PBA Galleries

22pp. + front and rear covers. 30.5x22.5 cm (12x9").

Printer's mock-up, with many empty spaces for still-unwritten articles, of a 1914 projected magazine - which was never published. Seven years before women won the right to vote in the United States, this proposed magazine was to advise American women on investing in the Stock Exchange. Though the rear cover quotes J.P. Morgan on the importance of women investors and cites the congressional estimate of a million women owning corporate stocks, no woman (except the notorious Victoria Woodhull) had yet made a mark on Wall Street, either as broker or investor. The eccentric "Hetty" Green, richest woman in the country, later called the "Witch of Wall Street", was still unknown to the public. And the first book primers aimed at women investors were 15 years away. Neither the names of the editors or publishers appear in this copy. From the editorial texts and headlines (The Stock Exchange Boycotts Women; What has Suffrage Done for Business?) which appear in this mock-up, the magazine was to be decidedly Feminist: The lead article, Dollars and Sense, was to have been written by Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House, feminist founder of the American social work movement. And the venture probably had the support of some wealthy people. The planned magazine had offices at 20 Broad Street (a building now owned by the New York Stock Exchange) and one projected contributor was Mrs. Russell Sage, fabulously wealthy widow of a skinflint financier who devoted much of her fortune to improving social and living conditions for the poor. But for all its illustrious endorsements, the magazine apparently never got off the ground. The title is unknown to bibliographers of both financial history and early feminist periodicals. We could locate no copy in any institutional collection in the United States.