The Leibniz Institute SAFE, the Institute for Banking and Financial History (IBF), the House of Finance, and the Women in Economic History (WIEH) organize and cordially invite you to attend a lunch talk in the context of the Goethe University Visiting Professorship of Financial History – endowed by Metzler Bank and the Friedrich Flick Förderungsstiftung – currently held by Eugene N. White (Rutgers University) on
Women Bankers in Nineteenth Century America?
Eugene N. White, 7th Goethe University Visiting Professor of Financial History and
Distinguished Professor of Economics at Rutgers University
Moderator: PD Dr. Friederike Sattler, member of Women in Economic History
to be held in hybrid format on 30 June 2023, 12:00 - 13:30
Room HoF E.01, House of Finance and online
It has become common in financial histories to refer to nineteenth century bankers with he/she pronouns. But rare is a woman that is identified as a banker in the literature. Is this because women bankers have been overlooked or are these 20th and 21st century pronouns of respect covering up the exclusionary misogyny of 19th century American finance? Eugene White will present the results of his paper which finds that only a handful of women managed banks and if they were employed it was usually in menial positions. But, they accounted for a third of the national bank shareholders, owning a quarter of the stock. Women only had a slightly larger presence on the frontier and at the OCC (the federal regulatory agency), which slowly promoted them to more senior positions.
