Wall Street Women tells the story of the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street. Since these women, who began their careers in the 1960s, faced blatant discrimination and barriers to advancement, they created formal and informal associations to bolster one another's careers. In this important historical ethnography, Melissa S. Fisher draws on fieldwork, archival research, and extensive interviews with a very successful cohort of first-generation Wall Street women. She describes their professional and political associations, most notably the Financial Women's Association of New York City and the Women's Campaign Fund, a bipartisan group formed to promote the election of pro-choice women.

Fisher charts the evolution of the women's careers, the growth of their political and economic clout, changes in their perspectives and the cultural climate on Wall Street, and their experiences of the 2008 financial collapse. While most of the pioneering subjects of Wall Street Women did not participate in the women's movement as it was happening in the 1960s and 1970s, Fisher argues that they did produce a "market feminism" which aligned liberal feminist ideals about meritocracy and gender equity with the logic of the market.

Tells the story of the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street

About the Author

Melissa Fisher is the Laurits Anderson Professor of Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is a coeditor of Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"Detecting gendering in high finance is a long-standing challenge-it is a domain inhospitable to the main categories of feminist analysis. Melissa S. Fisher goes at it with gusto and gives us a great book."-Saskia Sassen, author of Territory, Authority, Rights
"Extensively researched and thoroughly documented, this portrait of a pioneering generation of women provides context for understanding the emergent discourse of feminizing markets. Strongly recommended for readers interested in business anthropology or gender studies, particularly for gendered discourses of finance and the female financial elite." -- Rebekah Wallin * Library Journal *
"Melissa Fisher's Wall Street Women introduces us to a feminist world that we can hardly imagine. As they dream of changing the hostile domain of finance, women find themselves drawing on traditional notions of gender equality and coaching each other in old-fashioned survival skills. Written in enticing prose, Wall Street Women offers us an illuminating peek into a wholly unexpected fusion of feminism with the market."-Alice Kessler-Harris, author of A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
"Fisher presents a world to us that taps into a current public interest in women pioneers in business, is methodologically innovative, is theoretically rich, and is ethnographically vital in understanding how to move forward as both gendered and market-engaged persons in the post-financial crisis world." -- Sarah A. Tobin * American Ethnologist *
"Melissa Fisher has written a fascinating, fresh, and accessible account of the pioneering women who started careers on Wall Street in the 1960s and 1970s and established themselves as successful financial professionals. . . . This book offers a readable ethnography that would be a valuable course adoption in both undergraduate and graduate courses on social aspects of finance or gender and labor markets." -- Louise Marie Roth * American Journal of Sociology *
"Wall Street Women serves not only as an helpful reminder of women's struggles and successes, but also as an enlightening depiction of changes-and continuing challenges-in a part of the business world often seen as mysterious at best and oppressive at worst. Indeed, the material Fisher gleans through ethnographic and archival research establishes the importance of her project, even if the book raises troubling questions about the compromises that women continue to make in the name of success, and about the nature of high finance itself." -- Megan Brown * Reviews in Cultural Theory *
"[W]ell-argued and superbly researched. . . . Fisher's in-depth case study of a Wall Street women's cohort adds ethnographic specificity to the typically cross-societal literature on market feminism." -- Alexandra Michel * Administrative Science Quarterly *
"Wall Street Women offers insightful interpretations of the noticeable changes in the rhetoric and practice of the first women of Wall Street, encouraging further comparative study of elites in this area. Fisher's extensive fieldwork, conducted over many years, has produced a detailed, wide-ranging and thoughtful exploration of the first women of Wall Street and their navigation of a competitive corporate culture structured by ideas about masculinity. Furthermore, it makes a significant contribution to our wider understanding of capitalism and finance as gendered and the resulting complexity of this for women in a market-driven society." -- Alison C. Kay * Women's History Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822353454
Author Melissa S. Fisher
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 345g