"From Silent Partner to 'Ideal Jewish Mother': Gender, Jewishness and the Changing Face of Wall Street"

In its profile of Goldman Sachs; leading analyst, Abby Joseph Cohen, Bloomberg News noted how she regularly ‘moved markets’ through her television interviews and her writings. But the profile gave the final words to one of her protégés, who claimed her true gift was that “she uses her brainpower to be helpful to others… She’s the ideal Jewish mother.” By deploying such a stereotype, this profile highlights how her gender and Jewishness intersected to shape the real and imagined lives of Jewish female leaders in America’s financial sector. This paper will interrogate how gender and religion dovetailed, intersected and shaped the field of investment banking, a field that has long been associated with Jews, but rarely with women. This paper places Cohen in a long history of women in investment banking. Indeed, firms began as private family partnerships in the late nineteenth century, where women and their marital alliances made them central silent partners to the investment banking business. Starting in the 1960s, these firms shifted away from familial networks. Recent scholarship in banking history that looks at the few women who rose to leadership positions like Cohen rarely assesses how they were predominately Jewish. Did Jewishness help women succeed in this sector of the economy? By looking at a few case studies, this paper follows Francesca Trivellato’s clarion call for “the greater inclusion of women and gender in Jewish economic history” as a way to think anew about how to “expand the sources, perspectives, and methodologies that inform” our study of American banking.