In the 1960s, my mother, who had moved back to St. Louis after graduating from Radcliffe with an M.B.A., worked as a stockbroker for G.H. Walker—an investment and brokerage firm founded by George Herbert Walker, the grandfather and great-grandfather of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. She had moved to that company from one of its competitors because her boss at the other firm was sexist. He’d find her reading The Wall Street Journal and make comments such as, “Now why are you worrying your pretty little head about what’s in there?”