Wall Street's toughest octogenarian woman

Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, talks about risk-taking, feminism, and ethics in finance.

By David A. Kaplan

Muriel Siebert in 2011.

FORTUNE -- Muriel "Mickie" Siebert has been known as the "First Lady of Wall Street" for almost two generations. She was the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, paying nearly half a million dollars in 1967 for the privilege. (She says she borrowed the majority of it, from Chase Manhattan, after David Rockefeller personally approved the loan.) 

At the time, there were 1,365 other members, all men. SKIRT INVADES EXCHANGE, proclaimed a headline in a Montana newspaper. One male securities analyst explained to a Baltimore journalist that "women spend an awful lot of time trying to manage their husbands, so they have a natural advantage" in "picking good investments." On its front page, the New York Times, quoting unnamed friends of hers, described Siebert as "bubbly and ebullient and fortyish."

Despite such inane commentary in the press, she thrived, both in terms of professional reputation and financial success. Ever since -- through business peaks and valleys, entrepreneurial adventures and philanthropic efforts, public service and personal challenges -- Siebert has been seen as a crusader. Some women have considered her a role model; others, irrespective of gender, have simply viewed her a prescient and colorful character of the financial world. She knows her stocks and she knows how to read a financial statement, but she especially likes to boast that she learned to use four-letter words when dealing with traders -- and has never lost the knack.

Born and raised in Cleveland, the 23-year-old Siebert came East in 1954 in her old Studebaker, with no college degree, $500 in her pocket, and only the dream of a life on the Street. As a teenager, she had visited the NYSE (NYX) with her family and, looking down from the balcony from the Exchange, she was instantly taken—perhaps not unlike a boy of the time who first cast eyes down upon Yankee Stadium from the bleachers. After being turned down by Merrill Lynch because she hadn't graduated from college, she fibbed that she had a degree. Thus she was able to launch her career as a $65-a-week trainee in the research department at the brokerage firm Bache & Co., eventually specializing in the airlines and aerospace industries. Later on, she became a partner two other securities firms, Finkle & Co. and Brimberg & Co. For five years, beginning in 1977, she served as superintendent of banking for New York State -- the first woman to hold the job, which she calls "S.O.B."; a lifelong self-described bleeding-heart Republican," she was appointed by a Democrat, then Gov. Hugh Carey. She also had a failed run in a G.O.P. primary in New York State for the U.S. Senate in 1982.

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