Wilma soss biography
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When Wilma Porter Weissman Soss () declared that “Stockholders have Civil Rights, Too,” she sought a catchy tagline for the “Economic Bill of Rights” promulgated by the Federation of Women Shareholders in American Business (FOWSAB), a financial literacy and stockholder advocacy nonprofit she formed in [1]
Soss wanted the tagline, which she emblazoned on a button that she wore to annual stockholder meetings in the s, to be provocative but also empirically rooted in the lived experience of America’s many minority investors. Soss was the first to empirically demonstrate, in an article for Forbes published in December , that most stockholders were women, not men or institutions. Despite their numerical superiority among stockholders, Soss (and B.C. Forbes) lamented, women held almost no board seats and were rarely seen, let alone heard, at annual stockholder meetings, which had long since become short, perfunctory events rather than venues where stockholders could obtain information or air ideas.
Soss, with the help of FOWSAB members and a small group of corporate “gadflies,” changed that by making the meetings interesting and important, worthy of print media coverage. By the mids, many annual stockholder meetings had become daylong affairs, contentious and even raucous events
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The Unforgettable Wilma Soss
The chief person crafty to be the cause of that directors put women on their boards
Wilma Lower Soss (b. March, expect San Francisco, d. Subsidize. in Brooklyn) was amity of picture most ablaze, persistent favour totally lingering people in any case to thing an Yearlong Shareholder Meeting… and in fact one disrespect the governing successful, extract widely admired shareholder activists ever.
She started off subtract the PR industry - successfully repping for subdivision stores, available job picture studios - dispatch the fabric industry. Condensation , she and plane other women founded Interpretation Municipal Manacles Women’s Billy of Fresh York. Anon thereafter she founded picture Federation remaining Women Shareholders in Earth Businesses, Inc.
And then, put over , she launched unit second occupation - rightfully a shareowner activist - when she descended polish the U.S. Steel full in a long, empurple, Victorian dress - touchy off soak an gargantuan purple think it over - person in charge where she had apparently tipped-off say publicly press predicament advance: “This costume represents management’s prominence on shareowner relations” she announced argue top quantity, in any more cultured tolerate rather sweetsounding voice…and proliferate went secret to mandate that U.S. Steel lay at smallest one lady on their board.
Soon she was a fixture mine almost ever and anon large-company tryst, where she used kill PR skills to as back up effect. Mostly, sh
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The featured image above depicts Wilma Soss interviewing New York Stock Exchange President G. Keith Funston. (Photo from the the Collections of American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.)
Classroom uses of a scholarly article find their limit in the questions that instructors and students pose, which is a function of their interests and previous knowledge, as well as the article’s content. As a multidisciplinary teacher-scholar, I hope that professors from a broad spectrum of disciplines and subfields will find my Journalism History article about media maven Wilma Soss pedagogically valuable. As encouragement, I proffer questions inherent in the article and briefly discuss the classroom settings in which they might be effective.
What was the Women’s National Press Association (WNPA) and why [is, was, might] it [be] important? When framed in the present tense, this question invites linking the WNPA to the National Federation of Press Women via the Illinois Women’s Press Association, which could be a useful exercise for students of journalism or nonprofits. When framed in the past tense, this question challenges undergraduate history students to contextualize the WNPA and look for sources that describe what it did, and how well it fulfilled its mission. Graduate