Norma Yaeger, who became a female stockbroker in the early 1960s and went on to found two securities firms as a pioneering woman in the overwhelmingly male financial world of that period, died on June 3 in Los Angeles. She was 96.
She died at a hospital, said her daughter, Elysa Kaswan, who added that Ms. Yaeger had been under treatment for a respiratory virus.
Ms. Yaeger, then known as Norma Nahmias, was 32 and the mother of three children when she began her financial career in 1962 by getting a job at Hornblower & Weeks, a brokerage firm in New York.
The New York Stock Exchange, hoping more women would invest in stocks, that year sponsored an educational film, “The Lady and the Stock Exchange,” starring Janet Blair. Few women worked as stockbrokers at the time, but Hornblower and some other firms were starting to believe that female brokers might help them expand their clientele.
Ms. Yaeger was not seeking to demolish barriers. Her aim was to find a high-paying job to support her family. Her husband, Sam Nahmias, who worked as a cutter in garment factories and had recently been unemployed, wanted her to stay home and tend the children. In a 2012 memoir, “Breaking Down the Walls,” she recalled his reaction to news that she had found a job that paid more than his: “You’re castrating me.”
During a Hornblower training program, in which she was the only woman, she was told that she would not be welcome at sessions on the exchange floor, where some men were said to believe women were bad luck. She insisted and was finally admitted.
“She helped open doors for other women,” said Janice Traflet, a Bucknell University professor of accounting and financial management who has studied the history of women in finance. In 1967, another female Wall Street pioneer, Muriel Siebert, made headlines by becoming the first woman to acquire a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Before going to work as a broker in Hornblower’s Midtown Manhattan office, Ms. Yaeger borrowed money to buy snazzier clothing, an alligator-skin purse and three pillbox hats. “You have to sell yourself before you can sell anything to anyone,” she wrote. She enjoyed cold-calling potential clients. By 1968, she was earning enough commission money to send her two sons to boarding schools.
Her marriage ended in divorce. In the early 1970s, she and her new husband, Lawrence Yaeger, a surgeon, moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a broker for Bear Stearns and later Drexel Burnham Lambert.
In 1981, she founded her own West Coast brokerage firm, Yaeger Securities, where she eventually employed 50 brokers. At one point, she hired one of her sons, Stephen Nahmias, and then fired him for not working hard enough. (They were still estranged when he died of AIDS in the 1990s.)
Some of her employees promoted risky investments, leading to a rash of lawsuits. Yaeger Securities filed for bankruptcy in 1997. But a second firm she founded, Yaeger Capital Markets, thrived by providing services to state-employee pension funds after new laws required public entities to give more business to firms owned by women or minorities. She sold Yaeger Capital Markets in 1998 and embarked on a series of international vacations with her husband.
Naomi Hason, later known as Norma, was born in Brooklyn on May 5, 1930. She was the first of four children born to Sephardic Jewish immigrants. Her father, Samuel Hason, who worked in the garment business, was born in what is now North Macedonia. Her mother, Regina (Abolafia) Hason, who managed the home, was born in Turkey.
Ms. Yaeger studied business at City College of New York before dropping out to work as a buyer for a department store. She married Mr. Nahmias in 1951.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Victor Nahmias; two stepchildren, Tod Yaeger and Sheri Neilson; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her husband, Lawrence Yaeger, died in 2016.
Until about age 95, Ms. Yaeger continued to invest in stocks and rose early to monitor the market, her daughter said.
