BANKING: The Women

“Women from the Stone Age to the Mink Age are acutely conscious of money. Most of their waking hours are spent in thinking about it, in planning how they can use it so that it will purchase the most and still leave them a little something for the savings bank … or the sugar jar on the pantry shelf.”

Thus spoke Mrs. Georgia Neese Clark, 49, the first woman Treasurer of the U.S. to an audience of 105 women in San Francisco’s ornate Fairmont Hotel last week.

But no one in Mrs. Clark’s audience would dream of putting money in a sugar jar. The women were delegates to the 27th annual convention of the Association of Bank Women, a good cross section of the 5,636 women bank executives† in the U.S.

Women got their foot in banking’s door during World War I, when many bank officers were called to military services. They became firmly established during World War II. Today the Association of Bank Women has members in 43 states and the Territory of Hawaii.

After a round of luncheons, a fashion show and sightseeing, the bankers reelected Mrs. Bernice D. Parks, 45, president. Mrs. Parks started in as a $110-a-month secretary, is now assistant treasurer of Boston’s Provident Institution for Savings, one of the oldest mutual savings banks in the country. She thinks that women are right at home in banking. After all, she says: “Seventy percent of the wealth of this country is in the hands of women.”

Not many A.B.W. members work for such big-time institutions. Most come from small towns like the A.B.W.’s most prominent ex-member, U.S. Treasurer Clark, once president of a bank in Richland, Kans. (pop. 200).

Though women have added a few feminine frills to the countinghouse, complete acceptance of women in the fusty man-world of banking is a long way off. (Even the San Francisco newspapers could not quite accept them; they covered A.B.W.’s doings on the society pages.) Sighed one A.B.W.-delegate last week: “They’re learning to respect us—but they still snicker behind our backs.”

† Ten percent of all bank executive jobs—and 60% of all bank jobs high & low—are held by women. Among the executives are 19 board chairmen, 117 presidents, 300 vice presidents.