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On March 26 1973, the London Stock Exchange admitted its first female members. This followed years of resistance, with London trailing behind other smaller exchanges around the UK.
That women had been excluded for so long was not only due to institutional misogyny. Research has shown how finance was imagined in sexist terms for centuries. And despite the extraordinary accomplishments of prominent female figures over the past 50 years, these biased beliefs persist to this day.
Long before stock exchanges existed, women were active investors and speculators. They navigated the bustling coffee shops of London’s Exchange Alley, where people met to trade stocks. They sometimes acted as intermediaries, managing the investments of others in return for commission. In other words, women were stockbrokers.
But their presence in the market often attracted attention. This was especially the case in times of crisis, such as the South Sea Bubble in 1720 – one of the UK’s first speculative manias. Male commentators claimed women were too emotional to be effective investors, let alone brokers. Only men, to their minds, could exercise the self-restraint necessary to master the market.
So women got squeezed out. The title of the bestselling 18th-century investment guide –– Every Man His Own Broker –– was telling. The author, Thomas Mortimer, thought that women should only invest via a male relative. And he certainly didn’t think they were capable of being brokers.
When stockbrokers moved to a purpose-built stock exchange in the heart of the City of London, at the start of the 19th century, they signed up to a new set of rules. Though these did not specifically bar women, the wording made it clear that the exchange was for men only:
No new applicant for admission is admissible if he, or his wife, be engaged in business.
Later in the century, stock exchanges were established in towns and cities across the UK, and these followed London in excluding women.
Yet they never had a monopoly. From the 1880s, a few enterprising women started establishing their own brokerages. Trading a stone’s throw from the Bank of England, Amy Bell specialised in dealing for women. She sought to educate them in a subject about which they had often been kept ignorant:
I want to make women understand their money matters and take a pleasure in dealing with them. After all, is money such a sordid consideration?
Some were the daughters of stockbrokers who worked in family firms, occasionally taking them over on the death of the father. Others had no family connections and started in secretarial roles. They determinedly worked their way up to senior positions, like Edith Midgley in Bradford.
In the US, meanwhile, pioneering figures including the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull paved the way for a feminine presence on Wall Street.
By the interwar years, women had proven they could be successful stockbrokers. Clients, both male and female, reportedly had no objections. Indeed, many preferred dealing with a woman. But persuading institutions was altogether harder.
Publicly, the London Stock Exchange’s stance was that there was no rule against women joining. Privately, when women did try to apply –- the first as early as 1936 –- they were firmly told to drop the matter.
What changed? 1973 was not the result of an institution quietly moving in line with public opinion. A series of dramatic votes on the issue between 1967 and 1971 all went against admitting women. Brokers claimed that women were too delicate for the trading floor – they would be jostled, they would be offended by the language. One broker was clear this was no place for a woman:
When I’m there, I’m there to do business and when I’m doing business I’m not inclined to be as gentlemanly as when I’m pouring sherry at home.
Another explained that stockbroking, “like coal-mining”, was best done by men.
Outside London, attitudes were changing. Without much fanfare, smaller stock exchanges began accepting female applicants. Aberdeen was first in 1964, soon followed by Sheffield and Huddersfield. Larger exchanges followed. By the early 1970s, Glasgow, Nottingham and Manchester had all gained female members.
This mattered to London because for some years there had been plans to amalgamate the country’s stock exchanges to promote efficiency. In contrast to the polls on admitting women, London members enthusiastically voted for the creation of a United Stock Exchange in 1972.
Muriel Bailey, a broker, had long campaigned for equality in the City. In a filmed BBC interview in 1967, she had spoken candidly of the “deep-rooted prejudice in the Stock Exchange about women members, which is utterly ridiculous”. She explained that she did the same work as the partners and wanted the same status as them.
In 1972, she seized her chance. Writing to the London Stock Exchange, she pointed out that under the new rules, provincial brokers –- some of whom were women –- would be able to access the London trading floor, whereas those who happened to work in the capital would not. This was untenable, she said. The authorities were forced to concede.
The day women were admitted, members were on their best behaviour for the cameras. Those who ventured onto the floor reported a friendly reception. But it was not quite the victory it seemed.
Members had not voted for equality. Rather, it had been forced on them. And they were quick to make it clear that this was still a male domain.
Women were cast as intruders, and some were subjected to harassment. One new member who dared to wear a miniskirt faced catcalls, wolf whistles and yells of “Get ’em off!”. All were given derogatory nicknames.
Nevertheless, over the past 50 years, women have been able to forge successful careers in the City. Some, including the London Stock Exchange’s current CEO, Julia Hoggett, have demonstrated they can rise to the top. Challenging the macho culture, however, has been much harder.
History shows that finance is not inherently masculine. Rather, it was constructed as such by the institutions that sought to exclude women. Despite the barriers they have faced, women have, in fact, been trading successfully as stockbrokers, on and off, for over 300 years.
The gendered beliefs that are still widely held today –- that men are more financially literate and that women are excessively risk-averse -– are determined more by culture than biology. Recognising this is the next step towards fulfilling the promise of 1973.
James Taylor has received funding from the Economic History Society for research into the history of stockbroking.
As Pompeii’s House of the Vettii finally reopens after a long process of restoration, news outlets appear to be struggling with how to report on the Roman sex cultures so well recorded in the ruins of the city.
The Metro opened with the headline “Lavish Pompeii home that doubled as a brothel has some interesting wall art”, while the Guardian highlighted the fresco of Priapus, the god of fertility (depicted weighing his oversized penis on a scale with bags of coins) as well as the erotic frescoes found next to the kitchen.
The Daily Mail, on the other hand – and arguably surprisingly – said nothing about the explicit frescoes and instead centred its story on the house’s “historic hallmarks of interior design”.
As a scholar who researches modern and contemporary visual cultures of sexuality, I was struck by how the heavy presence of sexual imagery in the ruins of Pompeii seems to confound those writing about it for a general audience.
As a gay man and a researcher on sexuality, I am all too familiar with the ways modern gay men look to ancient Rome in search of evidence that there have always been people like us.
It is now clear among the research community that such straightforward readings of homosexuality in classical history are flawed. That is because same-sex relations among Romans were lived and thought about in very different ways from our own.
Roman sexuality was not framed in terms of the gender of partners but in terms of power. The gender of a free man’s sexual partner was less relevant than their social position.
Socially acceptable Roman sexuality was about power, power was about masculinity – and Roman patriarchal sex cultures were assertions of both. An adult free man could have sex as the penetrating partner with anyone of a lower social status – including women or slaves and sex workers of both genders.
Despite this, I understand how politically important and strategic it was for the early homosexual movement to invent its own myth of origin and to populate history with figures that had been – they thought – just like us.
The flip side of modern notions of homosexuality being read into Roman history, is the way in which the widespread presence of sex in ancient Roman (including in the graffiti and visual culture preserved in Pompeii) has been disavowed or – at least – purified by mainstream modern culture.
This phenomenon started when sexually explicit artefacts were first discovered in Pompeii, propelling archaeologists to preserve them due to their historical value, but to keep them hidden from the general public in “secret museums” on account of their obscene content.
Indeed, the coinage of the word “pornography” was a result of the archival need to classify those Roman artefacts. The term “pornographers” was first used to designate the creators of such Roman images in Karl Otfried Müller’s Handbook of Archaeology of Art (Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst), from 1830.
The news coverage around the reopening of the House of the Vettii is one such example of mainstream modern culture sanitising Roman history.
When focusing on the fresco of Priapus, for instance, news outlets are quick to claim that the god’s oversized penis was merely a metaphor for the wealth accumulated by the men who owned the house. The pair had made their fortune selling wine after being freed from slavery.
This reading of the fresco, while not necessarily incorrect, overlooks the more complex – and for that reason, more interesting – role of phallic imagery in Roman culture.
As classicist Craig Williams writes, the images of a hyper-endowed, hyper-masculine Priapus that were widespread in Roman culture functioned not only as a source of identification but also as an object of desire for Roman men – if not to be penetrated by the large phallus, then at least to wish it was their own.
Priapus, with his large manhood and unquenchable desire to dominate others through penetration was, Williams tells us: “Something like the patron saint or mascot of Roman machismo.”
News coverage of the erotic frescoes found in a smaller room of the house has been similarly too straight forward in claiming them as evidence that that room was used for sex work.
While some scholars have certainly argued that perspective, others believe it unlikely. Some academics suggest that the erotic frescoes in that room (which probably belonged to the house’s cook) had more likely been commissioned as a gift to the Vettii’s favourite slave and very much fit the wider aesthetic of quirky excess that marks the house as a whole.
In a culture where sex was not taboo but instead promoted as a sign of power, wealth and culture, it is fair to suggest that erotic images wouldn’t just belong in brothels. Sex was everywhere in Rome, including in literary and visual arts.
When reading the recent news stories, I could not help but think that their interpretations, while not wholly wrong, were too skewed into presenting the explicit frescoes as either metaphors for something more noble, or as something that was restricted to a specific site of Roman life – the brothel.
Perhaps these readings are privileged over others because we’re reluctant to accept that sex in ancient Roman culture – a culture we so often mythologise as our “origin” – was performed in ways that we are uncomfortable with.
João Florêncio receives funding from Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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