Wall Street Women: Engendering Global Finance in the
Manhattan Landscape
ciso_1042
262..285
MELISSA SUZANNE FISHER
Georgetown University
Abstract
The first generation of women on Wall Street has negotiated shifting gender roles from
the fifties to the present, a period of transformation in global financial markets and
business as well. Over much of this period, these women increasingly used city
places—federal buildings, the stock exchange—to promote women’s upward mobility
on Wall Street. In this article, I focus on how two women’s networks—The Financial
Women’s Association and the Women’s Campaign Fund (now Forum)—deployed
many tactics of visibility, including organizing events celebrating women’s accomplishments in male dominated industries, using the press, and more recently incorporating
feminist performance artist’s autobiographical storytelling. The article traces the ways
the women’s networks shifted the sites of their spatial tactics in the eighties, from
downtown financial spaces to more “democratic” professional-managerial spaces
throughout Manhattan. It also illuminates the ways the networks have increasingly
incorporated tenets of liberal feminism into their events. [Keywords: Wall Street
women, feminism, finance, performance, American culture]
Introduction
I
n 1981 the Financial Women’s Association, a network of professional
Wall Street women chose Federal Hall as the site of the organization’s
25th 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 celebration, the women represented themselves as an emerging financial elite in
a well known masculine space in Manhattan’s old downtown financial
district.
Cities are the landscape of the imagination, the site of promises,
dreams, fantasies, and nightmares. For Wall Street women, urban space is
among other things a landscape of the imagination where they can create
and legitimate a place for themselves in finance. Here they have situated
and brought visibility to their histories and ambitions for upward mobility and success. The first generation of women on Wall Street has negotiated shifting gender roles from the 1950s to the present, a period of
transformation in global financial markets and business. Over much of
this 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 American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2010.01042.x.
Wall Street
Women
used city places—federal buildings, the stock exchange, and corporate
headquarters—to promote women’s upward mobility on Wall Street. In
this article I focus on how two women’s networks—The Financial
Women’s Association and the Women’s Campaign Fund (now Forum)—
deployed tactics of visibility, including organizing events celebrating
women’s accomplishments in male-dominated industries, and the use of
the press.1
From the late 1950s through the early 1980s the women held their
events primarily in Manhattan’s financial district, the epicenter of Wall
Street. In using places important to the world of New York City finance,
they capitalized on their own increasing access to Wall Street, gained
initially as consumers and extended as professionals, and deployed marketing and branding strategies being used in business. During the late
1950s holding events in traditionally all-male clubs on Wall Street was
amongst one of the first tactics women’s networks used to showcase
women in finance. Ensuring that such events were written up in popular
New York City magazines was also amongst the first and arguably most
important strategies women used to draw further attention to themselves
as business women. They began to shift their spatial tactics in the 1980s.
As the world economy changed (including the expansion of an international financial service sector through the deregulation and the globalization of markets) the women’s networks widened their reach locally
and globally to include a small number of cities now at the apex of the
emerging globalized economic space—New York and London among
them. In Manhattan, they held events in the material spaces of an
emergent professional-managerial class: art galleries and museums. These
transformed and new spaces for social interaction amongst business elites
appear to be more democratic and accessible than traditional men’s clubs
(Zukin 1995:13). They offer a new social space for the exchange of ideas
on which businesses thrive (Downey and Fisher 2006:13–14). Specifically they provide a new social space for the exchange of ideas about
women and Wall Street.
The gendered logic of Wall Street women’s techniques of visibility
Like many women
has also shifted in recent decades. For most of the second half of the 20th
century, professional women were reluctant to publically portray themin corporate
selves and their networks (particularly the FWA) as feminist—even
liberal feminist organizations. Like many women in corporate America, America, the first
the first generation of Wall Street women did not participate in the
generation of Wall
feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s during their college or early
years on Wall Street (Fisher 2006:211; Ortner 2003). They did however, Street women did
benefit from the liberal women’s movement’s insistence on opening up
formerly male professions, including finance. They also profited from the not participate in
women’s movement’s transformation of the “gendered imagination’ in
the feminist
the nation, from one that linked women exclusively to their roles as
wives and mothers to one that increasingly aligned women with paid movement in the
work and the workplace (Kessler-Harris 2001:5–6). And part of the
professional-managerial class, women working their way up the ladder on 1960s and 1970s
Wall Street in the 1980s and well into the 1990s incorporated main263
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stream feminism’s strategies for assimilation. They sought in their careers
to “make it” in the business world (Ehrenreich 1989:216). More comprehensive feminist agendas and techniques—protest and revolution,
calling for changing or even overthrowing the corporate order, and
improving the plight of poor and African American women—proved too
radical for the first generation and their networks to incorporate into
their 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 their
networks (particularly the Women’s Campaign Forum) have begun to
use places in both NYC and Washington DC as theaters for political
action 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 event
planning has always called for stagecraft. But recent benefit events for the
WCF—a network composed of political, financial and other elite
women—often resemble a kind of performance installation art. Like
other nonprofits in the current financial climate, the WCF is pioneering
and drawing on new techniques of visibility that, according to event
planner David Stark (who does not work on the WCF campaign), “are
aligning the mission of the institution with what the fund-raising experience is like (Trebay May 2010).” The 2010 WCF benefit not only
mimetically evokes the organization’s mission to increase the number of
women in government, it also draws on a wider gendered discourse in
American culture that maintains that women are the best hope to repair
in a broken financial and political system, women who might restore
economic and social prosperity (Fisher n.d.).
Wall Street: Downtown Manhattan as a gendered
financial space
W
all Street is New York City’s downtown financial district, a
physical place composed of small colonial streets, the New
York Stock Exchange, and the towers of major investment
banks (Willis 2001:x). “Wall Street” also signifies an ethos and set of
practices embedded in an intricate network of institutions, investments,
and people (Ho 2009:6). Even its landscape is steeped in the history of
American politics, culture, and finance. After the American Revolution,
New York was the nation’s first capital. Twenty-six Wall Street was the
site of the city’s first City Hall. The First Congress of the United States
met in Federal Hall in the district to write the Bill of Rights. George
Washington, the country’s first president, was inaugurated in the building
on April 30th, 1789. In 1792, a group of male traders allegedly met under
a buttonwood tree—on the location of what is now 68 Wall Street—to
establish a formal stock exchange. While the buttonwood story appears
to be largely legend, there was, according to historian Steven Fraser, a
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Women
concerted effort at self-regulation during the 1790s on the part of the
embryonic 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 elite
men participated in the market, making money for themselves and their
families. Despite this segregation, a few women defied gendered conventions and made a name for themselves early on in finance. Born in 1932,
Muriel Siebert, for example became in 1967 the first woman to purchase
a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (it cost $445,000). All of the
other 1,365 members were men, and there was a great deal of speculation
about where she would go to the bathroom because the exchange floor
had no women’s restrooms (Lee 2009).
Although anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and historians
have taken a critical view of the world of high finance, they have
generally addressed the male dominated dimensions of the industry and
consider the market to be a space for unbound, fierce competition among
men (Fraser 2005; Zaloom 2006:113). In particular, ethnographers have
understood the formal sites of finance—the Chicago Board of Trade,
Wall Street’s investment banks, and the merchant banks in the City of
London—to be spaces in which men perform hyper-competitive performances of masculinities, and have understood these performances to be
part of the male drama of capital that construct women as inferior,
“other” and/or “invisible” (McDowell 1997:28; De Goede 2005; Zaloom
2006:113; Ho 2009).3 But financiers have used the urban landscape
beyond these sites, while women’s presence on city streets and in corporate offices has challenged both the male-defined arena of business and
the perception that urban offices were public, male spaces since at least
During the 1950s
the 19th century (Kwolek-Folland 1994:94). 21st century New York, a
global financial city, is made up of a range of partially localized assem- and 1960s, when
blages built of heterogeneous business networks, spaces, and practices
(Farias and Bender 2009). Multiple and overlapping gendered enact- the first generation
ments constitute the domain of finance and the city itself. Wall Street
of women made
women’s networks use actual material spaces to work out new discourses
and images of gender relations, finance, and women’s status. These nettheir way onto
works draw on business, marketing, and performative techniques to make
Wall Street, the
the case for women’s place on Wall Street.
world of New
Women’s use of the downtown financial
York City finance
landscape: The 1950s through the 1970s
was a
uring 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 (Fisher 2004). Firms, clubs, and restaurants provided male clients
with places to conduct business, socialize, and bond with male financiers.
However, women were not completely absent (Mayer 1955). In practice
male-dominated
D
downtown space
in lower
Manhattan
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they walked or took the subway, which they shared with men, to get
downtown 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 role
in the life of Wall Street. Physically, they play a part in the sense that
each weekday the Street’s stone and concrete canyons echo to the
click-click of approximately 60,000 high-heels as secretaries, stenos,
bookkeepers, receptionists, ticker operators, file clerks, messengers and
pages pour out of subways and into offices.
This . . . infiltration of Wall Street has not, however, done much to
open the way for promotion and pay to the women in question or to
women in general. It is extremely unlikely that any of the faithful
privates in the Wall Street army mentioned above—the clerical help
and receptionists—will attain any notable financial positions unless she
is 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 maledominate hegemony in post World War II finance. But their understanding that women only worked as support staff, and their forecast that these
women were unlikely to advance up the corporate hierarchy, were not
entirely on the mark. Indeed, by the time the article was published, there
was a small number of women working their way into the professional
area of research (Fisher 2004:301). In contrast to stockbrokers, analysts
were less paid and less visible on the Street and in American culture in
general. Brokers were picked for their charm, outgoing “frat boy” personalities, “risk-taking” nature, and ability to make (male) friends and sell to
the public (Sobel 1980:116–39). Analysts were regarded for the most
part, as introverted, quiet, detail oriented college men who spent the
bulk of their time hidden from the public eye—squirreled away in cubbyholes writing their reports (Mayer 1955).
Brokers were part of the public, front-line of late 1950s and 1960s
world of Wall Street. Analysts remained in the back office. They were
structurally disadvantaged players in the games of finance. They held less
prestigious jobs. Paid less, they lived in less exclusive areas than their
broker colleagues. Male analysts, thus, were lower ranking, and arguably
symbolically feminine. These dynamics left the door slightly open to the
entry 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 other
seven sister colleges, had wanted to join the Investment Association of
New York, an organization of young financial men, to help them make
“street contacts” to find better jobs. Barred from this group on the
grounds of gender, they formed their own organization (Fisher 2006:209–
10). in 1957, the father of Joan Mills, the president of the young women’s
network, contacted Brendan Gill—a writer friend of his—about his
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Women
daughter’s involvement in founding the organization. Gill, a well known
writer for the The New Yorker, [a pillar of New York’s civic, social and
literary life] then helped send out reporters to write a piece on the YWIA
for a short section in the magazine. Famous for its witty deployment of
the editorial “We,” the “Talk of the Town” piece began:
We had long looked upon Wall Street, above the secretarial level, as
one of the last almost-exclusively male preserves, but now having spent
a lively hour with the Young Women’s Investment Association we
know 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 the
City Midday Club where three noted male security analysts were to
speak—on drugs, steel, and of all things aluminum. Drugs, steel, and
aluminum, be damned, we replied; we’d come anyhow. Good said Miss
Williams, adding that we would be able to spot her by her plaid dress.
On arriving, we found this recognition device effective, and Miss Williams looked fine in it, too (“Talk of the Town,” 1957)
The journalists took note of women’s presence in the male bastion of
finance. But they did so in a way that drew attention to the women’s
fashion and attractiveness, rather than their brain power. Despite the
condescension of the New Yorker, the publication of the women’s
meeting with male security analysts, specializing in classically male dominated industries such as steel, helped break the public’s conception that
only men belonged in professional positions on Wall Street. That they
held the meeting in the City Midday Club, one of the oldest all-male
clubs on Wall Street, indicated that women might have a place in the
masculine landscape of white-collar work in finance. Like their male
counterparts, women used the space of the club to help create a legitimate space for themselves in finance. Other women (and men) reading
the article could then imagine themselves as part of such a mixedgendered space. Indeed in a talk about the FWA in 2006, Joan Williams
(now Farr) recalled that the article turned out to be great publicity for
the association. According to Joan, after it was published “women
approached us (the YWIA) out of every corner of Wall Street.” In
emphasizing women’s visibility and making use of the media (albeit
through one of the women’s father’s classed connections) the YWIA
women were following the examples of men even as they challenged
men’s exclusionary practices.
According to the 1957 New Yorker article, the YWIA women were
convinced that “the association is definitely a growth situation.” By the
organization’s twentieth anniversary in 1976, the organization had
increased their membership substantially. To celebrate, the organization
held an event at the Windows on the World, the restaurant atop of the
World Trade Center. Again, The New Yorker wrote the event up in the
Talk of the Town section:
the company included a hundred and thirty-five feminine financiers
and a scattering of male guests; and the menu consisted of spinach pate,
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chicken Veronique, mashed broccoli, anisette ice-cream, and Secretary
of the Treasury William Simon who made a stirring political speech
plugging free enterprise.
When the Talk of the Town asked if the organization had changed much
over the twenty years since its inception, “Miss Reese,” an FWA member
answered:
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 hundred
and eighty. The original group was security analysts—the first professional jobs open to women on Wall Street—but now we have bankers,
stockbrokers, traders, management consultants, financial analysts, portfolio managers, economist, and even several lawyers. In the last few
years, banks and brokerage houses have been aggressively hiring women
into professional jobs.
And Susan Dollinger, FWA member and staff-assistant in the corporate
finance department of A. T & T., assessed the extent of women’s mobility
and success on Wall Street:
Women are making good incomes on Wall Street, because it’s a performance oriented industry. Your salary reflects how much business you
do and how well you do it. We’ve got Muriel Siebert, with her seat on
the New York Stock Exchange, and Julia Walsh, who is a Senior Vice
President of a Washington brokerage house, but I’d still like to see a
woman partner in a major Wall Street firm. We don’t want women in
staff positions—we want jobs with real authority. How many women
are there above the vice-presidential level in banking?
In contrast to The New Yorker piece 20 years earlier, the journalists
appeared to take the women’s presence more seriously—even letting the
women speak for themselves. Indeed, FWA women carefully cultivated
their public personae. They took an avid interest in the popular depictions of the network’s members and practices, and appearing in The New
Yorker as financiers celebrating with the Secretary of the Treasury was
certainly a coup. It could be read as a new version of traditionally
American masculine discourses of entrepreneurship and the free market.
As The New Yorker quotes indicate, occupational mobility was the
primary goal of the FWA: ensuring that women move up the corporate
ranks on Wall Street. FWA women viewed their network as an elite,
female, financially focused entity defined by business principles, rather
than a pro-feminist organization fighting gendered discrimination and
sexual harassment in the workplace (Fisher 2006:211). Lenore Diamond,
a member of the FWA during the 1970s, characterized the organization
during that period as “cautious.”
The FWA, when I first started working on Wall Street, was like a
downtown Junior League, sort of Republican conservative group. My
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first experience with the FWA was when the Equal Rights Amendment
was up for passage in New York, and they banned us equal rights
supporters from putting up flyers. They got a court order that we had to
stand more than 200 feet from the organization’s meeting to give the
women to the FWA meeting a petition . . . Even in the early 1990s the
FWA was still very cautious about women’s issues—publicly saying
something. There was still this tremendous feeling, in the majority of
the members, “We can’t talk about that we’re discriminated [against] or
we are not going to get the corporate money for our dinner” (1994
interview).
In spite of the strict gendered segregation of space within Wall Street
firms, the sidewalks and steps in front of office buildings, traveled by both
men and women en route to work and meetings, functioned as both part
of the primarily male-gendered landscape of Wall Street and a mixed
landscape of protest. In 1967 Abby Hoffman and his fellow “yippies”
burned dollar bills, danced in the streets surrounding the New York Stock
Exchange, and, according to social historian Steve Fraser, “announced to
the press that they were emissaries from a ‘new generation that laughed
at money and lived free’ ” (Fraser 2005:525).” On August 26, 1979—
Women’s Rights Day—a group of Wall Street women demonstrated in
front of the New York Stock Exchange on behalf of women’s rights on
Wall Street (Bender 1970). Unlike the Yippies, they believed in the
institution and wanted to belong to it.
None of the women in the FWA participated in the protest in front
of the New York Stock Exchange. The FWA decided to publicize the
ERA march in the FWA Newsletter, while ensuring that the actual
sponsor was a city organization for business and professional women, not
the FWA. For many years to come, they would use their affiliations with
women’s national networks to avoid taking official political stances on
women’s issues (Fisher 2006:227).
The Financial Women’s Association’s 25th
anniversary (1981)
E
ven as the first generation of women on Wall Street began to
advance up the corporate ladder in the 1970s, they had to continually inscribe and re-inscribe their place in the built environment.
Money “creates an enormous capacity to concentrate social power in
space, for . . . it can be accumulated at a particular place without
restraint. And these immense concentrations of social power can be put
to work to realize massive transformations of nature, the construction of
the build environment” (Harvey 1989:176) The most powerful group on
Wall Street—white professional-managerial men—used their money and
power in part to impose their views on the urban landscape of finance.
Through their daily and long-term interactions—shouting on trading
floors, making decisions in executive board rooms, drinking in pubs after
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In order to contest the market closed—they built a male dominated atmosphere of meaning
and power in the spaces of finance (McDowell 1997; Zaloom 2006). In
the male
order to contest the male dominated system, women collectively engaged
dominated system, in performative practices—particularly at FWA anniversary events—to
discursively claim their place in high finance.
The 1980s saw an unprecedented bull market on Wall Street. The
women collectively
globalization of finance, the growth of the professional-managerial class,
engaged in
and the increase in conspicuous consumption unfolded (Ehrenreich
1989; Sassen 2001). In January 1981, Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ball in
performative
Washington D.C. ushered in a new period of “Reaganomics” in the
United States. Six months later, the women of Wall Street threw a very
practices—
different celebration in the financial district in New York City. The
particularly at
“FWA of New York, 25th Anniversary in Celebration of the Accomplishments of women in Finance,” was held at Federal Hall, where George
FWA anniversary
Washington had been inaugurated in 1789. The event was carefully
orchestrated. In September of 1980, ten months before the event, FWA
events—to
board members met to discuss the forthcoming anniversary. The meeting
discursively claim opened with a debate over who should be invited. The minutes of the
meeting record an update that provoked discussion:
their place in high
finance
The preparation for the 25th Anniversary Dinner with William Miller
as speaker is coming along. However, there was some confusion as to
whether the affair is to be of an exclusive or inclusive nature. This was
clarified by saying that the aim was to reach out to as many interested
and appropriate individuals and firms as possible (FWA September 1980
board meeting minutes, page 3; emphasis added).
In debating exclusivity and appropriateness, the women acted as gatekeepers. The women were regulated by historical financial discourses
about men and the marketplace, but they also turned their emergent
authority to perform, affirm, and amend these discourses (Butler 1993;
De Goede 2005).
They selected the venue as carefully as the guests. FWA planners
grasped the importance of using particular historical places within the
city’s landscape to stage this celebration. They committed themselves to
finding a place in the city that would symbolically affirm their growing
stature and presentation of self in the world of Wall Street. As Brian
Hoey points out, “a sense of place, understood as manifest in personal
attachment to real and imagined elements of particularity in specific
locations, i.e., local character, may support people in their ability to form
autobiographical accounts” (Hoey, this volume). The three possible sites
for the FWA event—a boat, mansion, and museum—were not simply
venues for the party; they were each potential theaters for the FWA’s
performance of themselves and women’s history in finance.
In early January the Peking Barge (one of the largest sailing boats in
existence and docked at the South Street Seaport Museum) was considered (FWA board meetings minutes, January 14, 1981). In February,
however, the “event had been rethought and scaled down to a more
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“elastic’ concept so that whatever number of participants show up, the
result will not leave the FWA with a staggering financial burden. Instead
of the Peking Barge, the Abigail Adams Smith House is under consideration as the site “(FWA board meetings minutes, February 10, 1981).
Federal Hall was also a strong contender. Each site would provide the
FWA with a different backdrop against which to enact their history. Each
provided a particular material and symbolic environment that would
provide attendees with pertinent information about Wall Street women’s
place within New York City’s landscape—their class status, gendered
history, and links to other urban actors and events (Taylor 2003). The
furnishings and style of each place would contribute to the participants’
understanding of the relationship between Wall Street women, the
FWA, the city, the nation and market.
The Peking Barge at the South Street Seaport Museum, next to the
financial district, represented New York City’s historical harbor, an
opening for world travel and trade. By the 1980s, the transformation of
the waterfront from dockland rubble to a mall, museum and tourist site
signaled the vitality of the financial sector and its professionalmanagerial class (Zukin, 1995:12). Holding the anniversary this site of
consumption would mark Wall Street women’s place within the city’s
corporate elite. However, anniversary planners were concerned that it
was flexible enough to accommodate low attendance, so that the FWA
risked losing money and the ability to showcase the organization’s size
and stature.
In 1981 the Abigail Adams Smith House was a federal period
mansion located on East 61st Street. It was originally conceived in 1795
by William Stephen Smith and his wife Abigail Adams Smith (daughter
of the President John Adams) as part of a grand estate named “Mount
Vernon” in honor of George Washington’s home in Virginia. Using the
museum as the site of the FWA anniversary event would effectively link
the FWA’s history to that of the early American female elite: Abigail
Adams Smith, and her family, particularly her mother who on her own
had invested in US government bonds, rather than following her husband’s instructions to invest in land (Museum of Finance website).
However, given that—in the end—Abigail’s wealth and stature were tied
to her father and husband, rather than being of her own making, the
FWA might blur their history without fully representing their own emergence in the public sphere of business and finance. Indeed, the fact that
the event would take place within an old mansion in an area where the
rich built “country homes,” would reproduce the traditional narrative
linking gender to the private, domestic sphere, thereby obscuring the
lesser 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 exclusive
use of elite men of the city and nation, and later on the market, it was a
prime piece of symbolic territory. With their celebration, they represented themselves as an emerging financial elite in a well-known symbol
of elite masculine space in the old downtown financial district. They
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followed earlier members of the FWA who held anniversaries and other
events in iconic male spaces on Wall Street.
The Hall’s history, classical Greek and Roman architecture representing democracy and economic might, and status as public space—all
provided FWA anniversary attendees with a powerful stage to highlight
the history of Wall Street women. It was the site of the inauguration of
the first capital, and with the first Customs House, and a Federal Reserve
Bank (in 1842) it was emblematic of the old financial district. It had
many lives, from government institution to national financial institution
to contemporary landmark. The women read these as histories of
freedom, and writing themselves into that legacy, claimed Federal Hall
for themselves in the FWA Anniversary Program. “The Financial
Women’s Association selected the Hall, the symbolic center of the financial district, to celebrate twenty-five years of growth and accomplishments of women in finance . . . This landmark site, where many battles
for individual freedom were fought, echoes the hard won efforts of
women who choose finance for a career” (FWA 25th Anniversary
Program). For the anniversary dinner, Wall Street women re-worked the
materials of city space and architecture to produce and memorialize their
place in the material and symbolic form of the market (Zaloom 2006:17).
Once they chose Federal Hall, FWA anniversary committee
members made further plans. They considered branding their story
in fundraising, marketing and advertising campaigns. Minutes of one
such meeting provide insight into the business techniques the women
discussed:
The meeting with Joan Farr, a charter member, has been quite productive and elicited many anecdotes of interest. There will be an effort to
find the rest of the charter members for the Anniversary and perhaps their
stories might be packaged by an advertising agency. . . . In addition to the
event itself, an Anniversary Journal documenting FWA history and serving
as a program will be available. This will have special pages where
membership, corporations, and the board can make contributions
through the purchase of space . . . A silver case will serve as a fundraising
memento (February 1981 meeting minutes; emphasis added).
The narrative of FWA history provided in the anniversary booklet is
a performative inscription of women’s identity as people appropriate to
be included on Wall Street. (In words they would never use, one could
say that they announced their larger project, to discursively “mark themselves as historical subjects whose genealogies might be found outside of
traditional forms of identification and belonging” (Roman 2005:3).
Their understanding of themselves as historical outsiders—as a so-called
minority group—can be gleaned in another portion of the 25th Anniversary journal entitled “A Brief History of the FWA”:
The original membership was eight financial women—mostly securities
analysts—interested in forming an association to vitalize and broaden
our work, by getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, and keeping
ourselves posted in the securities business.
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The year was 1956. Eisenhower had been re-elected, unemployment
was low, and the stock market hit a new high (521). It was a comfortable time for most Americans—unless you found yourself in a minority
group as the founding members discovered and were deterred from
joining in the professional pursuits of other Wall Street analysts (FWA
Anniversary Program 1981; emphasis added)
Writing cultural memory is as much about forgetting and omitting as
remembering (Taylor 2003:11). The women drew on a discourse of race This complex mix
(referring to themselves as a “minority group”) without directly acknowlof privilege and
edging the histories of “other” groups, such as African-Americans in the
1950s, who were excluded from mainstream American society. Instead,
blindness is
the FWA was pre-occupied with writing (white) women and their history
into the broader history of Wall Street, the nation, and the world-at- evident not only in
large—not the women’s shared history with poor women or women of
the FWA’s
color.
This complex mix of privilege and blindness is evident not only in
decision to use
the FWA’s decision to use Federal Hall but in the way they crafted the
show that was the highlight of the celebration. In April 1981 Kimberly Federal Hall but
Mason informed board members that the anniversary dinner show would
“consist of a tape of music and an evocation of the current events and
in the way they
stock-market activities of the times paralleling FWA history. A slide
crafted the show
show will be part of this presentation” (FWA Board Minutes, April 8,
1981:2). The show would draw on and intertwine three historical tracks.
that was the
Tying the women’s, the nation’s, and the market’s stories together, the
makers of the show produced a newly multilevel gendered history of
highlight of the
(predominantly white) women in high finance. They brought the local,
celebration
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 Street
women previously unacknowledged in official stories, biographies, and
commemorations. Again, the organizers carefully monitored the voices
and discourses that would be heard publicly. Their dominant narrative
situated Wall Street women as part of NYC’s predominantly male financial elite, leaving out other female, particularly feminist, voices of
discontent.
Feminism and finance: Quandaries of identity and
alliance making in the 1980s and 1990s
W
all Street and the world of finance underwent dramatic
changes beginning in the 1980s (Henwood 1997), hugely
expanding the financial services industry in the United
States and in Britain and Japan (Sassen 2001). The globalization of
markets, the introduction of new-risk management technologies to deal
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with increasing volatility and uncertainty, and securitization (the conversion of non-marketable assets into marketable ones) radically
reshaped the institutional landscape of Wall Street. In response to
these changes, firms dramatically expanded their research, trading, and
banking departments and capabilities. For example, when the financial
economist Henry Kaufman began his career in 1962 at Salomon Brothers, he joined a six-person research department. By the time he left the
firm in 1988, he was managing a research staff of more than 450
employees (Kaufman 2000:149). The growth and internationalization
of the industry forced institutions to enlarge their managerial structures
and emphasize leadership and partnership (Eccles and Crane 1988;
Fraser 2005). As markets and firms went global, a new global power
structure in finance emerged. High-status and well-paid jobs in the
higher echelons of management became increasingly concentrated
in global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo. Most of these
positions still belonged to men. Some members of the first generation
of women were able to work their way into the top tiers by the end
of the 20th century, but at the highest level they were a distinct
minority. Only 5.9–13.6 percent were managing directors (Abelson
1999).
The Financial Women’s Association experienced significant
change during the same period. In addition to using their ties with
women’s national networks to avoid taking official political stances on
women’s issues, they chose to focus on making international connections to cement their affiliation with other financial women in global
cities, and to bypass feminist issues at home. A group of about thirty
women traveled to visit the financial community in London in 1985,
then went to Tokyo, Peking, and Hong-Kong a year later. They
returned to London in 1987 to celebrate the “Big Bang,” the deregulation and restructuring of finance in the city of London (Leyshon and
Thrift 1997). Just as they had made themselves visible thirty years
earlier in the male dominated spaces of Wall Street, the women made
sure to be seen explicitly engaging in the masculine market place and
practices of these global cities. The 1985 excursion to London, for
example, was packed with activities; a management seminar, a panel
discussion of the Euro-market, a tour of the Stock Exchange, a reception hosted by The Economist Magazine, and even a meeting with
Margaret Thatcher, the iconic symbol of neoliberal reform in
England.
The FWA’s reception in London received considerable press in the
United States and England. In a London Sunday Times article, journalist
Maggie Drummond interviewed a number of FWA women, one of whom
explained that, “New York is the tip of the financial world and the
women you are seeing are at the top of that tip.” Barbara Thomas, an
American woman and the first woman on the main board of a British
merchant bank, explained that women’s networking practices in the City
of London were “at least five and possibly ten years behind New York.”
Maggie Drummond elaborated upon the differences:
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Women
The City of London does, it is true, have at least two women’s network
groups—but much smaller and less organized than New York’s FWA.
British women seem to be more defensive about networking—possibly
because men immediately pounce on it crying “sexist.” The FWA
members, on the other hand, have absolutely no problem squaring this
concept with their demands for increasing power and status in the
financial world (1987).
During the 1970s, the decade in which most of the first cohort of
professional women entered Wall Street, terms such as “networks,”
“mentors,” and “role models” were not part of America’s general
vocabulary. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, the language of social
capital was an unremarkable part of everyday business, especially
amongst women (Laird 2006:265). Here the FWA was instrumental in
teaching women how to network and find mentors that would make
them more visible and hence, potentially promotable in the workplace.
In fact, the organization pioneered women’s use of these types of strategies of visibility. The FWA, for example, invited speakers to talk about
networking, mentoring, interviewing strategies, and career planning—
all techniques designed to help their members climb up the ladder in
finance.
The FWA of the 1980s and 1990s may have been in the vanguard
of the corporate women’s leadership movement. However, 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. This was a cause for frustration
amongst some members—particularly senior level women in finance,
who had their own political ambitions, or who wanted to push
for more women in government. In 1984 in a discussion about
“politics and government,” FWA board members discussed whether
their members’ interest in politics was a help or a hindrance to the
organization:
Our board members are interested in courting government appointments. A criticism leveled against some of these individuals in that a
few have “Potomac Fever.” Most senior women are inactive [in the
organization], although they are responsive when they are asked for
help. Our more senior members have learned to use the FWA for their
own purposes, which in some cases can be political. The FWA generally
gains from this “use” (FWA, Board Meeting Minutes 1984)
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
The FWA allowed women to make connections to the political
world. But doing so did not, in time, provide a way to keep high-profile
women active in the organization. By the late 1980s and 1990s, a small
number were senior enough, and visible enough that, as one woman,
Mindy Plane explained to me in 1994 (during my first fieldwork amongst
Wall Street women) “the organization no longer could do anything for
us.” By then, Plane had pulled many of her female peers in finance and
the FWA into the Women’s Campaign Fund, a bi-partisan grassroots
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women’s political group that had formed in the 1970s in the wake of the
women’s movement and Roe vs. Wade. Through the WCF, women
pursued a more overtly liberal, gendered political agenda, including
securing reproductive rights and advancing women into government
positions at all levels. Furthermore, it was a forum where women could
make political connections. Mindy Plane, for example, by the late 1990s
had made connections with politicians (women and men) that helped
pave the way for her to be appointed to the advisory committees of
various women pursuing office.
At present Wall Street women are negotiating a complex reality. In
the new millennium the neat divisions separating dimensions of the
women’s movement and those of corporate women are no longer as clear
as they once were. This blurring of boundaries is also evident in Wall
Street women’s political practices and the Women’s Campaign Forum.
The Women’s Campaign Forum’s 30th Annual
Parties of Your Choice Gala 2010
I
n 2006, the WCF changed its name from the Women’s Campaign
Fund to the Women’s Campaign Forum. It is currently the only nonpartisan venture capitalist organization supporting women leaders at
all levels of office. On the evening of Thursday, March 11th 2010, I
attended the Women’s Campaign Forum’s 30th Annual Parties of Your
Choice Gala in New York City. I had been attending such events since
I first began my fieldwork in the mid-1990s.
The first part of the 2010 WCF fundraising event was held at
Christies’ 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. The
March fundraising event itself marked the launch of the WCF’s National
Awareness Campaign for Gender Equality in Public Office, with the
slogan “Who Needs More Women in Government? Everyone,” emblazoned in bold letters across the cover of the printed invitation. An iconic
photograph showed the six women who were elected to the Senate in
1992 marching up the steps of the Capitol—Senators Carol MoseleyBraun, Diane Feinstein, Patty Murray, Barbara Mikulski and Barbara
Boxer—on the invitation. The media had dubbed that year as “The Year
of the Woman” when the female senators plus twenty- four first-term
women won seats in the House of Representatives and female voters were
said to have “carried” Bill Clinton to victory in the Presidential race.
By the time I arrived at Christies’ around 6:30 pm—several hundred
well-dressed stylish women and some men were milling about drinking
wine, eating canapés, and talking with one another in one of the main
auction rooms. I recognized a few New York City luminaries including
1960s pop artist Peter Max and his wife. When I first began attending
WCF fundraisers in the 1990s, most of the people were white and above
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Women
the age of forty. Now, women and men from a variety of generational,
racial, and ethnic backgrounds were amongst the guests. While I did not
see any members of the first generation of Wall Street women at the
reception, several were special invited guests to the dinner parties that
followed.
Around 7 pm, Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, the President of the WCF,
moved to the dais where auctioneers typically stand—marking the
formal beginning of the evening’s program. Initially everyone—
speakers, guests, waiters, and myself—used the space of the auction
room in a fairly traditional manner: As Sam began to speak—the
crowd stopped moving about. We gathered en-masse and watched like
an audience does in a traditional theater space the proceedings unfold
on the stage, clapping when appropriate. Sam, and others, including
female 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 protocol
of other FWA and WCF fundraising events I had attended over the
years.
Suddenly the lights dimmed and a drum beat sounded. Within a few
minutes the center of the room was lit from the ceiling. Cautiously and
curiously, the tony crowd of spectators shifted our stance from looking
forwards towards the stage to peering into the middle of the room. When
the lights came back on, we could see a dozen women, wearing jackets of
various shades of red, pink, and orange along with black slacks, standing
on ladders clustered together but facing in different directions. At least
two if not more shared a ladder.
The appearance of the women on ladders in the middle of the
auction room disrupted the conventionality of the evening’s event. The
dozen women, who had been a part of the crowd moments before, were
now it seemed to me projecting themselves as female performers in the
space. Certainly politicians—women and men—in the contemporary
moment draw on many performative techniques when they are on the
road campaigning. However, they are rarely if ever collectively standing
upon ladders in the middle of an elite art auction space. Indeed, the first
image of the women upon ladders reminded me of famous art-works that
might be auctioned off at Christies—works composed of groups of
women under the “male gaze.” But as soon as the women began to move
and talk, the piece began resembling live feminist performance art
pieces—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 was
witnessing some dimensions of avant-garde, even radical, feminist performance practices being incorporated into the WCF’s presentation of
elite women leaders. Soon a female voice, apparently emanating from
one of the ladders spoke:
My name is Debbie Walsh. I’m the Director of the Center for American
Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Every day, I am reminded
just how abysmal women’s representation in our government truly is.
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“Who needs more
women in
government?
Everyone”
Our country is ranked 74th in the world for the number of women in its
legislature. Women hold only 17% of the seats in Congress, 24% of
State Legislatures, and six governor seats. This isn’t just a shame, it’s a
crisis. Who needs more women in government? Everyone. (WCF
Script)
A female percussionist—in a corner of the room—played a drum riff
after Walsh’s short impassioned speech. I took note of the way in which
Walsh represented the lack of women in government as a “crisis.” We
were already two years into the financial crisis, and it seemed the discourse of crisis was pervading various realms of thought and practice.
Indeed, she and the other women continued to draw on the discourse of
crisis throughout the performance.
Political scientist Marieke De Goede, in her work on the cultural and
historical history of financial crises, argues that “gendered images” in the
representation of financial crisis and their resolution “are not just a
cultural fringe on financial debates, but are part of the a central discourse
through which crises are understood and resolved (2009:300). “Voices
from the Ladder” portrays having more women in government as the
solution to the current social, political and economic crisis in the United
States:
I’m Dr. Avis Jones-Deweever, Director of the Research and Policy
Division of the National Council of Negro Women. I stand in the
footsteps of Dr. Mary McCloud Bethune, who went door-to-door to
raise money for the payment of poll taxes, held night classes to prepare
others to pass literary tests, and refused to back down—even when
faced with the threat of Klan violence—to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote. Who needs more women in
government? Everyone.
[Drum Riff]
My name is Liz Shuler, the Secretary-Treasurer and Chief Financial
Officer of the AFL-CIO—representing 11.5 million workers. Countless
union women everywhere have fought in the streets, in the workplace,
and in the halls of Congress for rights like social security, equal pay, and
more. Working women’s values are at the country’s core. And every
Friday, I thank the labor movement for bringing us the weekend. Who
needs more women in government? Everyone.
[Drum Riff]
The incorporation of women’s voices in the piece (from different
races and classes) captures the ways in which second wave 1970s feminists are rethinking and redressing their own implicitly white agenda,
and how certain tenets of feminism, diversity and multiculturalism have
been incorporated into mainstream political institutions and practices
(Aston 2008:xiii; McRobbie 2009). Indeed, the visual and oral narrative
of difference was intentional. A few months after the fundraising performance, I spoke with Sam Bennett, the President of the WCF, about the
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Women
piece. Sam, who was the producer of the piece, explained that when she
began to imagine “Ladders” she knew she wanted to include “a wide array
of women from different ages, races, ethnicities, and points along their
career paths.” In this way, the “women would perform every woman’s
voice.” Sam thus asked each and every woman performer to “turn their
life story into a haiku that communicated her own life-experience.” She
invited the women to write their own short life-story and paint a picture
from their own perspectives as to why we need more women in government. Here Sam wanted the women’s presentations to be “clean,
un-culturated—in an attempt to eliminate conventional stereotypical
modes of self-presentation used by women.” For example, she asked
Christie Hefner to introduce herself as the “longest running CEO of a
corporation” rather than “Hugh Hefner’s daughter.”
There are striking similarities and differences between the ways the
first generation of women on Wall Street relayed their stories and histories in the FWA’s 25th Anniversary event in 1981, and the ways the
women performed narratives from ladders at the WCF’s gala nearly
three decades later. Professional women in both eras explicitly drew
The women
attention to women’s places in male dominated spaces. Wall Street
women in the 1980s engaged autobiographical narratives at FWA
leaders of 2010
events in which they were intent on writing their history—elite, proalso wrote the
fessional women’s history—into the male urban landscape of high
finance. The women leaders of 2010 also wrote the history of women
history of women,
but theirs is a more inclusive history. They transformed their autobiographies and experiences into art, into an actual theatrical “testimobut theirs is a
nial” that has similarities to some forms of political performance (Satin
more inclusive
with Jerome 1999:1). It is perhaps not surprising that Anna Deavere
Smith, a performer known for her political “documentary theater,” perhistory
formed at the WCF in 2007.
Like the “happenings” of the 1960s and 1970s, the female politicians
in 2010 bring the “audience”—investors in women’s leadership in the
nation—into their performative orbit. Mid-way into the piece, they urge
the audience to respond to the question—“Who needs more women in
government? The elite crowd becomes part of the performance—similar
to an ancient Greek Chorus or call-response patterns that take place in
African-American churches.4 The WCF responds with increasing enthusiasm and vigor: “Everyone!!” Civic leaders, political leaders, fashion
designers and others thus participate in the performance of a kind of state
feminism—aligning feminist interests with the nation state. But this is a
new emergent kind of feminism—one that is not entirely mediated by
the state but also by the WCF—a market-oriented organization of female
political venture capitalists.
The play ended with a stand-in for Ambassador Swanee Hunt, who
served as the Ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997: “I dream of a
country with an equal number of women in all political-offices—women
who collectively add a broader perspective, inspire collaboration, and
shape a stronger, more just society—Because we need 100 percent of
America’s talent.” Every woman on a ladder then pointed into the
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audience asking: “Who needs more women in government? YOU!” One
more drum riff sounded. Lights went out. The audience clapped and then
everyone, including me, dispersed into limousines and taxis taking us
through Manhattan streets to various dinner parties across the city.
Sam views the Voices piece as one of several techniques the WCF is
using in their new campaign. She is concerned that many women now,
particularly younger women, feel that the “battle for the feminist movement has been won—giving women certain rights . . . They think that
the movement has won because of the advances of women in the eighties
and even the nineties.” Sam, in her early fifties, completely disagrees
with this post-feminist belief. She sees her mission, as the leader of the
WCF, 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 candidates. After Clinton’s loss, Sam began to ask herself various questions:
“How can we instigate change? How can we disrupt complacency? What
rocks people’s worlds?” And, in “one full swoop” she thought of the
“ladder piece.”
Conclusion: Feminism, finance, politics and
cultural critique
T
ransformations in Wall Street women’s networked events are
grounded in larger historical frameworks of various sorts: the globalization of finance, neoliberalism, social movements such as feminism, and the women’s own imagining of themselves. Wall Street
women’s networks have increasingly used city places to promote women’s
leadership and mobility. Their spatial logics have shifted from the 1950s
to the present—from holding events in masculine downtown financial
institution to holding them in professional-managerial spaces throughout
the city. A closer look at the women’s networked events helps us sort out
the shifting gendered politics of Wall Street women and to illuminate the
cultural backdrops to debates over the relationship between financial
women and their networks, Wall Street, feminism, and society at large.
Historically, the first generation and their networks took a rather
conservative approach to feminist politics. They presented their network
as a professional women’s organization oriented toward moving women
up Wall Street, rather than a pro-feminist organization. It is only within
the past decade that they have begun to address helping other women to
advance in and out of the workplace—in the United States and beyond.
Here we are witnessing how the realms of finance and feminism, once
worlds apart in the women’s lives, are increasingly being brought
together.
Tenets of feminism are being incorporated and mainstreamed into
Wall Street institutions and practices. This new feminism—a “market
feminism”—as defined recently by feminist political scientists Johanna
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Women
Kantola and Judith Squires (2008) refers to the incorporation of tenants
of liberal feminism—such as equal rights—into Wall Street institutions,
practices and the global marketplace. It is a visible, performative feminism that ties women, finance and politics together—that is also in
contemporary women’s political networks (Fisher n.d.).5 The WCF’s
Voices from the Ladder piece represents the mainstreaming of feminism,
including dimensions of feminist performance art, into political and
corporate institutions. In many respects the project of market feminism is
highly dissonant with the development of various forms of feminism in
the United States and the world for more than a century. Feminist
academics and activists, including myself, whose politics are aligned with
left-wing agendas are inclined to view Wall Street as the engine of
inequality, discrimination, and ruthless social and gender injustice. The
commitments of market feminism sits uneasily then with many, if not
most, articulations of contemporary feminism. Meanwhile, the successful
alignment of key aspects of feminism with market driven values and
distinctions provided the way for women in finance and politics to
become successful.
Bringing a critical eye to the first generation of Wall Street women is
Is the WCF’s
a complex endeavor for a feminist anthropologist. On the one hand, I
share the women’s liberal feminist beliefs in women’s equality. On the
Ladder piece a
other hand, as a scholar I am concerned about the ways in which their
form of political
practices are increasingly aligned with the market: Is the WCF’s Ladder
piece a form of political art? Or does its message of “moving women up
art? Or does its
the ladder” merely reproduce the kinds of masculine image of upward
mobility and success? What kind of a feminist politics are the women
message of
performing? What does it mean when the women are looking toward and
“moving women
promoting women as state actors as part of the solution to women’s social
and political ills? Recently Louise Amoore (cited in De Goede 2009:298)
up the ladder”
pointed to the manifold contradictions in the global economy within
which we all find ourselves. For Amoore it is precisely these contradic- merely reproduce
tions that have the ability to become points of politicization. My reading
of the historical and cultural shifts in women’s networked practices is
the kinds of
thus intended as a critical anthropological strategy—making the seemmasculine image
ingly familiar (feminism, the market, women) into the strange, and
thereby potentially opening up other avenues of critique.
of upward mobility
Notes
and success?
Acknowledgements. A very early version of this piece was presented at the 2007
American Anthropology Association Meetings (Washington, DC) in a session organized by Brian Hoey entitled “Locating Personhood and Place in the Commodity
Landscape.” Subsequent versions were presented at Georgetown University’s Americas Initiative (Dec 2007) and the Departments of Anthropology at the University of
Pennsylvania (Oct 2008) and Stockholm University (June 2009). I presented the
current version in the keynote speech I gave at the University of Amsterdam’s
Conference on Critical Finance in August of 2010. I am grateful to Siobhan Bennett
for speaking with me about the WCF. I especially wish to thank Laura Helper-Ferris,
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City & Society
Randy Martin, Brian Hoey, Janet Finn, Christina Garsten, Helena Wulff, Denise
Lawrence-Zuniga, Mary Kenny, Rodney Collins, Joyce Goggin, Ewald Engelen and
the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I also want to acknowledge the
helpful comments of all of the participants in these various venues. The original
research for this article was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program on
the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families. Follow up fieldwork was supported by several competitive grants from Georgetown University. I am also grateful
to Kevin Mercer for his help with research tasks.
1
Wall Street women and their networks may disagree with some of the interpretations of their experiences suggested here, but I have tried to capture the
complexities, ambiguities and anxieties of their world. I have disguised the names of
Wall Street women.
2
There is vibrant body of literature on the history and contemporary formation
of feminism in the United States and globally. For a discussion of the shift from labor
feminism to mainstream feminism see Cobble 2004. For discussions of the impact of
the women’s movement on women’s entry into the workplace in the United States
see Kessler-Harris 2001; Laird 2006). For an ethnographic study on the shifting
relationship between feminism, fundamentalism and the family see Stacey 1990. For
discussions of contemporary feminism see Kantola and Squire 2008; McRobbie 2009;
Eisenstein’s 2009.
3
The anthropology of finance has flourished during the past two decades (see for
example Appadurai 1996; Holmes and Marcus 2006; Maurer 2008; Riles 2006).
There is an important body of ethnographic work on Wall Street and the marketplace (see for example Hertz 1998; Ho 2009: Zaloom 2006). There is a small but
growing body of interdisciplinary work on gender in finance (see for example Fisher
2006: De Goede 2005; McDowell 1997).
4
I thank Laura Helper-Ferris for pointing out the resemblance of the Voices of
Ladder piece to the call-response pattern in African-American churches.
5
I developed the concept of market-feminist subjects initially in my dissertation
“Wall Street Women: Gender, Culture , and History in Global Finance” (2003). I
have since discovered that Jacqui Alexander had coined the term “free-market
feminism” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). More recently in contemporary discussions of the mainstreaming of feminism I have also become aware of Kantola and
Squires’s (2008) notion of “market-feminism” and Hester Eisenstein’s (2009) term
“Madeline Albright Feminism.”
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