March is Women’s History Month in the US, and this year we’re going to take a moment to look at some of the women who have made American money history. We’ll talk about some of the most obvious characters like the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Treasury and the first woman to own an American bank.
But money history isn’t always about these institutionalized positions — especially when we’re talking about women. Whether they faced discrimination because of their gender or other aspects of their identity, some of these women made American financial history not by occupying traditional seats of power — but by subverting oppressive financial systems through methods like mutual aid or unabashed self-advocacy.
And we love to see it.
The very first woman to appear on American paper currency was none other than Pocahontas. The imagery was political, depicting the leader kneeling as she is baptized into Christianity. But nonetheless, her appearance on the back of the $20 bill in 1865 was a first.
Whether or not Abigail Adams was the first actual woman investor in America isn’t entirely possible to prove. But she is often cited as the first woman investor of record. In addition to making investments with her family’s money, she ran the farm and the family finances while her husband was off diplotmatting both before and after the birth of the country.
America’s early economy was built on the unpaid labor of enslaved human beings. In this context, helping enslaved people escape to freedom was so much more than a protest against an immoral economic system — it was an assertion of human rights that had liberating, life-changing impacts on individuals and communities. Perhaps no one helped more people escape from slavers than Harriet Tubman, who led hundreds to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
Hetty Green came from whaling money. She didn’t just grow up around mad cash — she paid attention. Sometimes feeling forced into the profession of money management, she nonetheless became an expert in fields like real estate, railroads, bookkeeping, and — most notoriously — timing the stock market.
Green was also ridiculously frugal, while the man she married was not. At all. She took the initiative of insisting on a prenup to protect her own assets, which was a big deal for the day and age. She also got bad press for some legal dealings in a family estate, with accusations of forgery circling around many of her business agreements.
It’s hard to tell how much of the negative portions of the story are valid. She may well have been everything the stories belie. But when you label someone as the ‘witch’ of Wall Street, it’s difficult to discern how much is accurate vs. how much was the social admonition of a woman asserting economic power in a time when it was unusual to do so.
Hetty Green, image via Wiki Commons
Victoria Woodhull did not come from money, but that didn’t stop her from impacting American culture — especially in the realm of finance. As a journalist, she was responsible for introducing American audiences to the work of Karl Marx and his economic theories. She was also a suffragist, an advocate for divorce for abused women, and the first woman to run for president of the United States. On top of it all, she and her sister Tennessee Clafin became the first woman stockbrokers in the US when they opened their brokerage firm in 1870.
Thocmetony — which means Shell Flower — was also known as Sarah Winnemucca. She was Pauite, and her people were forcibly removed from their homelands to a reservation. The violence of this removal wasn’t just physical — it was also economic. Thocmetony passionately voiced these realities to white audiences, including the president. Her economic arguments, rooted in human rights, advocated for a return of lands in the name of economic prosperity in addition to human dignity.
As influential as she was, she was ultimately not heeded by the people in power. She was the first American Indian woman to become a published author, and her works are still cited in modern research around contemporary laws, such as the Violence Against Women Act.
TIP: If you want to learn more about these economic themes, check out Stephanie Cote’s ongoing work at the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Maggie Lena Walker was the first woman to charter a bank in the United States. St. Luke Penny Savings Bank encouraged economic power in the African-American community, particularly in the Jim Crow South. While other banks collapsed during and leading up to the Great Depression, St. Luke Penny Savings survived through mergers with other Black-owned banks, becoming Consolidated Bank and Trust.
Consolidated Bank and Trust remained Black-owned until 2005. Today, it has been absorbed into Adams National Bank — a homage to the Adams family legacy, though not directly founded by Abigail Adams herself (another woman on our list). In addition to her position in banking, Walker was also a leader in local NAACP and NACW organizations.
Maggie L. Walker, image via Wiki Commons
Madam C.J. Walker, nee Sarah Breedlove, was the daughter of sharecroppers who worked on the same land where they were formerly enslaved before the Civil War. Through her own hard work and smart business moves, she built a haircare line and production facilities that made her America’s first woman self-made millionaire.
Madam Walker’s was an international, socially responsible company that encouraged political activism. Madam C.J. Walker herself was known to be a contributor of both her time and money to efforts such as the NACW and the NAACP.
Social (and, with it, economic) change doesn’t just happen. It requires coordination and mutual aid. Mutual aid is different from charity in that it doesn’t require its beneficiaries to prove themselves “worthy” and is more focused on empowering community members when other social systems fall short — whether through economic means or the provision of other resources.
Such was the case for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was a central part of the Civil Rights Movement. In order for people to stop riding buses and take other social actions that would lead to change, there needed to be a community effort towards financing alternative means of transportation and funding the overall well-being of boycott participants. Sometimes this meant cab drivers reducing their fares. Sometimes this meant community money being pooled to pay for transport into and around Montgomery.
The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) handled the coordination of these efforts. The financial secretary of the MIA was a woman: Erna Dungee. Dungee was the only officer of the MIA who was a woman. She was also a member of the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery, which had been laying the groundwork for the boycott for years prior to the event’s initiation in 1955.
In America, there are banks, and then there are credit unions. Banks serve shareholders, whereas credit unions serve the members who actually hold deposit accounts. Usually, membership eligibility is relegated to people in a set, local community. The first credit union in America opened in 1909, with the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) being founded in 1934 during the Great Depression.
CUNA has four great heroes and half of them were women: Dora Maxwell and Louise Herring.
Maxwell was in the room where it happened, attending the conference that established CUNA in 1934. She was also a passionate organizer, helping over 120 credit unions get off the ground across the country. Her work involved service and support for lower-income credit union members in particular.
Louise Herring was a little younger but no less passionate. Her pet interest was reforming predatory banking and lending practices, and over the course of her life, she helped organize 500 credit unions across the U.S.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a powerful activist from Mississippi, and one of her most prominent projects was an exercise in mutual aid. She called out the systemic racism that was keeping Black people unemployed and starving in her state in the 1960s. To address it, she bought some land and started the Freedom Farm Cooperative. This co-op provided food — including livestock — to anyone who asked, in addition to providing jobs and housing for the local community.
Ever wonder why America offers a free breakfast program in public schools? The Black Panthers started the robust programming in 1968. The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, attempted to shut the free breakfast program down. Congress eventually adopted the Black Panther model in all public schools in 1975.
The success of the free breakfast program can be largely attributed to the mutual aid effort’s original organizer: Ruth Beckford-Smith. She took the program from an idea to serving 135 low-income children in Oakland within a single week. Beckford-Smith made the program so successful that it was rapidly adopted by chapters all over the country.
Again, economic contributions to America don’t have to be measured by dollars and cents. Sometimes you can measure them by a healthy breakfast served to children whose parents may or may not have the economic means to provide that sustenance themselves. Well-fed children are more likely to perform well in school, which gives them a better shot of improving their economic outcomes (and therefore obtaining that elusive American Dream) over the course of their lives.
Mickie Siebert’s college education was interrupted by her father’s cancer diagnosis. She didn’t tell that to the company on Wall Street when she applied for a job as a researcher, though. She lied and said she had a college degree.
She was pretty great at the job but was persistently frustrated by the gender pay gap. Determined to make as much as the men who were her peers, she lobbied both banks and the stock exchange for years to secure a seat on the NYSE — and she got it, making history as the first woman to hold a seat at the organization in its history.
Her financial prowess eventually led to other achievements, like becoming the first woman to serve as New York State’s superintendent of banking and getting women’s bathrooms put on the seventh floor of the NYSE. (No joke — there was just no place for women to go to the bathroom before that!)
Muriel Siebert, image via Wiki Commons
Dolores Huerta has impacted everything from labor organizing to Chicano civil rights to the food on Americans’ dinner tables. Her entry into the field of organizing for social and economic improvements for America’s Hispanic population began when she was working as a school teacher in the 1950s. She noticed many of the children of agricultural workers were coming to school hungry.
Huerta didn’t just notice this alarming socioeconomic trend — she took action to change it. Serving as the leader of many political organizations, the role she receives the most acclaim for is as one of the founders of United Farmworkers of America — which organized agricultural workers to successfully advocate and boycott for the right to unionize, secure better working conditions, and even enact policies that led to safer food through the elimination of harmful pesticides.
You’re not going to believe this, but it wasn’t until 2009 that a woman won a Nobel Prize in the field of Economic Sciences. That woman was Elinor Ostrom, a UCLA grad working at Indiana University, Bloomington. The research that earned her the coveted prize proved that — despite common economic assumptions — when people share natural resources with each other as a community, they don’t tend to exploit them for their own personal gain over their neighbors. Instead, what we tend to see in these social structures around common resources is that the group establishes rules of use and care for the collective good. And then the group actually follows them.
Ultimately, what this research proved was that individual humans within communities are not inherently selfish. If acknowledged in policy, this revelation could have big impacts on future social and economic systems.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was volunteering her services as a lawyer to the ACLU in the early 1970s. Specifically, she headed up the Women’s Rights Project. This was a series of lawsuits she argued in front of the Supreme Court that altered gender discrimination in the U.S. for the benefit of both women and men.
The biggest win to note in a financial context this Women’s History Month is the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). The ECOA meant that you could no longer deny a woman credit on the basis of gender or require a male cosigner on a credit application. This was a big deal as America wasn’t always as reliant on credit as it is today. RBG’s arguments came at a time when credit was first becoming a larger part of navigating daily life.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, image via Wiki Commons
Marsha P. Johnson might not be the first person that comes to mind when you think of personal finance heroes. She was on the front lines at Stonewall and was a public-facing leader for much of her life as a self-advocate and an advocate for the queer community. She wasn’t rich and as a result, was on welfare.
Welfare stigma in the United States rose sharply when Black women began to effectively gain access to it in the 1960s. Johnson faced these discriminatory stereotypes and additional discrimination as a gay drag queen. When a journalist asked her how she thought her activism would affect her job, Johnson responded,
“Darling, I don’t have a job. I’m on welfare. I have no intention of getting a job as long as this country discriminates against homosexuals.”
While welfare stigma still exists, Johnson’s example is a powerful one that reminds America that there is no shame in getting assistance — especially when you need that assistance because the social contract is broken. Together with fellow activist Sylvia Rivera, Johnson also founded the group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which provided housing as a form of mutual aid to transgender youth, many of whom had trouble securing traditional employment due to transphobia in the employment sector.
The United States has not consistently upheld its treaties and commitments to Native peoples throughout its nearly 250-year history, and Elouise Campbell — or Yellow Bird Woman — successfully called this behavior out. The Blackfoot leader held many organizations to account over the years, including the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Department of the Interior, which mismanaged reservation funds and the trusts of individual Native Americans.
Cobell served as the Treasurer for the Blackfoot Nation in her youth and ultimately opened the first Native-owned bank when no other bank would open a branch on the reservation.
Not only was Janet Yellen the first person to head the Federal Reserve, but she was also the first woman to be Treasury Secretary. To top it all off, she is the first person — regardless of gender — to serve as the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, the Federal Reserve, and the Secretary of the Treasury. These are commonly thought of as the three most prominent positions for an economist in the United States, and hitting all three marks is a big deal over the course of a single career.
Rosemary McFadden became the first woman president of an American exchange in 1984 when she took over NYMEX. In this position, she worked a lot with energy markets and commodities. NYMEX had seen 50% gains during each of the three years prior to her appointment. Under her leadership, that growth bumped up to 70% per year.
Brynne Conroy is an award-winning personal finance writer, creator of the popular women’s finance site, Femme Frugality, and author of The Feminist Financial Handbook, which was an Amazon #1 New Release across multiple categories including Poverty and LGBTQ Demographic Studies. Her work has been cited in academic texts, and she’s spoken at venues such as Vanderbilt University, the Financial Planning Association and the 529 Conference. Here at PocketSmith, Brynne covers personal finance within American financial systems.
