12/08/2025
She arrived in New York with $500 and a used Studebaker.
No degree. No connections. No chance—or so everyone thought.
It was 1954. Muriel Siebert was 22 years old. She'd left college when her father got sick. The family couldn't afford both tuition and medical bills.
When she applied for her first Wall Street job, she had a problem: her name.
Muriel.
Firms saw a woman's name and never called back. So she changed her resume to read M.F. Siebert.
The phone started ringing.
Bache & Company hired her for $65 a week. They gave her the industries nobody wanted: airlines, movies, entertainment. Railroads were king back then. Who cared about airplanes?
Muriel did.
She saw what others missed. Commercial jets were coming. Aviation would transform everything.
She told her clients to buy Boeing.
She was right.
By 1965, she was making $250,000 a year. But her male colleagues doing identical work? They earned up to twice as much.
A friend gave her advice: "Buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Work for yourself."
She laughed.
Then she stopped laughing.
To buy a seat, she needed a sponsor. She asked one man. He said no. Then another. No. Then another.
Nine men refused her.
The tenth finally said yes.
But the NYSE wasn't finished.
They invented a new rule—one that had never existed in 175 years. She would need a bank to guarantee $300,000 of the $445,000 seat price.
No man had ever faced this requirement.
The banks wouldn't commit without NYSE approval. The NYSE wouldn't approve without a bank letter.
A perfect trap. Built just for her.
For two years, she fought.
Then Chase Manhattan broke ranks. They gave her the loan.
On December 28, 1967, Muriel Siebert walked onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
She joined 1,365 men.
She would remain the only woman for the next ten years.
The indignities never stopped. At the Union League Club, she arrived for a business lunch. They refused to let her use the elevator. She had to walk through the kitchen and climb the back stairs.
Her male colleagues were furious. When the club refused again—even with them vouching for her—every one of them walked down those stairs and through that kitchen with her.
And the women's bathroom on the seventh floor—where all the real deals happened?
It didn't exist.
Twenty years after she joined, there was still no restroom for her near the luncheon club.
So she told the chairman: either install one by year's end, or she would have a portable toilet delivered to the trading floor.
They built the bathroom.
In 1977, the Governor made her Superintendent of Banking for New York State. First woman ever. She oversaw $500 billion in assets during one of the most turbulent financial eras in American history.
Not a single New York bank failed on her watch.
And that bank that had refused to guarantee her loan years before?
"I regulated the bank that wouldn't write the letter," she said.
She never married. Her constant companion was a longhaired Chihuahua named Monster Girl—a tiny creature, she liked to say, that couldn't be cowed by the big dogs.
Just like her owner.
When people asked about money, she had one answer:
"Money represents power to men. But to me it represents freedom."
Freedom to walk through the front door. Freedom to ride the elevator. Freedom to use the bathroom.
Freedom she fought for every single day.
When she died in 2013 at 84, the New York Stock Exchange named a room after her. Siebert Hall. The first time they had ever named any room after any individual.
Someone once asked Muriel Siebert how she accomplished everything she did.
"When I see a challenge," she said, "I put my head down and charge."
She never stopped charging.
~Old Photo Club
