Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression by George Robb (review)

The so-called subprime crisis of 2007–8 drew the world's attention to the financial industry and its victims, most of whom were women and people of colour. Critics denounced predatory products like subprime mortgages but left little doubt about the real culprit, the Wizard controlling the levers behind the curtain: Wall Street. The crisis was hardly the first time women contended with the risks and opportunities of the market. George Robb's Ladies of the Ticker provides essential historical context for the contemporary gender wealth gap. He recovers women as important actors since finance capital-ism's infancy. Infant is appropriate imagery because Robb explores gendered language and images that alternately constructed women as desperately in need of financial literacy but essentially unfit to wield financial power.

Robb's work would have been useful if it only excavated women's roles on Wall Street. He goes further to emphasize tensions contemporaries recognized but historians often ignored through methodological and theoretical approaches that, like separate spheres ideology, "banished women from the marketplace" (2). As legitimate, active players in finance capitalism during the critical period from the Gilded Age to the 1930s, women enjoyed virtually unencumbered access to the stock market — if they had the money. Wealthy, elite women figure prominently; Robb does note middle-and working-class women's participation, particularly during World War I. More important, ideas about the dangers of the market adversely affected all women's economic autonomy: a critical aspect of women's rights and personal freedoms.

Robb uses the traditional tools of economic history, such as stockbroker ledgers and investment guides, but also mines cultural sources, such as films and popular novels. With these tools, Robb plumbs both economic practices and cultural attitudes that shaped the opportunities allowed and the barriers erected against women's participation in the market. He concedes the disadvantages women faced but reads them against the grain, underscoring women's ingenuity and resilience.

In chapter one, Robb sets the historical context of the Gilded Age. The adolescent New York Stock Exchange still possessed the whiff of illicit gambling. Women's participation in the stock market earned them both severe critics and enthusiastic supporters. An arbitrary line demarcated investment (rational, educated, and professional) from speculation (emotional, reckless, and inept). The distinctions were deeply gendered: the former reading as masculine and the latter as feminine. In addition, cultural productions and industry practices linked the market's materialist ethos to sexual danger and moral peril for women. The age exposed the ambivalence between the empowering benefits of women's financial literacy and pervasive assumptions about essentialist gendered differences that constructed women as particularly vulnerable in the market.

In chapter two, Robb calls out the historiographical myopia about the critical roles women played, both as subjects and agents, in Wall Street in the period. Brokers created ladies' rooms and actively sought women customers. Women commanded capital and used it, such as providing capital for start-up businesses and helping husbands and family members establish their careers and enterprises. Hostility to women investors escalated around the turn of the twentieth century, which Robb correlates to the rise of bucket shops, or "brokering houses unconnected to the official stock and commodity exchanges" (60). These shops gave women greater access to the stock market. Women's participation in the stock market expanded across class, racial, and ethnic lines through the 1920s. The emphasis on spectacular fraud cases to argue women's inherent unfitness for complex finance led to tighter regulations, particularly the eradication of bucket shops, which further reduced women's market options and access.

In chapter three, Robb acknowledges the realities of fraud and exploitation in the market. He explores corporeal archetypes of the "shady lady broker" (92) and "confidence woman" (97) in the well-publicized financial swindles of...