Lillian G. Jones, Bank Cashier

by Mary Goljenboom

The banking career of Lillian G. Jones was uncommon in many ways.

It started in 1910, when Jones took a job as a stenographer at the New York branch of the National Bank of Cuba. She worked her way up, becoming an expert in foreign exchange. This was a critical area for the bank because of its deep involvement in the Cuban sugar trade. A woman with this kind of expertise was rare. Many of the women who went into banking in the late nineteen-teens were hired—at least in part—because of their extensive social networks; they were then taught the necessary banking skills.

Jones’s work was rewarded when, in May 1916, she was appointed assistant cashier of the Bank of Cuba of New York. (It was the same bank, but renamed to reflect it becoming a state bank). Jones, then in her mid-20s, was one of the country’s earliest female bank executives.

Two years later, newspapers across the country noted how “Wall Street precedence was shattered” when Lillian Jones was appointed the cashier of the bank. The job opening was created when the bank’s cashier, Charles F. Plarre, was called to World War I military duty in July 1918. The New York Tribune noted how the even “the more important” financial posts were being filled by women because of the war. The Associated Press said she was first woman in New York to hold the cashier’s position.

As cashier, Jones was responsible for receiving and paying out the bank’s money, collecting and paying its debts, receiving and transferring its commercial securities, and overseeing the work of assistant cashiers, auditors and accountants, and tellers. The position of cashier is similar to the modern position of controller (comptroller).

Jones’s tenure as cashier was temporary. The war ended in November 1918; Plarre was discharged in January and returned to the bank as cashier shortly thereafter. Jones was again assistant cashier. Her achievement was valued by the bank for in all of its ads her name and title, L. G. Jones, Assistant Cashier, are listed with the president, vice president, and cashier. She also showed that women were capable of so much more than the standard of the day assumed.

Jones’s career was not long. Bank of Cuba of New York closed in 1921 after a precipitous drop in sugar prices caused the failure of its parent, the National Bank of Cuba. She married in 1923. It’s possible that she continued to apply her skills behind the scenes to her husband’s business (real estate), like countless other wives who have worked unacknowledged.

Sources
The Commercial & Financial Chronicle, July 29, 1916 p 380 via Google Books

“Precedent Shattered.” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 22, 1918, column 7, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from the Library of Congress