by Carolyn Setlow
I began my business career in July 1970, just a month before 10,000 women marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue to mark the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The march was part of a “Women’s Strike for Equality,” organized by feminist leader Betty Friedan.
Younger women often ask me whether male chauvinism hindered my career, and whether I had any role models or mentors who eased the way for me. I did but, interestingly, they were mostly supportive men of an older generation.
The first, and by far the most important, was my father, Herbert Setlow, a graduate of the Wharton School at Penn, who ran a family-owned work clothes manufacturing company, SetloWear, founded in 1893 as M. Setlow and Son, Inc., by his grandfather and father, Morris and Joseph Setlow – three generations of Setlow men at the helm. The women in this family were not in the business, but were “executives” in their own way. Herbert’s mother, born Dora Chernoff, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, founded the New Haven chapter of Women’s American ORT, a Jewish organization that provides education and job skills to immigrants. His sister, Ursula, earned a bachelor’s degree at Smith College in 1932 and a master’s at Yale and later ran her husband’s cardiology practice.
Not surprisingly, my father grew up with a respect for women and what they could accomplish. Remarkably gender blind, he nudged my sister Marcie and me toward business careers. If not for the objections of our mother, we’d have had bicycle newspaper routes when we were teens. He encouraged us to sell Girl Scout cookies door to door and pushed us to join Junior Achievement, a youth-development program that taught business and entrepreneurial skills.
In 1970, I headed to New York City with a newly-minted master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts.
My first job was with Lou Harris, who had been President Kennedy’s pollster and now ran a firm that competed with the likes of Gallup and Roper. On my second week there, Lou phoned me in my office one morning to tell me he was running late for a meeting with the editors of Japan’s leading newspaper and would like me to greet them and start the meeting without him. He would join us shortly. Lou had no doubt that I could handle this (but I was not so sure). The Japanese gentlemen were unfortunately not like Lou. It became quickly clear that they were unwilling to engage with a young woman and preferred to await his arrival.
In the early 70’s, as the only female vice president of Louis Harris and Associates, I was assigned an exciting project. Philip Morris wanted to position their new brand, Virginia Slims, as the expert on American women (who “could never be too rich or too thin,” according to their tagline). As part of their PR program, they commissioned the first of many annual Virginia Slims American Women’s Polls, definitive surveys of public attitudes toward the roles of women in our society and the emerging women’s movement, and I authored these studies.
In early 1973, I got a call from Gloria Steinem, who wanted to report on women’s attitudes in her newly-launched Ms. Magazine. Would I coauthor articles with her, she asked. With permission from Lou to mine the Harris Poll data, I submitted my first article to Gloria, on the women’s vote in the 1972 presidential election.
Gloria made only one edit. Wherever I quoted the “Harris Poll,” she crossed it out and replaced it with the Setlow Poll. Ms. wanted to provide role models of successful women to their aspiring female readers, she explained. I reminded her that Lou Harris, not I, was the famous opinion pollster, and we could not make this change. Her final words to me, as I left her office, were “Go ask him.” (This was 40 years before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.)
When I returned to my office, I told Lou of Gloria’s request, He thought for a minute and, to my surprise, then asked, “Can you live with the Harris-Setlow Poll?” Articles based on the Harris-Setlow Poll appeared regularly in Ms. Magazine for a couple of years.
Another of my clients was a pension fund trade association, for whom we conducted a landmark study on corporate attitudes toward pension fund managers. I had authored the study but they understandably wanted Lou Harris to present the results at a big industry luncheon at the University Club. Lou asked me to write his speech and join him at the podium for the Q & A session. However, when we arrived at the University Club door, we were informed that the luncheon was on the second floor and the club did not permit women above the ground floor.
Lou expressed outrage, but the club wouldn’t budge. He turned to me and asked whether I wanted us to walk out in protest. Aware that the client had not yet paid the final bill for the study, I insisted he proceed, and I listened to his speech (with no Q & A session following it), from a little room off the lobby. (The University Club finally accepted its first female members in the 1990’s, more than 15 years later.)
Fast forward to the early 1990’s, I was a senior executive of The Roper Organization and a top business developer. A new business call from the head of a leading Washington DC-based nonprofit was directed to me. After a lengthy conversation, I offered to fly down to meet with the client and his team. He said he’d get back to me.
An hour later, the vice chairman of our firm, Harry O’Neill, knocked on my office door to tell me that the prospective client had called back, asked for Harry, and explained that he had had a very productive call with me but that his team preferred to work with a senior male at the firm. Harry reported that he thanked the man for the call but told him he’d already spoken with the most qualified member of our executive team and that he was welcome to take his business elsewhere.
Another of my clients was the Seagram Corporation. The client asked me to fly up to Montreal to share a study’s results with the head of their Canadian business at his elite private club. For the occasion, I wore my first pair of expensive Ferragamo shoes. As luck would have it, it began to snow as the plane landed in Montreal. As my taxi pulled up to the club, I saw with relief that the walkway to the front door had just been shoveled. I was greeted at the front door by a uniformed doorman who said, “I apologize, Madame, but ladies are not allowed to enter the club through the front door.” He signaled to me a yet-to-be shoveled path that led around the building to the ladies entrance. Unwilling to ruin my new shoes, I smiled confidently at the doorman, pushed my way past him, and announced my arrival – silently thanking my father, Lou Harris, Harry O’Neil, plus a few other men along the way, for the confidence they had instilled in me.
In 1981, my 68-year old father urged me to spend just a little time at SetloWear, so that I would understand enough about the business to run it or sell it, in case something happened to him. I accepted the offer and, a year later, he insisted that I become SetloWear’s president. After five more years, in 1986, he gave me his blessing to sell the business to Williamson-Dickie, a Texas-based work clothes company. Among the conditions for their purchase were that my father would retire, and that I would continue as president. While my dad was not happy to be put out to pasture in his early 70’s, he was proud that I had negotiated a successful sale and that the new owners wanted me to continue to run their new acquisition. I was grateful to him for his trust in me.
My father received public recognition for how he raised his daughters. He was honored in the early 1980’s by the NOW (National Organization of Women’s) Legal Defense Fund with their BUDDY Award (that stood for Bringing Up Daughters Differently) and featured in a Newsweek article about women in family businesses, with the headline “Like Fathers, Like Daughters.”
Carolyn was EVP of leading public opinion polling/marketing research firms (Louis Harris and Associates, the Roper Organization, GFK); VP of corporate planning at Newsweek Inc.; and President of a family-owned uniform company. She has served on several nonprofit boards (Northside Center for Child Development, Children’s Tumor Foundation, Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies) and been involved recently in refugee resettlement. She is married to LP2 member Andrew Shapiro.