Law and Gender Commons^™

Corporate Governance And The Feminization Of Capital, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

At the start of the twentieth century, women made up a small proportion of shareholders in American publicly traded companies. By 1956, women were the majority of individual shareholders. Although this change in shareholder gender demographics happened gradually, it was evident early in the century: Before the 1929 stock market crash, women shareholders had come to outnumber men at some of America’s largest and most influential corporations, including AT&T, General Electric, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. This Article synthesizes information from a range of historical sources to reveal an overlooked narrative of corporate history—the feminization of capital, or the transformation of …