Remembering a Wall Street pioneer

Muriel Siebert, who battled "the old boys network'' of Wall Street to become the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, died Saturday of complications from cancer. She was 80.

Siebert was founder and president of the brokerage firm that bears her name, Muriel Siebert & Co. Inc. The company went public in 1996 as Siebert Financial Corp, which confirmed her death Monday.

"She went against the odds and wasn't afraid of defeat and wasn't afraid of upsetting the status quo,'' said Jennifer Openshaw, a consumer finance expert who came to know the Wall Street pioneer when she sold Siebert her web company, Women's Financial Network, during the dot.com boom of the early 2000s. "She was hugely admired. There's no one who comes close to what she represents.''

Siebert was also the first woman to serve as the superintendent of banking for the state of New York, appointed in 1977 by Gov. Hugh Carey. During her tenure, she launched protective measures to prevent banks from failing in New York, reorganizing troubled banks and insisting on bank mergers, then obtaining millions of federal dollars to make the mergers happen.

With her usual pluck and humor, Siebert would introduce herself as "SOB'' during her tenure for the state. In her 2002 memoir "Changing the rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick,'' she recounted that she finally got a women's bathroom on the same floor of the NYSE luncheon room by threatening to install a portable toilet.

Known as "Mickie,'' Siebert could also be outspoken and tough in making her way through the financial ranks, brushing off rejection and ridicule. A native of Cleveland, she arrived in New York in a Studebaker in 1954, a few credits shy of a college degree. Her first job was as a $65-a-week research trainee at Bache & Co. Later, she poached one of the male employees there to be her secretary

In 1982, she resigned from the banking post to run for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She came in second to a state lawmaker, Florence Sullivan, who went on to lose to Moynihan in the November election.

The next year, while president of the New York Women's Agenda -- a coalition of over 100 women's organizations -- Siebert developed a personal finance program to improve the financial literacy of young people that later became part of the economics curriculum for New York City high schools.

As recently as 2010, she was named by American Banker magazine as one of the 25 most influential women in finance. The publication listed her as 8th and recounted that younger women would stand in line to shake her hand.

Al Jazeera and wire services with contributions from Katherine Lanpher