Q&A with Paulina Bren

 

Photo by Adam Patane

 

 

Paulina Bren is the author of the new book She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street. Her other books include The Barbizon. She is a professor at Vassar College, and she lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write She-Wolves, and how was the book’s title chosen?

 

A: She-Wolves emerged from my previous book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, and indeed in many ways I see it as a continuation of that story. 

 

While writing The Barbizon, I was struck by how when New York City took a downturn, starting in the late 1960s one might say, that occupancy rates at this famous women-only hotel started to decline. And yet surely this should have been the moment when young women were eager to live somewhere that offered safety and community? 

 

Clearly, a different kind of woman was starting to embody New York and I followed her figuratively, and in one case literally, from out of the Barbizon and onto Wall Street. 

 

I was keen, moreover, to write a history of the 1970s and 1980s and Wall Street saw enormous change during these two decades. It’s a story that hasn’t been told before, let alone with women taking center stage. It’s also how the title She-Wolves came about. 

 

The term “wolf of Wall Street” goes back to the 19th century and then with various popular films about the 1980s get-rich-quick shenanigans on Wall Street, that epithet became especially popular. But it’s always been attached to men. Well, turns out there were also women there…she-wolves.

 

In fact, once I started doing the research, it become clear that if we let the men who were there at the time tell the story of women on Wall Street, then either that history remains completely unwritten or else very much distorted. 

 

I started my research at the New York Historical Society with an oral history archive they commissioned about 10 years ago or so, entitled Wall Street, 1950-1980. It consists of around 50 interviews with men and five with women. 

 

Those numbers are not the shocker, however. What was disconcerting was that when the men were asked about the women, they almost always drew a blank or else said there just weren’t any qualified women around. And that’s just not true.

 

Q: Can you say more about how you researched the book? What did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: As I said, I started at the New York Historical Society, and I was grateful for those interviews, and also to the HistoryMakers oral archive, but, ultimately, there is so little documented about these early women of Wall Street that I ended up having to do extensive interviews myself, whittling it down eventually to the dozen or so “characters” in my book. 

 

As for what I learned? It was endlessly surprising. 

 

First off, I went into this knowing nothing about finance, nothing about Wall Street, and I think that was an advantage because I was then able to translate this world to the readers like me. 

 

She-Wolves does not belong in the usual genre of finance books because it’s a social history of women and New York and one of the craziest times in finance.  Such a fascinating world it was! I write about the women first arriving on Wall Street in the 1950s, up through 9/11 in 2001. 

 

That’s 50 years of momentous change during which time Wall Street went from an intimate almost sleepy backwater on the southern tip of Manhattan to the center of the financial world, defining American values, for better or worse. 

 

The women who first entered this place as more than a rare one-off (because women had always been on Wall Street but not as a workforce as such) were so markedly different from the Yuppie Wall Street woman of the 1980s armed with shoulder pads and MBAs. 

 

The early pioneers were a much scrappier bunch, and they had to be to withstand it all: the harassment, the derision, the utter inequality. They tended to be working class, from the outer boroughs of New York: strivers who at first were only looking for a secretarial job that paid maybe a bit more than elsewhere, but they looked and listened and started to climb that ladder.

 

Q: The writer Liza Mundy said of the book, “It’s a riveting tale of trades and trade-offs, ticker tape and triumphs, sexism and strategy, ambition and ascent, as women dealt themselves into the game.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love it! I think it should be on the front of the book and not the back! 

 

First, as a writer, I’m all for “riveting” and it’s been a joy to hear from readers who have no connection to Wall Street or finance and tell me they couldn’t put it down. I mean, as a writer, you realize you’re competing with a lot of other forms of distraction and entertainment these days.

 

Mundy is also right to point to the question of ambition. The Barbizon hotel was also about women’s ambition at a time when women had an early sell-by date stamped on them by society, meaning no matter their talent or ambition, they were expected to enter into marriage sooner than later. 

 

Wall Street as the next part of this story was also fascinating to me in terms of women wanting money, wanting power, and what it meant for them, the choices they had to make to “deal themselves in.”

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead for women on Wall Street?

 

A: Everyone asks me and I protest: but I’m a writer, I’m a historian! And so that’s my usual caveat. Nevertheless, of course I have something to say about this question—I asked it of every woman I interviewed, as my last question.   

 

To be frank, publicly they are more positive but when speaking to me, they inevitably rolled their eyes and noted how many gender equality task forces and committees they’d been on and yet when one looks at the very top tier of Wall Street power, it’s still a minimal number of women. And that’s the truth of it. 

 

More disconcerting is what we hear coming out of Silicon Valley and the cryptocurrency world where sneakers and espresso machines in the office cannot mask the bro culture that seems to be repeating much of the worst of Wall Street in its early days no less. 

 

So, no, I’m not particularly optimistic. I do think that the sort of blatant sexual harassment and more that is a significant part of the story of these early pioneers is less apparent and less tolerated but that in itself does not spell out equality.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I can’t really say yet but I do envision a third and final book that would constitute a sort of loose trilogy with The Barbizon and She-Wolves. In the meantime, I’ve been working on a novel, a mystery-thriller but with deeper themes about memory and family set in Prague in the early 1990s.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: She-Wolves would make a great Christmas or Hanukkah present...

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Paulina Bren.