In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction In 1942 t h e dir ec t or s of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) met to discuss who should be allowed on the floor of the exchange. The exchange floor was dirty, scuffed by the shoes of men racing one another for shares of the American dream. The furious trading that took place there resembled a testosterone-fueled scrum. The environment was unruly, loud, and aggressive. And it was strictly off-limits to women. The men all agreed this was how it should be. However, they faced a problem. It had recently become public knowledge that one of New York’s most prolific and respected financial writers, S. F. Porter, was a woman. If Porter trained her eye on the all-male exchange, the NYSE might find itself the subject of unwanted controversy during the electrified “Rosie the Riveter ” days of World War II. But should women really be allowed into the stock exchange? The board finally saw its way around the dilemma and voted on a resolution: “Sylvia is one of the boys. We hereby award her honorary pants.”1 Sylvia Porter (1913–1991) originated the personal finance column, a specialized form of journalism—now a staple of major newspapers and websites—that has been overlooked in media history. At the height of Porter’s success, she reached forty million readers in more than 350 newspapers as a syndicated columnist; published a monthly financial advice column in Ladies’ Home Journal; and produced a shelf full of books, including the bestselling Sylvia Porter’s Money Book. During her sixty-year career, she advised bankers on the bond market and also counseled half-a-dozen Treasury secretaries and three U.S. presidents. “Few journalists have done more to put financial news on the map than Sylvia Porter, and none has done more to advance the cause of women in this area of journalism,” 2 | S Y LV I A P O R T E R journalist John Quirt wrote in his history of the field.2 Yet her story has never been told, nor have historians examined the development of personal finance journalism. There is no biography of Sylvia Porter to date. And despite writing many other books, including an unpublished novel, she did not write her autobiography. In 1958 Time magazine published an article about Porter, who was by then a well-known newspaper columnist and frequent guest on radio and television programs such as Meet the Press. The editors claimed that Porter “bustles through the messy, male-contrived world of finance like a housewife cleaning her husband’s den—tidying trends, sorting statistics , and issuing no-nonsense judgments as wholesome and tart as mince pie.”3 I discovered the article while I was in graduate school, studying postwar representations of American women in news magazines. I was immediately fascinated. Here was a woman who did not fit our cultural memory of the fifties. She was outspoken, she was respected, and she was not a housewife. Defying the decade’s historical reputation for conservative gender norms, the article praised Porter’s audacity and success. The editors did not hold her up as an example of a psychologically damaged career woman, they did not inquire about the well-being of her child, and they did not ignore her. They had, however, chosen metaphors that stuffed Porter into the mold of wife and helpmate. They had even titled the article “Housewife’s View.” In a type of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that would eventually be exposed for its sexism, the editors had made a woman with a reputation for heavy drinking seem as innocent as a new pair of white ankle socks. I began to wonder about the story behind Sylvia Porter. I wanted to understand how she had built a career in a field dominated by men and cultivated an overwhelmingly positive public image over the course of several decades, maneuvering her way around discriminatory gender norms and waves of ideological change. When Porter began her career as a financial journalist in the 1930s, she hid her gender behind the byline “S. F. Porter” because the field was so inhospitable to women. Not only was it difficult for a woman to get hired—the Associated Press and New York Sun both told Porter they would never hire a woman to cover finance—but even if a woman could land a job, editors worried that readers would not trust the information [3.133.109.211] Project MUSE...

Share