US business history – Ferret Research, Inc.

Lucy Jenkins Franklin’s Advice

by Mary Goljenboom

A can-do spirit marked the generation of young women attending college in the 1920s. They’d witnessed women’s great power and influence in enacting prohibition and voting rights. They’d seen how, during World War I, women not only had filled jobs traditionally held by men, but had excelled in them. They believed deeply that their success—in school or in their future careers—depended on their own determination and hard work.

This ambitious generation wanted to shape their futures: earn a living by performing meaningful work, live independently in apartments instead of in the family house, make their own decisions about friends and activities. The lives of their mothers and grandmothers, limited to the home, were too restricted for these independent young women.

But figuring out how to get the most from life raised many questions, offered many paths, and required many decisions. For the three thousand female students enrolled at Boston University in 1925, Lucy Jenkins Franklin, the university’s first dean of women, was there to help. “I’m here as an advisor, to make college, if possible, a happier and more beneficial place for our girls, and to make life more glorious.”

Franklin was familiar with the questions and decisions that perplexed her students. They weren’t that different from ones she and her classmates had twenty-five years earlier when Franklin was an undergraduate. She’d made choices in the ensuing years: studying oratory (public speaking) at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she earned a BA in 1904 and an MA three years later. Choosing a career in academia supplemented with occasional public performances created from popular works of the day, like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. She’d married another academic, a professor of English, and had a child. She put together a life that included both career and family.

The current generation had opportunities in fields and professions that, twenty years before, Franklin and her cohorts could only dream of. Franklin believed modern young women needed to be educated differently than she and her classmates had been. “They must be trained for leadership whereas in the past they [young women] were merely protected and given an appreciation of the cultural advantages of an education,” she told the Boston Globe soon after starting at the university in December 1924.

Modern young women needed to be prepared to take an active part in life, Franklin believed, and that preparation started at the university. Franklin’s duties as dean of women included vocational advising to help students choose a field and take the classes necessary to get a job upon graduation.

Books, bibliographies, and brochures supplied the information, produced by individuals (like Catherine Filene who published Careers for Women in 1920) and organizations. Franklin used resources from the Bureau of Vocational Information (BVI), an educational research group headed by Emma P. Hirth. BVI collected data about fields that employed college-educated women. That data included: training required for the field; personal qualifications; best methods of entering the field; kinds of positions available and their duties; working conditions; salary ranges; and opportunities for advancement.

“I keep in touch with the bureau, so that I’ve a prospective job for every girl who wants one,” Franklin explained to a news service reporter in early 1925. “I’m here to suggest openings for girls who haven’t any idea of what they’d like to do.”

She also had a suggestions for young women grappling with the question of career or marriage and family. “My advice to girls who are contemplating matrimony and wavering between housework and business is, Try them both. If you are a competent enough woman, you can swing them. If they’re too much for you, give up the job.”

Franklin believed that every woman ultimately wanted “love, husband, home, and babies” and should, therefore, prioritize home life. “When a woman marries, her home, I feel sure, must mean more to her than this matter of economic independence.”

But room could be made for a career. Franklin had continued to work after her 1910 marriage but, when her son was born four years later, she stayed home. “I gave up five years to him and went back to work again. He was old enough then to leave in the care of my maid.”

A schedule, a cooperative husband who didn’t object to her working, and a maid to handle housework and childcare allowed Franklin to join Evansville College’s faculty in 1919 and Boston University’s five years later (her husband was also a faculty member at both schools). She scheduled breakfast and dinner as family time, although sometimes her work obligations (meetings, speeches, etc.) forced her to miss the family’s evening meal. At her son’s bedtime, one of the parents, usually Lucy, told him a story.

Franklin assumed without question that it was her responsibility—and that of every other married woman—to manage the household and family. She also assumed that a married woman’s income could be lost without deeply damaging the family’s financial wellbeing. Consequently, women had to find supports (like she did) or make trade-offs. “If hustling off to business each morning and coming home all weary to a disordered home and a delicatessen meal takes all the romance out of business, then my advice is stay home, young woman, and put your house in order,” she said in 1925. “But if you can keep your place well-ordered and your husband happy, and your children good, and rate a pay envelope on the side, then all power to you!” That remained her advice until she retired from BU in 1945.

Lucy Jenkins Franklin firmly believed in women’s education and ability to shape their futures. She helped Boston University’s female students plan careers and find meaningful work to support the independent lives they desired. She also advised her students to make choices that prioritized husband, home, and family, advise that many acted on. Above all, she believed that “there’s precious little a woman can’t do if she wants to badly enough.”

Sources
“Modern Girl All Right, Says New Dean of B.U.,” Boston Globe, 14 December 1924, accessed via Newspapers.com

“The First Dean of Women in American Education,” Tacoma (WA) Sunday Ledger, 8 February 1925, accessed via Newspapers.com [Note: Contrary to what the article’s title might suggest, Lucy Jenkins Franklin was not the first woman appointed dean of women at an American college. She was Boston University’s first dean of women.]

“Mrs. George B. Franklin Now Winning New Laurels,” Atlanta Constitution, 18 August 1912, accessed via Newspapers.com

“Lucy D. Jenkins Impersonator. Will Give Interpretative Recital at Euclid Avenue Friday Evening,” Zanesville (OH) Times Recorder, 9 April 1907, accessed via Newspapers.com

Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin (Princeton University Press, 2021)

Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900—1930 by Sharon Hartman Strom (University of Illinois Press, 1992)

Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper by Linda Simon (Reaktion Books, 2017)

Boston University Annual Report of the President of the University for the Year 1924-1925, v.14 no.32 presented Nov. 24, 1925, accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015076485054?urlappend=%3Bseq=62%3Bownerid=13510798895575182-66

A history of the Position of Dean of Women in a Selected Group of Co-Educational Colleges and Universities in the United States by Lulu Holmes, PhD (Teachers College, Columbia University, 1939), accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015022406600

Training for the Professions and Allied Occupations; Facilities Available to Women in the United States by The Bureau of Vocational Information, (1924) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b45940

Careers for Women, edited by Catherine Filene (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b385238

A Guide to the Study Of Occupations: A Selected Critical Bibliography of the Common Occupations with Specific References for Their Study by Frederick J. Allen prepared under the auspices of the Bureau of Vocational Guidance, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University (1921) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t8mc93z6g

Library Work: An Opportunity for College Women by American Library Association (1920) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951000935317e

“The New Position of Women in American Industry,” Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, no.12, (US Dept of Labor, 1920) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hl28l4

“Married women in industry” by Mary N. Winslow, Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, no.38 (US Dept. of Labor, 1924) accessed via Haithi Trust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112104139842

First Women’s Banks

by Mary Goljenboom

A group of Chicago businesswomen saw a problem with the range of banking options available to women. Female business owners were denied credit from banks at a far higher rate than their male counterparts. It stifled women’s ability to start, operate, and expand their firms.

The Chicago women reasoned that a bank that specialized in the female market, led by women who knew the financial industry, and supported by female stockholders and depositors, could address that credit gap. The result is First Women’s Bank, chartered in Illinois in July 2021 with plans to open in the autumn. It will be one of the few US banks primarily owned and managed by women, and whose products and services are specifically designed to support women in business.

The new First Women’s Bank has predecessors. Some of them even used the same or similar names. For instance, in the mid-1970s, as throngs of American women agitated for equal rights, female-led groups established:
First Women’s Bank, opened in New York in 1975
Women’s Bank, opened in San Diego in 1976
Western Women’s Bank, opened in San Francisco in 1976
First Women’s Bank of California, opened in Los Angeles in 1976
Women’s Bank, opened in Richmond, Virginia in 1977
Connecticut Women’s Bank, opened in Greenwich in 1977
Women’s National Bank, opened in Washington, DC in 1978
Women’s Bank, N.A. opened in Denver in 1978.

Many savings-and-loan associations and credit unions which were owned, managed, and staffed by women also opened in this period.

One of the earliest predecessors dates back a century, to another period when women were agitating for equal rights and seeking opportunities to improve society. It was the need to be useful that impelled Brenda V. Runyon to establish First Woman’s Bank in Tennessee in 1919.

During World War I, Runyon had headed the Clarksville chapter of the Red Cross. After the war ended, she told a reporter, “I found it impossible to settle down to the old life of ease and inactivity. There was the desire to do something for the public good—something worthwhile.”

At the suggestion of a banker friend, she settled on a bank for women. Runyon and four of her friends incorporated the First Woman’s Bank in Tennessee on August 1, 1919, sold stock, and held the first shareholders’ meeting on August 16. Shareholders voted in a board of directors: eight women including Runyon and the incorporators. Following the shareholder’s meeting, the board elected officers: Brenda Runyon, president; Mary Elder, vice president; Love Lyle, cashier and secretary. The group found space in the Montgomery Hotel building, which was owned and managed by Lulu Bringhurst Epperson.

While organizing the corporation and preparing the space, Runyon and Lyle also spent at least three days each week at a bank in a nearby town, learning the trade. They initially did all the work to keep costs to a minimum. Newspapers delighted in reporting that all the bank’s personnel were female, including the janitor.

First Woman’s Bank in Tennessee opened for business on October 6. Lulu Epperson was the first depositor. By 2pm, customers had deposited $20,058.75—five thousand dollars more than the capital raised by the sale of stock.

The bank did not limit its clientele to women and had male stockholders and depositors. It made an effort to “influence women to economize and save their money,” according to Runyon. “We shall try to teach them business methods and encourage them to do things for themselves.”

First Woman’s Bank grew and operated successfully for six years. In 1926, growth slowed and Runyon retired from the bank after a fall incapacitated her. First Woman’s merged into First Trust and Savings Bank. Love Lyle continued as cashier at First Trust.

First Woman’s Bank in Tennessee, the women’s banks formed in the 1970s, and Chicago’s new First Women’s Bank were all founded on the same concept: women helping women. In each period, women recognized a financial problem or need and fashioned a solution that educated women, provided jobs, and increased their participation in the economy.

Sources
First Women’s Bank, https://www.firstwomens.bank/

From the Clarksville (TN) Leaf-Chronicle accessed via Newspapers.com
“First Woman’s Bank in the State of Tennessee,” 30 July 1919
“First Woman’s Bank in the State of Tennessee, the Charter for which has been Filed for Registration—the Incorporators,” 31 July 1919
“First Meeting of Stockholders of New Bank,” 18 August 1919
“Clarksville’s New Bank Opens,” 6 October 1919

“Story of State’s First Woman’s Bank is Told,” Nashville Tennessean, 21 September 1919 accessed via Newspapers.com

“The First Woman’s Bank in Tennessee: 1919-1926” by H. Bruce Throckmorton. Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 1976), pp. 389-392. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42623608

“First Woman President of the First Woman’s Bank in the United States” by Vonnie Rector Griffith. Ladies Home Journal, June 1920, p. 149

Harriet Fisher Pivots

by Mary Goljenboom

Harriet White Fisher was a woman of action and independence. When her husband died, she took over running his family’s business, Fisher & Norris Eagle Anvil Works in Trenton, NJ. To make sales calls, she traveled around the country by chauffeured automobile. In early 1908, with the anvil business slow because the country was in a recession, she started a reduced-rate automobile repair business.

It made perfect sense. It allowed her to keep all her workers busy instead of having to lay some off. It generated revenue. There was room in the factory to do the work. And it injected competitive pricing into a business where mechanics, Fisher felt, colluded and were “practicing extortion on the automobilists.”

To oversee the department, Fisher hired an experienced manager, Harold Fisher Brooks. He knew marine engines as well as automobile, so they included motorboat repairs in their services. The business was limited to machinery repair—no painting or upholstery work. Fisher guaranteed the workmanship, promising that it would adhere to Eagle Anvil Works’ reputation for quality.

Fisher invested in some machinery for the repair department and began advertising in the Trenton Evening Times classified advertising pages in late January 1908.

Gasoline Engines
AUTOMOBILE Repairs, motor boat engines repaired and installed, by expert machinist and engineer; first-class work guaranteed; no trust prices. Fisher & Norris Anvil Works, Fair Street, Trenton, N.J.

Slow economic times caused Harriet White Fisher to think creatively and act decisively. She found a niche that utilized some of her business assets, required a manageable amount of investment, and was personally satisfying.

Sources
Trenton Evening Times, 23 January 1908; 21 January 1908; and 21 April 1908 via newspapers.com

New York Times, 24 January 1908

Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 January 1908 via newspapers.com

The Motor World magazine, 6 February 1908 via Google Books

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

Thinking Differently: Josephine Roche

by Mary Goljenboom

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Apple’s Think Different advertising campaign (1997-2002), used those words to describe 20th century icons—Einstein, Gandhi, Martha Graham, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—whose images were the other integral piece of the television and print ads. Two of the visionaries in this series were business leaders—Richard Branson (founder Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, etc.) and Ted Turner (founder CNN and TBS).

Businesswoman Josephine A. Roche was not part of Apple’s campaign but the ads’ description fits her, particularly when she took over the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and changed its management policies.

Forty-year-old Josephine Roche took her seat in the boardroom after inheriting 40% of the Colorado-based coal mining company’s stock in 1927. She knew her positions on pressing issues differed from those of the company’s other directors and her late father, the company’s former president. She’d been educated at Vassar College and Columbia University and, in her professional life, had instituted progressive policies within organizations where she worked as an administrator: the US Foreign Language Information Service, the editorial division of the US Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau, and the Denver Juvenile Court System. She expected to be seen as a troublemaker by her boardroom colleagues.

Disputes over working conditions and wages had caused years of labor-management conflicts for all of Colorado’s coal mining businesses. Seen from today, management’s treatment of labor is harsh and unfair. Miners’ wages and hours fluctuated dramatically and they were not paid for time that was integral to the operation but not “mining,” such as loading coal or building support structures. Pay raises frequently were followed by cuts that zeroed the increase. Often miners were paid not in cash but in scrip, which only had value at the company store. Inside the mine, there was spotty compliance with safety and ventilation regulations. Complainers faced instant job loss. These issues, unresolved for decades, led employees to call strikes and for unionization. Management believed in their inalienable right to control their property (i.e., the business). They chose to quash dissent, ruthlessly and unscrupulously, using their economic power to support their business practices, no matter the cost in dollars or lives.

Josephine Roche saw things differently. She believed the company should be managed for the benefit of all stakeholders—employees, customers, managers, and investors—not exclusively for those controlling the capital. She was sympathetic to workers’ demand for union representation because she’d witnessed their deplorable living and working conditions. Her vision for RMFC was farsighted and progressively capitalistic: She believed the company could both make money and improve the lives of her workers and their families.

In order to realize her vision, Roche first needed a majority of stockholders supporting her. According to biographer Robyn Muncy, Roche contacted non-board investors and received enough authorizations (proxies) to fire the current board of directors and re-build it. The president of RMFC was so incensed that he offered to sell his shares to Roche. She borrowed $35,000, completed the deal, and became RMFC’s controlling stockholder.

Roche installed progressive managers to oversee the business, and named herself as vice president (within a few years she became president). She then invited her workers to organize and choose their own representatives for negotiations with management. They chose the United Mine Workers and in the summer of 1928 Roche signed the labor contract she and the union had negotiated. Its provisions—an eight-hour day and six-day work week at $7 per day (the highest coal mining wage in the state), as well as other benefits—won her increased productivity, labor peace, and the support and gratitude of her employees. She needed it.

Her competitors viewed her as a “dangerous industrial radical” according to TIME magazine and started a price war. These coal operators, including Colorado’s largest, the Rockefeller–owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp., dropped prices 50 to 75 cents per ton so RMFC’s higher labor costs put the company at a big disadvantage. Some operators gave secret rebates to customers. The predatory practices were designed to force RMFC into bankruptcy and rid the industry of unions.

Roche fought back. She met the competition on price, then, to supplement the loss of income, raised money privately. Six hundred of her workers, according to TIME, voluntarily voted to take only half their wages for three months, thus loaning the company about $80,000. The union-led “Buy from Josephine” campaign to increase sales to households, merchants and manufacturers was pumped up. The United Mine Workers loaned her money, too.

Rocky Mountain Fuel Company hung on, even as the Great Depression added more economic hardship and the newly developed natural gas industry competed for coal customers. Roche was forced to lower wages to $5.25 a day in 1932 but opened company property to farming and provided credit at the company store to help offset the cuts. That same year, the New York Times reported that the company’s costs for digging a ton of coal had steadily declined since the 1928 contract took effect and its sales increased. The company was making money because of the joint efforts of management and labor. In 1935, a nationwide poll of 500 business executives named her the top US businesswoman. By then, all the other Colorado coal mines were unionized.

Josephine Roche was crazy enough to think she could change the world. And she did.

Sources
“A Woman Unravels an Industrial Knot,” by Louis Stark, New York Times, February 7, 1932

Restless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth Century America by Robyn Muncy

A Wide-Awake Woman: Josephine Roche in the Era of Reform by Elinor McGinn

Regulating Danger: The Struggle for Mine Safety in the Rocky Mountain Coal Industry by James Whiteside

“Rocky Mountain Gesture,” TIME, September 7, 1931

Land Of Contrast: A History of Southeast Colorado by Frederic J. Athearn

The Campaign for Early Christmas Shopping

by Mary Goljenboom

In the 1890s, as today, stores were often packed with shoppers in the days leading up to Christmas, lured by sale prices and special merchandise. At that time, however, the shopping season only spanned the few weeks before the holiday. Merchants often did not have all their holiday merchandise available until mid-December. Shoppers waited until a few days before Christmas—and especially Christmas Eve—to make their selections and have them packaged and sent to the recipient, with delivery expected before Christmas. This consumer behavior put tremendous pressure on retail employees, and interfered with their own holiday celebrations.

It took a concerted social movement to make store management change their policies and for consumers to buy-in. Ironically the change has led to Black Friday and shopping madness on Thanksgiving Day. But the story of that social movement also illustrates what needs to happen in our own time to cause change for modern workers.

The movement was started by a group of middle- and upper-class women interested in changing the working conditions of women and children with jobs in retailing. At the time there was no minimum wage, no maximum number of hours to the work day or week (and, therefore, no overtime compensation), and no limits on child labor. While some labor organizers were working to improve conditions through unionization, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Maud Nathan, and other like-minded women believed in another strategy—the power of the purse. They reasoned that consumer demand dictated the policies of employers and, therefore, consumer demand could force change to those policies. In 1891, these women organized themselves into the Consumers’ League of the City of New York (CLCNY).

Maud Nathan, who became president of the group in 1896, explained one tactic:

The majority of employers are virtually helpless to maintain a high standard as to hours, wages and working conditions under the stress of competition, unless sustained by the cooperation of consumers.

A woman who joins our league agrees to shop early in the day. She does not insist that her goods shall be delivered on the same day, declining to receive anything after 6 pm. This enables the delivery men and errand boys to finish their labors early. A member of our league does her Christmas-shopping early. She avoids shopping in the evening and on Saturday afternoons. She does not even ring up the grocer or the butcher by telephone on Saturday afternoons and order goods.

Another tactic used by CLCNY was to create and publicize a list of merchants who met the league’s criteria for fair working conditions; league members and sympathetic consumers (who may have seen it in the newspapers) would then patronize those businesses. The league actively investigated conditions by visiting stores, interviewing managers, and separately seeking verification or contradiction from workers. The list was called the White List for it was the opposite of blacklisting merchants. Eleven retailers, including Lord & Taylor, were on the league’s first White List in 1891. Four years later there were 31 including John Wanamaker, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, and F.A.O. Schwarz.

As the CLCNY investigated and reported on workplace conditions, they realized the particular burden the Christmas holiday, particularly Christmas Eve shopping, placed on workers. After a twelve- or fourteen-hour selling day, shelves needed to be restocked, goods packaged for delivery, and deliveries made (gifts were almost never sent early at this time), keeping employees—including children—working far into the night.

In typical league fashion, Maud Nathan’s CLCNY fashioned a multipronged approach, reaching out to retailers and consumers. It encouraged White List merchants to close early on Christmas Eve. For instance, eight days before Christmas 1898, White-List-member Wanamaker’s started announcing in its holiday advertising that it would close early (at 7 pm instead of 10 pm) on Christmas Eve. The next year, Wanamaker’s ran an ad explicitly stating that they were closing early on Christmas Eve so “the thousands of us who will have helped with your good Christmas can get ready for our own.”

The league also discouraged evening hours during the Christmas shopping season and encouraged merchants to display all holiday merchandise earlier than the few weeks just before Christmas, as was the custom, so shoppers could make their selections early. “We found that just as soon as demand for these gifts was made, supply was forthcoming,” Nathan wrote in her book on the league, Story of an Epoch-Making Movement.

Finally, CLCNY, in its annual appeal to members and supporters, urged them to shop early at the White List stores.

Over the next decade these tactics became a campaign to promote early Christmas shopping.

The league amended its fairness standards to cover the evening hours. To comply, a merchant must “not remain open after 7 pm more than four evenings between December 15^th and December 25^th,” and not remain open “later than 9 o’clock on these four evenings.” The White List was divided into two categories: “Stores not open in the evening before Christmas” and “Stores open in the evening before Christmas” (in 1908, there were 34 stores closed in the evening compared to 14 open). Members pledged to shop early. The White List was printed in newspapers, magazines, and theater programs.

Nathan made speeches, gave interviews, wrote opinion pieces and letters to the editor. She set up a Committee on Arousing Public Sentiment. They produced thousands of flyers, posters, letters, and postcards with the appeal to shop early. These were distributed through churches and synagogues (some 15,000 in 1907 alone), in schools and clubs. At CLCNY’s urging, they were also used as talking points by clergy and teachers. Women’s clubs signed pledge cards to complete shopping before December 15^th. In 1909, from November 30^th to December 14^th, a 25×30 foot banner was hung over 23^rd St. between 5^th and 6^th Avenues. It read Do your Christmas shopping before December 15^th to help the workers in the shops and factories. [signed] Consumers League of the City of New York.

The movement and the Consumers’ League spread nationwide. Habits changed. Merchants displayed their goods in November and, in some cases, October. CLCNY reported proudly in 1906 that “one merchant sent notices in October to all of his charge customers, informing them that his full Christmas stock would be on exhibition by October 29^th , and that selected goods would be reserved for later delivery if purchased before December 10^th.”

In her memoir, Maud Nathan wrote with pride “No longer do shoppers feel that they must wait until the hurried last days before the holiday. . . .Each year holiday goods are displayed earlier and earlier to meet an ever-increasingly early demand.” If she was here today, she would protest shopping hours on Thanksgiving Day. Or maybe start another movement.

Sources
Story of an Epoch-Making Movement by Maud Nathan via Haithi Trust Digital Library

The San Francisco Call. 27 May 1902 via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers at the Library of Congress

New-York Tribune. 28 Jan. 1894 via Chronicling America

The New York Sun. 16 Dec. 1898 via Chronicling America

New-York Tribune. 15 Dec. 1899 via Chronicling America

Volumes of the Annual Reports of the Consumers’ League of the City of New York via Haithi Trust Digital Library

The Extraordinary Story of the Woman’s Tea Company

by Mary Goljenboom

When we want a cup or a package of tea, we can choose from varieties that come from all over the world, like white tea from China—once served to the emperor—or kukicha green tea from Japan. Tea buyers shop throughout the world for the flavors and fragrances that will entice and satisfy customers.

Like her modern counterparts, Susan A. King searched abroad for high-quality, distinctive tea when she and Ellen Louise Demorest went into the business. In 1870, King took the very unusual step of traveling unescorted to Japan and China.

The pair brewed a plan to import tea from Asia and sell it wholesale to female-operated shops around the country. The name of their business, the Woman’s Tea Company, was literal: Demorest served as president, and King served as treasurer. All the stockholders and directors were female. The company had $500,000 in capital, an enormous sum. Both King and Demorest had made fortunes in other industries; this venture was a way for them to help other women gain financial security and the independence that accompanies it.

King and Demorest were well-known names in New York which allowed the plan to coalesce quickly. Demorest and her husband ran one of the top fashion businesses. Her tissue-paper patterns, used by home sewers, sold in shops across the country and in the Demorests’ own emporium in New York City. They also published a magazine, Demorest’s Monthly Magazine and Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions. Their nationwide connections with merchants and shopkeepers, as well as ads and articles in the magazine, were great resources for introducing and promoting the company and its tea to customers and vendors.

Susan King was a successful New York City real estate investor. She was a woman skilled in negotiation and finance—which she would need in the import business. For expert advice on shipping, King, no doubt, turned to her brother-in-law, a sea captain named Frederick Gorham.

In the middle of 1870, just as newspapers were publishing the first accounts of the Woman’s Tea Company, King’s plans were well underway. She secured letters of introduction and credit from New York banking and merchant companies to their overseas offices. She then crossed the country to San Francisco, arriving in July. There she did the bulk of her banking, obtaining letters of credit from the Bank of California to the Oriental Bank Corporation, Asia’s dominant financial institution. On August 1, 1870, fifty-three year old Susan King departed on the steamship Great Republic for Yokohama, Japan.

Arriving about three weeks later, she set to work. She met exporters headquartered in the port and sampled teas. She met with the American ambassador as well as Sir Harry Smith Parkes, the British ambassador, who had long experience in the region. “The English Ambassador said it wouldn’t be safe for me to go out in the country, and wanted me to take an escort. But I said what would anybody want with an old woman like me?” King told a correspondent for the Boston Post. Against Parkes’ advice, King hired locals to take her into the countryside to visit growers and sample their teas—she wanted to make an informed decision about the product that her company would sell. King then sailed to China and, again, hired natives to take her to growers. She later told reporters that she’d been farther into China’s interior than any other Westerners, including missionaries.

In China, King found pure, sun-dried leaves that the Woman’s Tea Company marketed as Mandarin Tea. “I got three hundred tons,” she told the Boston Post. In April 1871, the merchant ship Adelaide Carleton, carrying a cargo of tea and one passenger, Susan King, sailed out of Hong Kong for New York. The ship reached the city four months later, on August 18.

The Women’s Tea Company was in business.

Over the next months the tea was packaged, distributed, and promoted. A beautifully-appointed shop was set up in Madame Demorest’s Emporium on Broadway in New York City. The company sold only Mandarin Tea and packaged it in three sizes. Ads listing businesses carrying the tea began to appear in newspapers from Boston, Cleveland, and Omaha.

The wide variety of tea available to us today may help to explain company’s failure to thrive. WTC carried only one tea and it was very different from what most consumers were used to. Consumers had to develop a taste for it (although it was very popular in immigrant Chinese communities, according to King). In addition, Mandarin Tea, at $1.50 per pound, was expensive. The company cut costs by dealing directly with producers, employing its own agent in China (a woman), and purchasing its own merchant ship, the Madam Demorest (captained, on its maiden voyage in 1872, by Fred Gorham, King’s brother-in-law). But company’s initial strong sales weakened and the company eventually closed.

Susan King told a reporter in 1870 “If women can govern empires, as they do in China and England in our day, and did in Spain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, in the olden times, they ought to have enough talent to sell a pound of tea.” She was right, of course.

Sources
Newspapers
Daily Alta California, 6 November 1870, 9 Nov. 1872, via California Digital Newspaper Collection
Boston Daily Globe, 28 June 1885, via ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Troy (NY) Daily Times (reprint of Boston Post article), 17 April 1872, via fultonhistory.com
New York Tribune, 18 Aug. 1871, 12 and 14 October 1871, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from the Library of Congress
Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Jan. 1873, via National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper db
Omaha Bee, 27 Feb. 1873, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
New York Sun, 11 June 1870, via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Cleveland Daily Herald, 14 May 1872, via Gale Cengage 19^th Century US Newspapers

Harper’s Bazaar, 23 March 1873, via ProQuest American Periodicals
Demorest’s Monthly Magazine, Sept. 1870, via Google Books

US Census records for 1870 and 1880, via Ancestry.com
Passenger List of the bark Adelaide Carleton, 18 Aug. 1871, via Ancestry.com

Muriel Siebert Makes the NYSE Co-Ed

by Mary Goljenboom

Although there is no rule against them, the floor of the Exchange has been better protected against women members than that of Congress.

That’s Eunice Fuller Barnard’s opinion of opportunities for women at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) from her 1929 article “Ladies of the Ticker.” She goes on to describe what seems to be an impossible barrier to women members.

A woman . . . could not just buy a seat. As in any club, she would have to be admitted by vote of the membership committee. And it seems doubtful whether either she or they yet desire her presence . . . .

That barrier worked for almost forty more years. During that time at least one woman was said to have tried to buy a seat. Her bid was ignored. But in 1967 the barrier was finally broken. Muriel “Mickie” Siebert finally had all the necessary requirements to purchase an NYSE seat: desire, established ability and experience, money, and, most importantly, support of two members.

In her autobiography, Changing the Rules, Siebert told how she made the New York Stock Exchange co-ed.

“It took me six months to summon up the nerve to apply.” During that time she considered the risks and rewards, and compared the levels of potential aggravation to satisfaction. “It’s hard to imagine that any man would have been troubled by similar doubts and concerns, but, realistically, I had to consider what I was risking” she said. She was already a very successful securities analyst with a strong client list of institutional investors to whom she provided both research and suggestions about securities purchases and sales.

Siebert, like all other applicants, put up twenty per cent of the seat’s purchase price as a deposit and had arranged financing (using stocks she owned as collateral) for the remainder; found two NYSE members to sponsor her (a difficult task); underwent a background check by a detective agency; and was interviewed by the admissions committee. Parts of Siebert’s application process were not standard. She was required to present a letter from her bank stating that it was prepared to loan Siebert the necessary funds to complete the purchase of the seat. One of her sponsors was asked what he knew about Siebert’s private life. During the admissions committee interview, Siebert reported seeing the committee’s relief upon learning that she would not be working on the NYSE floor.

It was evident that the NYSE did not wish to admit Siebert to the “club,” and it did what it could to dissuade her from completing the process. But the exchange could not ignore her application (as it did with at least one earlier female candidate) and, because of her strong qualifications, it could not afford to vote her down. Why? Because members knew that Siebert would sue and the law was on her side. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed sex-based discrimination, had taken effect in 1964.

Whether or not the majority of members of the New York Stock Exchange desired the presence of a female colleague, they got one on December 28, 1967.

Siebert died in August 2013. In her life, she changed rules and made it easier for women to rise in their chosen professions.

Sources
Changing the Rules by Muriel Siebert and Aimee Lee Ball

“Ladies of the Ticker” by Eunice Fuller Barnard. The North American Review, Vol. 227, No. 4 (Apr. 1929), pp. 405-410, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25110719

Young-Quinlan Reflections

by Mary Goljenboom

Finding pieces of women’s business history sometimes requires that you look up.

For instance, in downtown Minneapolis, if you stand on the Nicollet Mall outside the Target store and look across the street, you’ll see the historic Young-Quinlan Building. Look up above the third floor windows and you will see “Elizabeth C. Quinlan”, the name of the businesswoman who built both the building and the business that was housed in it.

exterior of the Young Quinlan Bldg, Minneapolis,

Young-Quinlan Company opened its doors in March 1895 as Fred D. Young & Company, selling women’s clothing. Fred Young had left his position as manager and buyer for the cloak department of another popular Minneapolis store to start his own business. Elizabeth Quinlan joined Young in his new venture. She was well-known to customers, judging by Young’s mention her in pre-opening publicity and advertising. In 1903 her name was added to the business.

Young and Quinlan’s great innovation was to stock their shop with high quality, ready-to-wear clothing at a time when most clothing was made individually by dressmakers. The team also benefited from the growing personal wealth and affluence created by burgeoning Minneapolis and St. Paul businesses such as Pillsbury, General Mills, and the Northern Pacific Railroad. To attract upper-income customers, the Young & Co.’s opening day ad announced “the finest line of imported and domestic cloaks, mantles, suits, separate skirts, and waists ever seen” in Minneapolis. According to Elizabeth Quinlan, they sold out most of their merchandise on their first day. And they never strayed from stocking the finest.

By the time the Young-Quinlan Building was opened in 1926, Elizabeth Quinlan had been with the company for more than thirty years. She had been sole owner and president since the death of Fred Young in 1911. The business grew significantly so that by the 1920s, Quinlan saw its need for more space. She purchased the land at Nicollet Avenue and Ninth Street South for $1.25 million; the $1.25 million she needed to erect the building was financed by issuing bonds (which sold quickly because her credit was so good). The elegant new Young-Quinlan building was filled with walnut fixtures, stairs, cathedral windows as well as modern conveniences like a 250-car parking garage and elevators. It reflected the success and taste of Elizabeth C. Quinlan, who put her name on the Nicollet facade, above the third floor windows.

Quinlan sold Young-Quinlan Company in 1945, and it lasted until 1985. The landmark Young-Quinlan Building today prominently houses J.B. Hudson jewelers. Reflected in the glass door into Hudson’s, you can catch Target’s bulls-eye logo. Young-Quinlan’s merchandising innovation of providing women with ready-to-wear clothing eventually revolutionized the apparel industry and led to the rise of mass merchandisers like Target. It’s a glimpse of the future reflected from the past.

Y-Q Target bullseye

Mildred King Archibald

by Mary Goljenboom

Over time, the stories that make up our history sometimes change. Usually they are modified to be simple and concise. Often in business history this means that women’s roles are diminished or ignored entirely. One example: Mildred King Archibald of Fannie May Candies.

A quick internet search lists the founders of Fannie May Candies as “H. Teller Archibald and his wife, Mildred.” Mr. Archibald is always listed first. We are left with the impression that he was the primary force in starting the business and that his wife’s role was secondary. She helped, taking on responsibilities under his management and guidance. But in a 1928 interview in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Mrs. Archibald tells the story in a slightly different way:

We opened our first shop on La Salle Street . . . with a small amount of capital and in a small way. Our kitchens were in the back room of the shop. Mr. Archibald continued his real estate business, with the shop only as a side line. But the business grew. One shop seemed to lead to another and almost before we knew it we had a chain store system.

While her husband worked primarily in his real estate business, Mildred Archibald “was willing to work night and day” to see the candy shop succeed. And succeed it did. When the first Fannie May shop opened in 1920, the business was one of about two hundred candy or confectionary manufacturers in Chicago. Even with all that competition, three years later Fannie May Candies had ten shops. While it is unclear when Teller Archibald joined the business full-time, it is clear that Mildred’s full-time efforts got the business up and running successfully.

Interestingly, later in the interview she says “But please don’t think that I am entirely responsible for the success of this business. I should much rather give the credit to my husband, who is president of the firm, and my brother, who is manager of the kitchens.”

Modesty? Perhaps. Social convention? Maybe. Within nine months of the published interview, the Archibalds’ marriage was over. Newspaper reports say that part of the strife came from differences of opinion on the business. The divorces (there were two: one in Florida and one in Illinois) were acrimonious; when all was finally settled, Mildred received $1 million (about $13 million today), in part to repay the money she invested in starting up Fannie May Candies. Teller kept the business. Thus, when the story of the founding of Fanny May is told, his name is always listed first.

Sources
Chicago Daily Tribune, February 19, 1928