Women

Near the northern end of the Mohawk Valley at the gateway to the lake country of upper New York is Utica (pop. 100,000), maker of one-third of all the nation's knitted underwear. Remote from a metropolis, Utica society is nothing if not clubby. Rare is the matron who does not belong to one of the town's State-famed musical societies, garden clubs, welfare organizations.

One noon last March 500 civic-minded Utica matrons crowded into the dining room of the Utica Hotel abuzz with talk over Utica's latest, hottest club idea. No men were to be invited, but husbands clamored so loudly they were finally permitted to fill up a few tables. Boys from nearby Hamilton College came to town begging for reservations. The guest of honor, Miss Cathrine Curtis, whose radio talks on Women & Money had inspired the luncheon, was so excited she could not eat. Over plates of steaming chicken the ladies listened to speeches, applauded, voted. Result: Women Investors in America, Inc., a non-profit making national organization for the "mobilization" of women.

Last week Women Investors, Inc. filed its charter in Albany. It promised to "arouse women to a realization of the stake they hold in the nation's wealth." It promised to protect and preserve industry, stocks & bonds, homes, husbands, etc. It promised to oppose "unsound" legislation. "Few people realize," it said, "that women own 70% of the wealth of this country; 80% of the insurance policies now in effect. . . . It is the women who guard the family pocketbook, and the women now have decided to guard the nation's pocketbook."

Exactly how Women Investors, Inc. was going to accomplish all this, it would not say last week. It was not going to give investment advice to women.* It was not going to conduct a woman's lobby in Washington, at least for the present. But it was going after membership. Proof of this fact was the Organizing Committee whose most prominent member is Mrs. Hortense Odium, president of Manhattan's Bonwit, Teller & Co. (clothes), wife of Investment Truster Floyd B. Odium of Atlas Corp. Legal counsellor is Mrs. Jean Nelson Penfield, New York attorney and onetime suffragette. National Director is Radio Lecturer Cathrine Curtis who claims she first decided to educate women investors when she overheard a dowager exclaim at a party: "Commodities are like utilities, I mean they are something like options. I have a box full of them."

Tall, handsome Director Curtis, a shrewd publicist, likes to think of herself as the only woman ever to "humanize and dramatize'' big business over the radio. Her business experience began at 18 when she speculated in Reading Railroad and the stock went up eight points in one day. "Harold Bell Wright saw me walk through the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, Ariz.," she mused last week, "and he said he felt I was a character out of one of his books." Then & there she went to Hollywood to take a part in the cinema version of Author Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills. In Hollywood she continued to play the stockmarket, swears she is ahead of the game despite the crash. Last week Director Curtis adopted as the organization's slogan: "One Woman can be Forceful, One Hundred Women can be Helpful, One Thousand Women can be Powerful, BUT ONE MILLION WOMEN --UNITED--ARE INVINCIBLE! LET'S GO!"

*Last week in Manhattan the career of a famed woman investment counsellor was ended when Miss Edna V. O'Brien, 49, was sentenced to between 15 months and three years in jail for grand larceny. In 1928, one year after she began trading stock, Miss O'Brien paid an income tax of $80,000. Among her clients were Amelia Earhart and Anne Morgan, sister of John Pierpont Morgan. Convicted of using the securities of a client named Walsh to bolster her own trading account, Counsellor O'Brien confessed to appropriating some of Miss Morgan's stock, to cover her losses. Client Morgan declined to sue.

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