Skirts

The late John Pierpont Morgan, conservative, resisted that invasion which came on the heels of the invention of the typewriter and the telephone--the invasion of the businesswoman. But now some 200,000 stenographinae are to be found at work in lower Manhattan. Women had quick fingers, quicker wits. They survived the expensively unfit male bookkeeper, secretary, clerk. Economy forced a new attitude. Ladies turn up at nine a-mornings today at Morgan's itself.

Latterly great bond houses have trained up a generation of college bond saleswomen, who are always called "salesmen," who are always shouted at by the boss across a field of desks by their last names, and who smoke up the sales rooms. Seventeen ladies are actually partners in Stock Exchange houses. Three of them have applied to the Exchange authorities for admission to membership. "Too much jostling on the floor," the 15 gentlemen of the Committee on Admissions have always sternly replied. "No worse than subways or night-clubs," is the reply of the eager ladies.

Last week another woman, name of Peggy Cleary, applied for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Apparently she has the two major qualifications for admission to the most expensive and least exclusive club in the world: $375,000, and that firmness of jaw possessed by exquisite, merciless croupiers who rake chips on Monte Carlo's greens. Miss Peggy Cleary's training has been sound. She was and is a star customer's woman.* Last week 1,100 brokers at 20 posts applauded Miss Cleary's audacity. Next week 1,099 members may have a chance to "haze" a pretty young stockbroker in skirts.f For Miss Cleary is pretty. Last week she saw screen star Nita Naldi and a prize beauty off for Europe on the midnight S. S. Paris. Flashlight men found her more smartly dressed than the former, prettier than the latter. Under the hard daylight of Watson & White's uptown stockbrokerage office in the Hotel Berkeley, she is thought still prettier.

*A customer's man (or woman) is the liaison officer between the customer and the Stock Exchange floor. His function is to tip, advise, caution, stimulate, warn customers, in other words to provoke trading and "produce" commissions.

-f New members are "hazed" and "razzed" cruelly. Favorite tortures are to sell them stocks which do not exist, deliver them bogus orders from telephone booths, induce them to smoke ($15 fine).