were picked for their charm, outgoing “frat boy” person-alities, “risk-taking” nature, and ability to make (male) friends and sell tothe public (Sobel 1980:116–39). Analysts were regarded for the mostpart, as introverted, quiet, detail oriented college men who spent thebulk of their time hidden from the public eye—squirreled away in cub-byholes writing their reports (Mayer 1955).

Brokers were part of the public, front-line of late 1950s and 1960sworld of Wall Street. Analysts remained in the back office. They werestructurally disadvantaged players in the games of finance. They held lessprestigious jobs. Paid less, they lived in less exclusive areas than theirbroker colleagues. Male analysts, thus, were lower ranking, and arguablysymbolically feminine. These dynamics left the door slightly open to theentry of women into research (Fisher 2004:301).

Eight female security analysts working in the area of research—launched the Young Women’s Investment Association (YWIA) in 1956.The women, mostly graduates of Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and the otherseven sister colleges, had wanted to join the Investment Association ofNew York, an organization of young financial men, to help them make“street contacts” to find better jobs. Barred from this group on thegrounds of gender, they formed their own organization (Fisher 2006:209–10). in 1957, the father of Joan Mills, the president of the young women’snetwork, contacted Brendan Gill—a writer friend of his—about his

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daughter’s involvement in founding the organization. Gill, a well knownwriter for the The New Yorker, [a pillar of New York’s civic, social andliterary life] then helped send out reporters to write a piece on the YWIAfor a short section in the magazine. Famous for its witty deployment ofthe editorial “We,” the “Talk of the Town” piece began:

We had long looked upon Wall Street, above the secretarial level, asone of the last almost-exclusively male preserves, but now having spenta lively hour with the Young Women’s Investment Association weknow better. Miss Jones Williams, chairman of the program committee,called one morning last week to invite us to a Y.W.I.A luncheon at theCity Midday Club where three noted male security analysts were tospeak—on drugs, steel, and of all things aluminum. Drugs, steel, andaluminum, be damned, we replied; we’d come anyhow. Good said MissWilliams, adding that we would be able to spot her by her plaid dress.On arriving, we found this recognition device effective, and Miss Wil-liams looked fine in it, too (“Talk of the Town,” 1957)

The journalists took note of women’s presence in the male bastion offinance. But they did so in a way that drew attention to the women’sfashion and attractiveness, rather than their brain power. Despite thecondescension of the New Yorker, the publication of the women’smeeting with male security analysts, specializing in classically male domi-nated industries such as steel, helped break the public’s conception thatonly men belonged in professional positions on Wall Street. That theyheld the meeting in the City Midday Club, one of the oldest all-maleclubs on Wall Street, indicated that women might have a place in themasculine landscape of white-collar work in finance. Like their malecounterparts, women used the space of the club to help create a legiti-mate space for themselves in finance. Other women (and men) readingthe article could then imagine themselves as part of such a mixed-gendered space. Indeed in a talk about the FWA in 2006, Joan Williams(now Farr) recalled that the article turned out to be great publicity forthe association. According to Joan, after it was published “womenapproached us (the YWIA) out of every corner of Wall Street.” Inemphasizing women’s visibility and making use of the media (albeitthrough one of the women’s father’s classed connections) the YWIAwomen were following the examples of men even as they challengedmen’s exclusionary practices.

According to the 1957 New Yorker article, the YWIA women wereconvinced that “the association is definitely a growth situation.” By theorganization’s twentieth anniversary in 1976, the organization hadincreased their membership substantially. To celebrate, the organizationheld an event at the Windows on the World, the restaurant atop of theWorld Trade Center. Again, The New Yorker wrote the event up in theTalk of the Town section:

the company included a hundred and thirty-five feminine financiersand a scattering of male guests; and the menu consisted of spinach pate,

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chicken Veronique, mashed broccoli, anisette ice-cream, and Secretaryof the Treasury William Simon who made a stirring political speechplugging free enterprise.

When the Talk of the Town asked if the organization had changed muchover the twenty years since its inception, “Miss Reese,” an FWA memberanswered:

We took our name in 1971. We’ve dropped the cutoff age of thirty-five,since many of our members move into really important jobs after forty.And, we’ve increased our membership from twenty-seven to a hundredand eighty. The original group was security analysts—the first profes-sional jobs open to women on Wall Street—but now we have bankers,stockbrokers, traders, management consultants, financial analysts, port-folio managers, economist, and even several lawyers. In the last fewyears, banks and brokerage houses have been aggressively hiring womeninto professional jobs.

And Susan Dollinger, FWA member and staff-assistant in the corporatefinance department of A. T & T., assessed the extent of women’s mobilityand success on Wall Street:

Women are making good incomes on Wall Street, because it’s a per-formance oriented industry. Your salary reflects how much business youdo and how well you do it. We’ve got Muriel Siebert, with her seat onthe New York Stock Exchange, and Julia Walsh, who is a Senior VicePresident of a Washington brokerage house, but I’d still like to see awoman partner in a major Wall Street firm. We don’t want women instaff positions—we want jobs with real authority. How many womenare there above the vice-presidential level in banking?

In contrast to The New Yorker piece 20 years earlier, the journalistsappeared to take the women’s presence more seriously—even letting thewomen speak for themselves. Indeed, FWA women carefully cultivatedtheir public personae. They took an avid interest in the popular depic-tions of the network’s members and practices, and appearing in The NewYorker as financiers celebrating with the Secretary of the Treasury wascertainly a coup. It could be read as a new version of traditionallyAmerican masculine discourses of entrepreneurship and the free market.

As The New Yorker quotes indicate, occupational mobility was theprimary goal of the FWA: ensuring that women move up the corporateranks on Wall Street. FWA women viewed their network as an elite,female, financially focused entity defined by business principles, ratherthan a pro-feminist organization fighting gendered discrimination andsexual harassment in the workplace (Fisher 2006:211). Lenore Diamond,a member of the FWA during the 1970s, characterized the organizationduring that period as “cautious.”

The FWA, when I first started working on Wall Street, was like adowntown Junior League, sort of Republican conservative group. My

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first experience with the FWA was when the Equal Rights Amendmentwas up for passage in New York, and they banned us equal rightssupporters from putting up flyers. They got a court order that we had tostand more than 200 feet from the organization’s meeting to give thewomen to the FWA meeting a petition . . . Even in the early 1990s theFWA was still very cautious about women’s issues—publicly sayingsomething. There was still this tremendous feeling, in the majority ofthe members, “We can’t talk about that we’re discriminated [against] orwe are not going to get the corporate money for our dinner” (1994interview).

In spite of the strict gendered segregation of space within Wall Streetfirms, the sidewalks and steps in front of office buildings, traveled by bothmen and women en route to work and meetings, functioned as both partof the primarily male-gendered landscape of Wall Street and a mixedlandscape of protest. In 1967 Abby Hoffman and his fellow “yippies”burned dollar bills, danced in the streets surrounding the New York StockExchange, and, according to social historian Steve Fraser, “announced tothe press that they were emissaries from a ‘new generation that laughedat money and lived free’ ” (Fraser 2005:525).” On August 26, 1979—Women’s Rights Day—a group of Wall Street women demonstrated infront of the New York Stock Exchange on behalf of women’s rights onWall Street (Bender 1970). Unlike the Yippies, they believed in theinstitution and wanted to belong to it.

None of the women in the FWA participated in the protest in frontof the New York Stock Exchange. The FWA decided to publicize theERA march in the FWA Newsletter, while ensuring that the actualsponsor was a city organization for business and professional women, notthe FWA. For many years to come, they would use their affiliations withwomen’s national networks to avoid taking official political stances onwomen’s issues (Fisher 2006:227).

The Financial Women’s Association’s 25th

anniversary (1981)

Even as the first generation of women on Wall Street began toadvance up the corporate ladder in the 1970s, they had to continu-ally inscribe and re-inscribe their place in the built environment.

Money “creates an enormous capacity to concentrate social power inspace, for . . . it can be accumulated at a particular place withoutrestraint. And these immense concentrations of social power can be putto work to realize massive transformations of nature, the construction ofthe build environment” (Harvey 1989:176) The most powerful group onWall Street—white professional-managerial men—used their money andpower in part to impose their views on the urban landscape of finance.Through their daily and long-term interactions—shouting on tradingfloors, making decisions in executive board rooms, drinking in pubs after

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the market closed—they built a male dominated atmosphere of meaningand power in the spaces of finance (McDowell 1997; Zaloom 2006). Inorder to contest the male dominated system, women collectively engagedin performative practices—particularly at FWA anniversary events—todiscursively claim their place in high finance.

The 1980s saw an unprecedented bull market on Wall Street. Theglobalization of finance, the growth of the professional-managerial class,and the increase in conspicuous consumption unfolded (Ehrenreich1989; Sassen 2001). In January 1981, Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ball inWashington D.C. ushered in a new period of “Reaganomics” in theUnited States. Six months later, the women of Wall Street threw a verydifferent celebration in the financial district in New York City. The“FWA of New York, 25th Anniversary in Celebration of the Accomplish-ments of women in Finance,” was held at Federal Hall, where GeorgeWashington had been inaugurated in 1789. The event was carefullyorchestrated. In September of 1980, ten months before the event, FWAboard members met to discuss the forthcoming anniversary. The meetingopened with a debate over who should be invited. The minutes of themeeting record an update that provoked discussion:

The preparation for the 25th Anniversary Dinner with William Milleras speaker is coming along. However, there was some confusion as towhether the affair is to be of an exclusive or inclusive nature. This wasclarified by saying that the aim was to reach out to as many interestedand appropriate individuals and firms as possible (FWA September 1980board meeting minutes, page 3; emphasis added).

In debating exclusivity and appropriateness, the women acted as gate-keepers. The women were regulated by historical financial discoursesabout men and the marketplace, but they also turned their emergentauthority to perform, affirm, and amend these discourses (Butler 1993;De Goede 2005).

They selected the venue as carefully as the guests. FWA plannersgrasped the importance of using particular historical places within thecity’s landscape to stage this celebration. They committed themselves tofinding a place in the city that would symbolically affirm their growingstature and presentation of self in the world of Wall Street. As BrianHoey points out, “a sense of place, understood as manifest in personalattachment to real and imagined elements of particularity in specificlocations, i.e., local character, may support people in their ability to formautobiographical accounts” (Hoey, this volume). The three possible sitesfor the FWA event—a boat, mansion, and museum—were not simplyvenues for the party; they were each potential theaters for the FWA’sperformance of themselves and women’s history in finance.

In early January the Peking Barge (one of the largest sailing boats inexistence and docked at the South Street Seaport Museum) was consid-ered (FWA board meetings minutes, January 14, 1981). In February,however, the “event had been rethought and scaled down to a more

In order to contest

the male

dominated system,

women collectively

engaged in

performative

practices—

particularly at

FWA anniversary

events—to

discursively claim

their place in high

finance

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“elastic’ concept so that whatever number of participants show up, theresult will not leave the FWA with a staggering financial burden. Insteadof the Peking Barge, the Abigail Adams Smith House is under consid-eration as the site “(FWA board meetings minutes, February 10, 1981).Federal Hall was also a strong contender. Each site would provide theFWA with a different backdrop against which to enact their history. Eachprovided a particular material and symbolic environment that wouldprovide attendees with pertinent information about Wall Street women’splace within New York City’s landscape—their class status, genderedhistory, and links to other urban actors and events (Taylor 2003). Thefurnishings and style of each place would contribute to the participants’understanding of the relationship between Wall Street women, theFWA, the city, the nation and market.

The Peking Barge at the South Street Seaport Museum, next to thefinancial district, represented New York City’s historical harbor, anopening for world travel and trade. By the 1980s, the transformation ofthe waterfront from dockland rubble to a mall, museum and tourist sitesignaled the vitality of the financial sector and its professional-managerial class (Zukin, 1995:12). Holding the anniversary this site ofconsumption would mark Wall Street women’s place within the city’scorporate elite. However, anniversary planners were concerned that itwas flexible enough to accommodate low attendance, so that the FWArisked losing money and the ability to showcase the organization’s sizeand stature.

In 1981 the Abigail Adams Smith House was a federal periodmansion located on East 61st Street. It was originally conceived in 1795by William Stephen Smith and his wife Abigail Adams Smith (daughterof the President John Adams) as part of a grand estate named “MountVernon” in honor of George Washington’s home in Virginia. Using themuseum as the site of the FWA anniversary event would effectively linkthe FWA’s history to that of the early American female elite: AbigailAdams Smith, and her family, particularly her mother who on her ownhad invested in US government bonds, rather than following her hus-band’s instructions to invest in land (Museum of Finance website).However, given that—in the end—Abigail’s wealth and stature were tiedto her father and husband, rather than being of her own making, theFWA might blur their history without fully representing their own emer-gence in the public sphere of business and finance. Indeed, the fact thatthe event would take place within an old mansion in an area where therich built “country homes,” would reproduce the traditional narrativelinking gender to the private, domestic sphere, thereby obscuring thelesser known story about Abigail Adams, the “Stock-Jobber.”

In the end the FWA chose Federal Hall as the site of the 25th

anniversary dinner. A noted landmark built originally for the exclusiveuse of elite men of the city and nation, and later on the market, it was aprime piece of symbolic territory. With their celebration, they repre-sented themselves as an emerging financial elite in a well-known symbolof elite masculine space in the old downtown financial district. They

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followed earlier members of the FWA who held anniversaries and otherevents in iconic male spaces on Wall Street.

The Hall’s history, classical Greek and Roman architecture repre-senting democracy and economic might, and status as public space—allprovided FWA anniversary attendees with a powerful stage to highlightthe history of Wall Street women. It was the site of the inauguration ofthe first capital, and with the first Customs House, and a Federal ReserveBank (in 1842) it was emblematic of the old financial district. It hadmany lives, from government institution to national financial institutionto contemporary landmark. The women read these as histories offreedom, and writing themselves into that legacy, claimed Federal Hallfor themselves in the FWA Anniversary Program. “The FinancialWomen’s Association selected the Hall, the symbolic center of the finan-cial district, to celebrate twenty-five years of growth and accomplish-ments of women in finance . . . This landmark site, where many battlesfor individual freedom were fought, echoes the hard won efforts ofwomen who choose finance for a career” (FWA 25th AnniversaryProgram). For the anniversary dinner, Wall Street women re-worked thematerials of city space and architecture to produce and memorialize theirplace in the material and symbolic form of the market (Zaloom 2006:17).

Once they chose Federal Hall, FWA anniversary committeemembers made further plans. They considered branding their storyin fundraising, marketing and advertising campaigns. Minutes of onesuch meeting provide insight into the business techniques the womendiscussed:

The meeting with Joan Farr, a charter member, has been quite produc-tive and elicited many anecdotes of interest. There will be an effort tofind the rest of the charter members for the Anniversary and perhaps theirstories might be packaged by an advertising agency. . . . In addition to theevent itself, an Anniversary Journal documenting FWA history and servingas a program will be available. This will have special pages wheremembership, corporations, and the board can make contributionsthrough the purchase of space . . . A silver case will serve as a fundraisingmemento (February 1981 meeting minutes; emphasis added).

The narrative of FWA history provided in the anniversary booklet isa performative inscription of women’s identity as people appropriate tobe included on Wall Street. (In words they would never use, one couldsay that they announced their larger project, to discursively “mark them-selves as historical subjects whose genealogies might be found outside oftraditional forms of identification and belonging” (Roman 2005:3).Their understanding of themselves as historical outsiders—as a so-calledminority group—can be gleaned in another portion of the 25th Anniver-sary journal entitled “A Brief History of the FWA”:

The original membership was eight financial women—mostly securitiesanalysts—interested in forming an association to vitalize and broadenour work, by getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, and keepingourselves posted in the securities business.

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The year was 1956. Eisenhower had been re-elected, unemploymentwas low, and the stock market hit a new high (521). It was a comfort-able time for most Americans—unless you found yourself in a minoritygroup as the founding members discovered and were deterred fromjoining in the professional pursuits of other Wall Street analysts (FWAAnniversary Program 1981; emphasis added)

Writing cultural memory is as much about forgetting and omitting asremembering (Taylor 2003:11). The women drew on a discourse of race(referring to themselves as a “minority group”) without directly acknowl-edging the histories of “other” groups, such as African-Americans in the1950s, who were excluded from mainstream American society. Instead,the FWA was pre-occupied with writing (white) women and their historyinto the broader history of Wall Street, the nation, and the world-at-large—not the women’s shared history with poor women or women ofcolor.

This complex mix of privilege and blindness is evident not only inthe FWA’s decision to use Federal Hall but in the way they crafted theshow that was the highlight of the celebration. In April 1981 KimberlyMason informed board members that the anniversary dinner show would“consist of a tape of music and an evocation of the current events andstock-market activities of the times paralleling FWA history. A slideshow will be part of this presentation” (FWA Board Minutes, April 8,1981:2). The show would draw on and intertwine three historical tracks.Tying the women’s, the nation’s, and the market’s stories together, themakers of the show produced a newly multilevel gendered history of(predominantly white) women in high finance. They brought the local,national, and the global into one visual frame.

The women also put together a display of FWA related materials,including the 1957 New Yorker article (FWA Board Meeting Minutes,June 10, 1981:3). Bringing such objects into a view as a “public archive”was another way to represent the voices and narratives of Wall Streetwomen previously unacknowledged in official stories, biographies, andcommemorations. Again, the organizers carefully monitored the voicesand discourses that would be heard publicly. Their dominant narrativesituated Wall Street women as part of NYC’s predominantly male finan-cial elite, leaving out other female, particularly feminist, voices ofdiscontent.

Feminism and finance: Quandaries of identity and

alliance making in the 1980s and 1990s

Wall Street and the world of finance underwent dramaticchanges beginning in the 1980s (Henwood 1997), hugelyexpanding the financial services industry in the United

States and in Britain and Japan (Sassen 2001). The globalization ofmarkets, the introduction of new-risk management technologies to deal

This complex mix

of privilege and

blindness is

evident not only in

the FWA’s

decision to use

Federal Hall but

in the way they

crafted the show

that was the

highlight of the

celebration

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with increasing volatility and uncertainty, and securitization (the con-version of non-marketable assets into marketable ones) radicallyreshaped the institutional landscape of Wall Street. In response tothese changes, firms dramatically expanded their research, trading, andbanking departments and capabilities. For example, when the financialeconomist Henry Kaufman began his career in 1962 at Salomon Broth-ers, he joined a six-person research department. By the time he left thefirm in 1988, he was managing a research staff of more than 450employees (Kaufman 2000:149). The growth and internationalizationof the industry forced institutions to enlarge their managerial structuresand emphasize leadership and partnership (Eccles and Crane 1988;Fraser 2005). As markets and firms went global, a new global powerstructure in finance emerged. High-status and well-paid jobs in thehigher echelons of management became increasingly concentratedin global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo. Most of thesepositions still belonged to men. Some members of the first generationof women were able to work their way into the top tiers by the endof the 20th century, but at the highest level they were a distinctminority. Only 5.9–13.6 percent were managing directors (Abelson1999).

The Financial Women’s Association experienced significantchange during the same period. In addition to using their ties withwomen’s national networks to avoid taking official political stances onwomen’s issues, they chose to focus on making international connec-tions to cement their affiliation with other financial women in globalcities, and to bypass feminist issues at home. A group of about thirtywomen traveled to visit the financial community in London in 1985,then went to Tokyo, Peking, and Hong-Kong a year later. Theyreturned to London in 1987 to celebrate the “Big Bang,” the deregu-lation and restructuring of finance in the city of London (Leyshon andThrift 1997). Just as they had made themselves visible thirty yearsearlier in the male dominated spaces of Wall Street, the women madesure to be seen explicitly engaging in the masculine market place andpractices of these global cities. The 1985 excursion to London, forexample, was packed with activities; a management seminar, a paneldiscussion of the Euro-market, a tour of the Stock Exchange, a recep-tion hosted by The Economist Magazine, and even a meeting withMargaret Thatcher, the iconic symbol of neoliberal reform inEngland.

The FWA’s reception in London received considerable press in theUnited States and England. In a London Sunday Times article, journalistMaggie Drummond interviewed a number of FWA women, one of whomexplained that, “New York is the tip of the financial world and thewomen you are seeing are at the top of that tip.” Barbara Thomas, anAmerican woman and the first woman on the main board of a Britishmerchant bank, explained that women’s networking practices in the Cityof London were “at least five and possibly ten years behind New York.”Maggie Drummond elaborated upon the differences:

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The City of London does, it is true, have at least two women’s networkgroups—but much smaller and less organized than New York’s FWA.British women seem to be more defensive about networking—possiblybecause men immediately pounce on it crying “sexist.” The FWAmembers, on the other hand, have absolutely no problem squaring thisconcept with their demands for increasing power and status in thefinancial world (1987).

During the 1970s, the decade in which most of the first cohort ofprofessional women entered Wall Street, terms such as “networks,”“mentors,” and “role models” were not part of America’s generalvocabulary. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, the language of socialcapital was an unremarkable part of everyday business, especiallyamongst women (Laird 2006:265). Here the FWA was instrumental inteaching women how to network and find mentors that would makethem more visible and hence, potentially promotable in the workplace.In fact, the organization pioneered women’s use of these types of strat-egies of visibility. The FWA, for example, invited speakers to talk aboutnetworking, mentoring, interviewing strategies, and career planning—all techniques designed to help their members climb up the ladder infinance.

The FWA of the 1980s and 1990s may have been in the vanguardof the corporate women’s leadership movement. However, the net-work’s leadership continued to be reticent about being associated withthe more overtly political dimensions in general and with the liberalwomen’s movement more specifically. This was a cause for frustrationamongst some members—particularly senior level women in finance,who had their own political ambitions, or who wanted to pushfor more women in government. In 1984 in a discussion about“politics and government,” FWA board members discussed whethertheir members’ interest in politics was a help or a hindrance to theorganization:

Our board members are interested in courting government appoint-ments. A criticism leveled against some of these individuals in that afew have “Potomac Fever.” Most senior women are inactive [in theorganization], although they are responsive when they are asked forhelp. Our more senior members have learned to use the FWA for theirown purposes, which in some cases can be political. The FWA generallygains from this “use” (FWA, Board Meeting Minutes 1984)

The FWA allowed women to make connections to the politicalworld. But doing so did not, in time, provide a way to keep high-profilewomen active in the organization. By the late 1980s and 1990s, a smallnumber were senior enough, and visible enough that, as one woman,Mindy Plane explained to me in 1994 (during my first fieldwork amongstWall Street women) “the organization no longer could do anything forus.” By then, Plane had pulled many of her female peers in finance andthe FWA into the Women’s Campaign Fund, a bi-partisan grassroots

The network’s

leadership

continued to be

reticent about

being associated

with the more

overtly political

dimensions in

general and with

the liberal

women’s

movement more

specifically

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women’s political group that had formed in the 1970s in the wake of thewomen’s movement and Roe vs. Wade. Through the WCF, womenpursued a more overtly liberal, gendered political agenda, includingsecuring reproductive rights and advancing women into governmentpositions at all levels. Furthermore, it was a forum where women couldmake political connections. Mindy Plane, for example, by the late 1990shad made connections with politicians (women and men) that helpedpave the way for her to be appointed to the advisory committees ofvarious women pursuing office.

At present Wall Street women are negotiating a complex reality. Inthe new millennium the neat divisions separating dimensions of thewomen’s movement and those of corporate women are no longer as clearas they once were. This blurring of boundaries is also evident in WallStreet women’s political practices and the Women’s Campaign Forum.

The Women’s Campaign Forum’s 30th Annual

Parties of Your Choice Gala 2010

In 2006, the WCF changed its name from the Women’s CampaignFund to the Women’s Campaign Forum. It is currently the only non-partisan venture capitalist organization supporting women leaders at

all levels of office. On the evening of Thursday, March 11th 2010, Iattended the Women’s Campaign Forum’s 30th Annual Parties of YourChoice Gala in New York City. I had been attending such events sinceI first began my fieldwork in the mid-1990s.

The first part of the 2010 WCF fundraising event was held atChristies’ American headquarters at Rockefeller Center. The building,featuring a limestone and bronze exterior with a steel and glass canopy,represents a fusion of the industrial and postindustrial economy. TheMarch fundraising event itself marked the launch of the WCF’s NationalAwareness Campaign for Gender Equality in Public Office, with theslogan “Who Needs More Women in Government? Everyone,” embla-zoned in bold letters across the cover of the printed invitation. An iconicphotograph showed the six women who were elected to the Senate in1992 marching up the steps of the Capitol—Senators Carol Moseley-Braun, Diane Feinstein, Patty Murray, Barbara Mikulski and BarbaraBoxer—on the invitation. The media had dubbed that year as “The Yearof the Woman” when the female senators plus twenty- four first-termwomen won seats in the House of Representatives and female voters weresaid to have “carried” Bill Clinton to victory in the Presidential race.

By the time I arrived at Christies’ around 6:30 pm—several hundredwell-dressed stylish women and some men were milling about drinkingwine, eating canapés, and talking with one another in one of the mainauction rooms. I recognized a few New York City luminaries including1960s pop artist Peter Max and his wife. When I first began attendingWCF fundraisers in the 1990s, most of the people were white and above

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the age of forty. Now, women and men from a variety of generational,racial, and ethnic backgrounds were amongst the guests. While I did notsee any members of the first generation of Wall Street women at thereception, several were special invited guests to the dinner parties thatfollowed.

Around 7 pm, Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, the President of the WCF,moved to the dais where auctioneers typically stand—marking theformal beginning of the evening’s program. Initially everyone—speakers, guests, waiters, and myself—used the space of the auctionroom in a fairly traditional manner: As Sam began to speak—thecrowd stopped moving about. We gathered en-masse and watched likean audience does in a traditional theater space the proceedings unfoldon the stage, clapping when appropriate. Sam, and others, includingfemale politicians, made speeches and gave out awards called the“Wendy” Shattered Glass Ceiling Award” to several women leaders.The format of this part of the program followed the typical protocolof other FWA and WCF fundraising events I had attended over theyears.

Suddenly the lights dimmed and a drum beat sounded. Within a fewminutes the center of the room was lit from the ceiling. Cautiously andcuriously, the tony crowd of spectators shifted our stance from lookingforwards towards the stage to peering into the middle of the room. Whenthe lights came back on, we could see a dozen women, wearing jackets ofvarious shades of red, pink, and orange along with black slacks, standingon ladders clustered together but facing in different directions. At leasttwo if not more shared a ladder.

The appearance of the women on ladders in the middle of theauction room disrupted the conventionality of the evening’s event. Thedozen women, who had been a part of the crowd moments before, werenow it seemed to me projecting themselves as female performers in thespace. Certainly politicians—women and men—in the contemporarymoment draw on many performative techniques when they are on theroad campaigning. However, they are rarely if ever collectively standingupon ladders in the middle of an elite art auction space. Indeed, the firstimage of the women upon ladders reminded me of famous art-works thatmight be auctioned off at Christies—works composed of groups ofwomen under the “male gaze.” But as soon as the women began to moveand talk, the piece began resembling live feminist performance artpieces—the kind I had seen performed in the 1970s and 1980s in “found”spaces in Manhattan (Aston 2008:xix). I slowly began to think that I waswitnessing some dimensions of avant-garde, even radical, feminist per-formance practices being incorporated into the WCF’s presentation ofelite women leaders. Soon a female voice, apparently emanating fromone of the ladders spoke:

My name is Debbie Walsh. I’m the Director of the Center for AmericanWomen and Politics at Rutgers University. Every day, I am remindedjust how abysmal women’s representation in our government truly is.

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Our country is ranked 74th in the world for the number of women in itslegislature. Women hold only 17% of the seats in Congress, 24% ofState Legislatures, and six governor seats. This isn’t just a shame, it’s acrisis. Who needs more women in government? Everyone. (WCFScript)

A female percussionist—in a corner of the room—played a drum riffafter Walsh’s short impassioned speech. I took note of the way in whichWalsh represented the lack of women in government as a “crisis.” Wewere already two years into the financial crisis, and it seemed the dis-course of crisis was pervading various realms of thought and practice.Indeed, she and the other women continued to draw on the discourse ofcrisis throughout the performance.

Political scientist Marieke De Goede, in her work on the cultural andhistorical history of financial crises, argues that “gendered images” in therepresentation of financial crisis and their resolution “are not just acultural fringe on financial debates, but are part of the a central discoursethrough which crises are understood and resolved (2009:300). “Voicesfrom the Ladder” portrays having more women in government as thesolution to the current social, political and economic crisis in the UnitedStates:

I’m Dr. Avis Jones-Deweever, Director of the Research and PolicyDivision of the National Council of Negro Women. I stand in thefootsteps of Dr. Mary McCloud Bethune, who went door-to-door toraise money for the payment of poll taxes, held night classes to prepareothers to pass literary tests, and refused to back down—even whenfaced with the threat of Klan violence—to ensure that African Ameri-cans could exercise their right to vote. Who needs more women ingovernment? Everyone.

[Drum Riff]

My name is Liz Shuler, the Secretary-Treasurer and Chief FinancialOfficer of the AFL-CIO—representing 11.5 million workers. Countlessunion women everywhere have fought in the streets, in the workplace,and in the halls of Congress for rights like social security, equal pay, andmore. Working women’s values are at the country’s core. And everyFriday, I thank the labor movement for bringing us the weekend. Whoneeds more women in government? Everyone.

[Drum Riff]

The incorporation of women’s voices in the piece (from differentraces and classes) captures the ways in which second wave 1970s femi-nists are rethinking and redressing their own implicitly white agenda,and how certain tenets of feminism, diversity and multiculturalism havebeen incorporated into mainstream political institutions and practices(Aston 2008:xiii; McRobbie 2009). Indeed, the visual and oral narrativeof difference was intentional. A few months after the fundraising perfor-mance, I spoke with Sam Bennett, the President of the WCF, about the

“Who needs more

women in

government?

Everyone”

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piece. Sam, who was the producer of the piece, explained that when shebegan to imagine “Ladders” she knew she wanted to include “a wide arrayof women from different ages, races, ethnicities, and points along theircareer paths.” In this way, the “women would perform every woman’svoice.” Sam thus asked each and every woman performer to “turn theirlife story into a haiku that communicated her own life-experience.” Sheinvited the women to write their own short life-story and paint a picturefrom their own perspectives as to why we need more women in govern-ment. Here Sam wanted the women’s presentations to be “clean,un-culturated—in an attempt to eliminate conventional stereotypicalmodes of self-presentation used by women.” For example, she askedChristie Hefner to introduce herself as the “longest running CEO of acorporation” rather than “Hugh Hefner’s daughter.”

There are striking similarities and differences between the ways thefirst generation of women on Wall Street relayed their stories and his-tories in the FWA’s 25th Anniversary event in 1981, and the ways thewomen performed narratives from ladders at the WCF’s gala nearlythree decades later. Professional women in both eras explicitly drewattention to women’s places in male dominated spaces. Wall Streetwomen in the 1980s engaged autobiographical narratives at FWAevents in which they were intent on writing their history—elite, pro-fessional women’s history—into the male urban landscape of highfinance. The women leaders of 2010 also wrote the history of womenbut theirs is a more inclusive history. They transformed their autobi-ographies and experiences into art, into an actual theatrical “testimo-nial” that has similarities to some forms of political performance (Satinwith Jerome 1999:1). It is perhaps not surprising that Anna DeavereSmith, a performer known for her political “documentary theater,” per-formed at the WCF in 2007.

Like the “happenings” of the 1960s and 1970s, the female politiciansin 2010 bring the “audience”—investors in women’s leadership in thenation—into their performative orbit. Mid-way into the piece, they urgethe audience to respond to the question—“Who needs more women ingovernment? The elite crowd becomes part of the performance—similarto an ancient Greek Chorus or call-response patterns that take place inAfrican-American churches.4 The WCF responds with increasing enthu-siasm and vigor: “Everyone!!” Civic leaders, political leaders, fashiondesigners and others thus participate in the performance of a kind of statefeminism—aligning feminist interests with the nation state. But this is anew emergent kind of feminism—one that is not entirely mediated bythe state but also by the WCF—a market-oriented organization of femalepolitical venture capitalists.

The play ended with a stand-in for Ambassador Swanee Hunt, whoserved as the Ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997: “I dream of acountry with an equal number of women in all political-offices—womenwho collectively add a broader perspective, inspire collaboration, andshape a stronger, more just society—Because we need 100 percent ofAmerica’s talent.” Every woman on a ladder then pointed into the

The women

leaders of 2010

also wrote the

history of women,

but theirs is a

more inclusive

history

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audience asking: “Who needs more women in government? YOU!” Onemore drum riff sounded. Lights went out. The audience clapped and theneveryone, including me, dispersed into limousines and taxis taking usthrough Manhattan streets to various dinner parties across the city.

Sam views the Voices piece as one of several techniques the WCF isusing in their new campaign. She is concerned that many women now,particularly younger women, feel that the “battle for the feminist move-ment has been won—giving women certain rights . . . They think thatthe movement has won because of the advances of women in the eightiesand even the nineties.” Sam, in her early fifties, completely disagreeswith this post-feminist belief. She sees her mission, as the leader of theWCF, to collaborate with others to “revitalize the women’s movement.”She was spurred on by Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidential election,along with the way the press treated Clinton and other female candi-dates. After Clinton’s loss, Sam began to ask herself various questions:“How can we instigate change? How can we disrupt complacency? Whatrocks people’s worlds?” And, in “one full swoop” she thought of the“ladder piece.”

Conclusion: Feminism, finance, politics and

cultural critique

Transformations in Wall Street women’s networked events aregrounded in larger historical frameworks of various sorts: the global-ization of finance, neoliberalism, social movements such as femi-

nism, and the women’s own imagining of themselves. Wall Streetwomen’s networks have increasingly used city places to promote women’sleadership and mobility. Their spatial logics have shifted from the 1950sto the present—from holding events in masculine downtown financialinstitution to holding them in professional-managerial spaces throughoutthe city. A closer look at the women’s networked events helps us sort outthe shifting gendered politics of Wall Street women and to illuminate thecultural backdrops to debates over the relationship between financialwomen and their networks, Wall Street, feminism, and society at large.

Historically, the first generation and their networks took a ratherconservative approach to feminist politics. They presented their networkas a professional women’s organization oriented toward moving womenup Wall Street, rather than a pro-feminist organization. It is only withinthe past decade that they have begun to address helping other women toadvance in and out of the workplace—in the United States and beyond.Here we are witnessing how the realms of finance and feminism, onceworlds apart in the women’s lives, are increasingly being broughttogether.

Tenets of feminism are being incorporated and mainstreamed intoWall Street institutions and practices. This new feminism—a “marketfeminism”—as defined recently by feminist political scientists Johanna

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Kantola and Judith Squires (2008) refers to the incorporation of tenantsof liberal feminism—such as equal rights—into Wall Street institutions,practices and the global marketplace. It is a visible, performative femi-nism that ties women, finance and politics together—that is also incontemporary women’s political networks (Fisher n.d.).5 The WCF’sVoices from the Ladder piece represents the mainstreaming of feminism,including dimensions of feminist performance art, into political andcorporate institutions. In many respects the project of market feminism ishighly dissonant with the development of various forms of feminism inthe United States and the world for more than a century. Feministacademics and activists, including myself, whose politics are aligned withleft-wing agendas are inclined to view Wall Street as the engine ofinequality, discrimination, and ruthless social and gender injustice. Thecommitments of market feminism sits uneasily then with many, if notmost, articulations of contemporary feminism. Meanwhile, the successfulalignment of key aspects of feminism with market driven values anddistinctions provided the way for women in finance and politics tobecome successful.

Bringing a critical eye to the first generation of Wall Street women isa complex endeavor for a feminist anthropologist. On the one hand, Ishare the women’s liberal feminist beliefs in women’s equality. On theother hand, as a scholar I am concerned about the ways in which theirpractices are increasingly aligned with the market: Is the WCF’s Ladderpiece a form of political art? Or does its message of “moving women upthe ladder” merely reproduce the kinds of masculine image of upwardmobility and success? What kind of a feminist politics are the womenperforming? What does it mean when the women are looking toward andpromoting women as state actors as part of the solution to women’s socialand political ills? Recently Louise Amoore (cited in De Goede 2009:298)pointed to the manifold contradictions in the global economy withinwhich we all find ourselves. For Amoore it is precisely these contradic-tions that have the ability to become points of politicization. My readingof the historical and cultural shifts in women’s networked practices isthus intended as a critical anthropological strategy—making the seem-ingly familiar (feminism, the market, women) into the strange, andthereby potentially opening up other avenues of critique.

Notes

Acknowledgements. A very early version of this piece was presented at the 2007American Anthropology Association Meetings (Washington, DC) in a session orga-nized by Brian Hoey entitled “Locating Personhood and Place in the CommodityLandscape.” Subsequent versions were presented at Georgetown University’s Ameri-cas Initiative (Dec 2007) and the Departments of Anthropology at the University ofPennsylvania (Oct 2008) and Stockholm University (June 2009). I presented thecurrent version in the keynote speech I gave at the University of Amsterdam’sConference on Critical Finance in August of 2010. I am grateful to Siobhan Bennettfor speaking with me about the WCF. I especially wish to thank Laura Helper-Ferris,

Is the WCF’s

Ladder piece a

form of political

art? Or does its

message of

“moving women

up the ladder”

merely reproduce

the kinds of

masculine image

of upward mobility

and success?

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Randy Martin, Brian Hoey, Janet Finn, Christina Garsten, Helena Wulff, DeniseLawrence-Zuniga, Mary Kenny, Rodney Collins, Joyce Goggin, Ewald Engelen andthe two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I also want to acknowledge thehelpful comments of all of the participants in these various venues. The originalresearch for this article was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program onthe Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families. Follow up fieldwork was sup-ported by several competitive grants from Georgetown University. I am also gratefulto Kevin Mercer for his help with research tasks.

1Wall Street women and their networks may disagree with some of the inter-pretations of their experiences suggested here, but I have tried to capture thecomplexities, ambiguities and anxieties of their world. I have disguised the names ofWall Street women.

2There is vibrant body of literature on the history and contemporary formationof feminism in the United States and globally. For a discussion of the shift from laborfeminism to mainstream feminism see Cobble 2004. For discussions of the impact ofthe women’s movement on women’s entry into the workplace in the United Statessee Kessler-Harris 2001; Laird 2006). For an ethnographic study on the shiftingrelationship between feminism, fundamentalism and the family see Stacey 1990. Fordiscussions of contemporary feminism see Kantola and Squire 2008; McRobbie 2009;Eisenstein’s 2009.

3The anthropology of finance has flourished during the past two decades (see forexample Appadurai 1996; Holmes and Marcus 2006; Maurer 2008; Riles 2006).There is an important body of ethnographic work on Wall Street and the market-place (see for example Hertz 1998; Ho 2009: Zaloom 2006). There is a small butgrowing body of interdisciplinary work on gender in finance (see for example Fisher2006: De Goede 2005; McDowell 1997).

4I thank Laura Helper-Ferris for pointing out the resemblance of the Voices ofLadder piece to the call-response pattern in African-American churches.

5I developed the concept of market-feminist subjects initially in my dissertation“Wall Street Women: Gender, Culture , and History in Global Finance” (2003). Ihave since discovered that Jacqui Alexander had coined the term “free-marketfeminism” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). More recently in contemporary discus-sions of the mainstreaming of feminism I have also become aware of Kantola andSquires’s (2008) notion of “market-feminism” and Hester Eisenstein’s (2009) term“Madeline Albright Feminism.”

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