Norma Yaeger, who became a rare female stockbroker in the early 1960s and went on to found two securities firms in the overwhelmingly male financial world, died on June 3 in Los Angeles. She was 96.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Elysa Kaswan, who said that Ms. Yaeger had been under treatment for a respiratory virus.
Ms. Yaeger was 32 and known as Norma Nahmias when she began her financial career in 1962 with Hornblower & Weeks, a brokerage firm in New York.
That year, the New York Stock Exchange, hoping to encourage more women to invest in stocks, had sponsored an educational film, “The Lady and the Stock Exchange,” starring Janet Blair. At the time, few women worked as stockbrokers, but Hornblower and some other firms believed that hiring female brokers might help them expand their clientele.
Ms. Nahmias was not seeking to break barriers. Her aim was to find a high-paying job to support her family. Her husband, Sam Nahmias, a cutter in garment factories who had recently lost his job, wanted her to stay home and take care of their three children.
In her 2012 memoir, “Breaking Down the Walls,” she recalled his reaction when she told him 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. No female stockbrokers were welcome there, as some men considered them 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 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 at Hornblower’s Midtown Manhattan office, she borrowed money to buy snazzier clothing, an alligator-skin purse and three pillbox hats. As she later wrote, “You have to sell yourself before you can sell anything to anyone.”
She enjoyed cold-calling potential clients, and by 1968 she was earning enough in commissions to send her two sons to boarding school.
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 the West Coast brokerage firm Yaeger Securities, eventually employing 50 brokers. At one point, she hired her son Stephen 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, and Yaeger Securities filed for bankruptcy in 1997. But the 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 the firm in 1998.
Naomi Hason, later known as Norma, was born on May 5, 1930, in Brooklyn, the eldest of four children of 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.
Norma studied business at the 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 her son Victor Nahmias; two stepchildren, Tod Yaeger and Sheri Neilson; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2016.
Ms. Yaeger continued to invest in stocks until she was about 95, her daughter said. And every morning, she continued to rise early to monitor the market.
