When Research Leads the Story
Research is the foundation on which all historical fiction novels are built, but sometimes the story guides the research and, as I discovered while writing my second novel, The Trade Off, sometimes it’s the other way around. When I first came up with the idea to write a novel about the complex morality of wealth, set in the roaring ‘20s, I thought my protagonist might be a man. I even had a historical figure in mind to loosely base him on: Jesse Livermore, a famous stock operator who notably shorted the great crash and made nearly $100 million dollars.
As I began my research about Livermore, I soon learned that by the 1920s he was the archetype of a Wall Street bad guy, part of the cadre of wealthy insiders who colluded to move the market in the direction they wanted it to go, usually at the expense of the average investor. This wasn’t my hero. I wanted an investor the reader could root for, someone who challenged the idea that rich equaled bad and poor equaled good. I like to write about strong women taking their place in a man’s world so I made my protagonist a woman: Bea Abramowitz.
Bea is an underdog, a young Jewish woman with a gift for numbers, who wants to be a stockbroker. I knew creating her path would be hard, but I didn’t think it was that unusual for a woman to be investing on Wall Street in the ‘20s. After all, this was a liberated moment in women’s history with the suffragists finally succeeding in getting women the vote and flappers living independent lives.
This was also the first “egalitarian” moment in the stock market. The whole country had gone stock crazy and more average American people were investing than ever, particularly in the years leading up to the crash. So, while I knew it might not be typical for an “everywoman” to succeed on Wall Street, I didn’t think it would be nearly impossible. Turns out I was wrong.
I love research. The puzzle of asking a question different ways to find the answer you need. The joy of discovering facts and people you never might have considered. But researching the early days of women in banking was challenging. I only found three books on the topic, one of which was published in 1959 and was more the history of a specific women’s banking association than a survey of the landscape. I was able to connect with archivists at some of Wall Street’s institutions, but the information they were allowed to give me was limited. It turns out there was very little about women in banking, because it was such an anomaly.
Fortunately, I reached out to a professor at William Paterson University named George Robb, author of one of the three books I had found: Ladies of the Ticker. What I learned from him dramatically changed Bea’s arc and the direction of the story overall. Here are some of the most surprising things I learned and how they influenced The Trade Off:
1. Women in banking were mostly college educated, well-connected socialites.
With the economy booming, banks were desperate for bodies…as long as they were male. Men on Wall Street could come from any walk of life and didn’t need a college degree to get hired at a bank. Women, on the other hand, were evaluated first for their social standing and second for their academic credentials.
Robb explained that it would be common for a male banker to be less educated and have less social status than his secretary. This was a light bulb for me: Bea could have a twin brother who would be able to get the job she wanted, simply because he was a man. And that would be her back door into being a stockbroker.
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2. While many prominent bankers were Jewish, very few Jewish women were hired for any position on Wall Street.
In retrospect, it seems naïve, but I hadn’t considered how much antisemitism, even among Jews, would have existed in the era. Some of the most famous banks (Kohn Loeb, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Salomon Brothers) were founded and run by Jewish men; but the typical female bank employee was more likely to be able to trace her lineage back to the Mayflower than to the shtetl.
In fact, when I casually mentioned to Robb that Bea was Jewish, he immediately said “Oh now that would be even more unusual; then she would be an outsider in two ways.”
Even before the recent uptick in antisemitism in our world I wanted to capture this idea that Bea wouldn’t be accepted on Wall Street—even by the other women—because she was Jewish. This subtle bit of information dramatically altered the emphasis I placed on Bea’s background as a Jew, and the amount I focused on the distinct culture of Judaism; it became the cornerstone of her struggle.
3. Women on Wall Street in this era didn’t have front office jobs. Period.
Robb suggested the opening scene in my novel in which Bea is standing on Broad Street looking around and seeing loads of women, but then enters the bank and sees virtually none. This is because women were relegated to jobs behind doors or in back offices. The exception was the Women’s Departments, essentially separate banks within the bank that catered entirely to wealthy female clientele, and were therefore staffed by wealthy women. Some of the Women’s Departments were even in alternate locations from the main institution. This information is why Bea ended up where she did, in the wire room, a sliver of the bank that I learned did hire women for some clerical functions.
Thanks to my research and the help of George Robb, the surprising realties of Wall Street as a place for women in the ‘20s shaped Bea’s journey in The Trade Off. It was one thing for a wealthy woman to “gamble” with her allowance in a banking environment created just for her and staffed by people just like her; it was entirely different for a poor immigrant to actively participate in the market the way Bea wanted to.
Perhaps I should have been less surprised; women couldn’t take out their own lines of credit until the mid 1970s and are still considered diversity hires at today’s investment banks. But I hadn’t expected to find such constraints. Once I did, that became the core of the story and one of the most important pieces of the history of the era that I wanted to share with readers.
As an author of historical fiction, one of my greatest hopes is to accurately capture the spirit of the time, to offer the reader a window into another world that makes them feel like they lived it. The way we do that is through careful research. I sent George an early copy of The Trade Off when it was completed, and his feedback meant more to me than any review ever could: “I think you did a great job of evoking the atmosphere of Wall St. in the 1920s and conveying the restrictive lives of women. The novel would make a great film or TV series!”
Check out Samantha Greene Woodruff’s The Trade Off here:
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