Wall Street Women

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.

Author: Melissa S. Fisher
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 06/19/2012
Pages: 242
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.10h x 5.80w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780822353454

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/07/2012 pg. 42
Library Journal 06/01/2012 pg. 110
Foreword 08/30/2012

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.