In the personal papers of Hannah Claire Haines is a document with Haines's reflection on “sixty years of progress for women,” from 1913 to 1973. In it, she humorously contrasts the women of the two eras, clearly portraying an upward path. In 1913, for instance, a woman “may have earned as little as $10 a week, and $100 a month was a good salary”; but in 1973, “the sky is the limit and no self-respecting secretary would accept less than $400 a month.”1 Haines herself had lived through those decades of change as she forged her own remarkable path in the business world. As the first female Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in Utah and later as the director of Salt Lake City's Union Bank and Trust Company, she was highly successful in challenging commonly accepted ideas about what a woman's place in society should be. Haines repeatedly broke through social norms that restricted a woman's presence in finance or business, and she did so with self-confidence and humor. Today, Haines's legacy continues because of her support of what she valued and understood most: education, especially for women. Her contribution to expanding the prevailing social views about women in male-dominated workplaces has become clear to us through our study of her unpublished papers. These documents reveal the story of Haines's challenges and successes, a story that shows how one woman propelled gender equality forward during her eighty-three-year life span.2Although little is known about Haines's childhood and family, some clues suggest that she enjoyed a life that allowed her to transcend the gender barriers prevalent in the early twentieth century. Her father, Harrison W. Haines, came from the culture of the urbanized East in Medford, New Jersey, and his family roots in America dated back to 1682, providing him with a pedigree and social standing. Eventually, he became an accountant, working for businesses in Philadelphia.3 After a doctor advised Haines to move to the West for his health—a common medical prescription for respiratory problems—he left the familiar comforts of his eastern lifestyle to settle first in Denver, Colorado. There, on September 16, 1890, he married Anna Becker, Claire Haines's mother.4Anna Becker's German family arrived in the United States about two hundred years after Harrison's family did. As with a vast number of immigrants before and after her, she grew up in New York City. How she moved from New York, gained her education, became a teacher, and found her way into the Haines's Medford home as both teacher and governess remains a mystery.5 After Harrison moved west, they married and first settled in Wyoming where he had accepted a job to manage a ranch, even though he surely had to have been considered a greenhorn.6 It was on this ranch near Saratoga, Wyoming, on July 15, 1891, that Hannah Claire Haines was born, almost one year after Wyoming was admitted to the Union.7Haines began her early childhood with advantages that must have helped her achieve some of her success as an adult. She was an only child, receiving all the attention and encouragement of her two professional parents, one a teacher and the other an accountant. Both served as role models, demonstrating the importance of education, of succeeding by using one's brains, and of being economically and personally independent in life. From an early age she embraced ranch life, including the indignity of being tossed off her horse “whose habit of unseating her was chronic.”8 When Haines was eight or nine, the family moved to Santa Cruz, California, to provide her with adequate educational opportunities; there she attended the Branciforte School.9 The current successor to that school has the motto, “Use your mind well. Do the right thing. Work hard,” a sentiment that could aptly summarize Claire Haines's life and personal achievements.10However, Haines completed her high school education in St. Anthony, Idaho, where her ambitious father had found a better job as the manager of the Riverside Hotel.11 Established schools in Idaho were not widely available then and were often understaffed, one-room affairs.12 In fact, St. Anthony created its schools only in 1883.13 Even in nearby Utah, which had a comparatively better educational system, “public secondary education did not exist until the last decade of the nineteenth century and did not become a viable part of the system until the second decade of the twentieth century.” By 1910, only “58 percent of Utah's 16- to 17-year-olds were enrolled in high school,” let alone graduated.14 Still, Haines took advantage of every educational opportunity available to her. She attended St. Anthony's high school and graduated in May 1909, along with four other students.15 Another challenge for the young graduate was that in 1909 women had few career choices, which Haines remembered in later life: “In those days a girl who wished to be self-supporting could . . . teach school, clerk, keep books, nurse or do housework.”16 Her family must have discussed her future job prospects because her father soon urged her to begin training as a nurse. At first, Haines thought of becoming a doctor or a dentist, but she decided to try taking nursing courses first because as she noted, “Father's requests were unwritten law.”17In 1910 Haines moved to Salt Lake City to enroll in the Training School for Nurses of Holy Cross Hospital.18 It was the finest hospital in the region. In 1883 the hospital opened a newly built, 125-bed facility, and by 1901 it had established its school of nursing.19 Although this was fifty years after Florence Nightingale had established the first nurses’ training school in London, the curriculum for nursing students, who were mainly women, included drudgery and menial tasks. For example, Haines's final exam asked her to illustrate how the floor in the hospital should be scrubbed so that it was clean and shining; and, in fact, nursing students did most of the hospital housekeeping.20Students received some classroom instruction, but most of their training came from the supervising Catholic nuns at bed sides and caring for the patients. There were strict rules. A history of the Holy Cross Hospital states that, Training consists of one trial after another from the time the nurse first dons her uniform. Her life is arranged to a definite route, and she must eat, sleep, work and study according to the schedule. When she attends classes, she is often too tired to understand what is being taught, particularly when she has been on night duty and had had only three or four hours of sleep.21The program at Holy Cross was consistent with those of other nursing schools in Utah and elsewhere in the nation.22 Despite all the demanding physical labor associated with nursing, Haines successfully finished the nursing program and graduated on May 23, 1912; however, she decided nursing was not for her.23After completing her disappointing nurses’ training program, Haines returned to St. Anthony; she told her cousin she had given up nursing “because instead of the glorious image of Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale and others, it turned out to be a routine of emptying bedpans and sweeping floors; and for that type of work she was not geared.” Not sure what to do next, Haines eventually convinced her father that she wanted to follow in his footsteps, to have a business career, and become an accountant.24 So, in 1915 Claire returned to Salt Lake City, this time with her own ambitious dream, which was very much at odds with the prevailing notion that a woman's primary place was in the home, married, and with children.By 1915, women in Utah and the United States faced mixed prospects, what the scholars Jean Friedman and William Shade call an “illusion of equality.”25 On one hand, Utah's women had received the right to vote almost two decades earlier in 1896. During these years, women also played a growing role in the public realm, and employment and educational opportunities increased. As Miriam Murphy details, the number of women working in Utah as stenographers, typists, bookkeepers, accountants, and clerks rose from 518 in 1900 to 4,168 in 1920. Likewise, the number of women engaged in professional work more than doubled between 1900 and 1910. And the Young Women's Journal, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ran pieces advising girls on how to land and keep jobs—this in a recognition that the official end of polygamy had created a “surplus woman problem.”26On the other hand, the cultural norm of the times, Murphy writes, was that “God intended girls to become homemakers. Their math studies should prepare them for keeping domestic rather than commercial accounts.”27 This opinion was not just the dominant way of thinking in Utah but one commonly accepted all over the nation. Further, legal biases remained prevalent against women well into the twentieth century. One 1873 court case summarized well the prejudice Haines faced as she vacillated in search of an appropriate career to match her talents: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”28Amidst this setting, Haines launched herself into business and took an extension course in accounting at the University of Utah.29 Additionally, she enrolled in two correspondence courses from the Walton School of Commerce in Chicago, established in 1910 by Seymour Walton, who was respected and experienced in the accounting world. A major contributor to the Journal of Accountancy, Walton was famous for “The Students’ Department” section, which was of interest to young accountants. As his obituary notes, “In the courses of his long association with the accounting profession Mr. Walton did more to raise the standards of accounting education and to stimulate the highest professional ethics than almost any man of his time.”30Although its tuition was costly, the Walton School offered a popular payment plan.31 Haines spent $190 for her courses. She was determined to become a CPA, but she needed to work for two years as an accountant before she could even take the required exam. This simple requirement proved to be a bigger challenge in achieving her goal of becoming certified in accounting than actually taking classes. When Haines visited accountants in Salt Lake City to find a position, she recalled, “They laughed me out of their office. It hadn't been done; it couldn't be done. That was their philosophy.”32 Being a CPA had a “men only” sign on it, and any woman who wanted into the profession was “slightly cracked.”33 No wonder that even with a degree, it was difficult for women to find employment at a public accounting firm.34Haines's challenges to getting into the profession were typical of the experiences of other women and of the gender stereotypes at that time. An account of the gradual rise of women in a male-dominated profession, compiled for the American Woman's Society of Certified Public Accountants to honor its seventy-fifth anniversary, notes that: Of course, a woman did not have to be a CPA to work in accounting. In 1870, the U.S. Department of Labor, Women's Division, reported that women working as bookkeepers, accountants and cashiers totaled 893 or 2.3 percent of the total. By 1900, their number had risen to 74,895 or 29.1 percent of the total. In contrast, by 1910 only 13 women were reported to be CPAs in the U.S.35As John Carey points out in his study of how accounting evolved into a profession, before the late nineteenth century, “the terms ‘bookkeeping’ and ‘accounting’ were often used interchangeably” and it was usually a male occupation.36 However, about the time that Haines sought to enter the profession, the two endeavors began to separate into more clearly defined career paths. I. S. Broo, writing in 1942 about women in accounting, noted that the assignments of bookkeepers and accountants bifurcated. Bookkeepers kept recording data but—particularly with the creation of the income tax in 1913—the accountant became “not only a keeper of records, an auditor, and an expert who prepares statements for management, but also a business analyst who interprets the figures for management.”37This two-tiered system might have created space for women in the profession, but only at the ground floor, doing the requisite drudgery. Bookkeeping was classified a “trade” and was considered “menial” labor or “women's work.”38 However, with the downgrading of bookkeeping into a clerical skill and with the explosive growth in the recruitment of women for clerical work, the number of female bookkeepers rapidly increased.39 Firms continued primarily to hire women as clerks, bookkeepers, or secretaries, but not as accountants. One female accountant, Jennie Palen, observed that “an accountant's office was about as hard for her to get into as Fort Knox.”40Why did women experience such difficulties in entering the accounting profession? Obviously, there was the widespread prejudice against women. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes in her historical analysis of popular images of women, in the 1920s, women who worked outside the home “did so only under duress or because they were . . . ‘single.’”41 Accounting firms maintained that they did not hire women because men would not accept women as supervisors, nor would male clients accept women as auditors.42 Male employers justified their hiring preferences by pointing to the widely shared perception that women did not have the “emotional makeup, analytical reasoning, or the long-term commitment to the job required for a manager.”43In addition, current research has explored the problem of gender stratification, a practice used for years to allow women to do only certain jobs, thus limiting their professional choices. Haines had already once given up on becoming a doctor and now, because of gender stratification, becoming a certified accountant seemed out of reach. C. R. Lehman wrote that natural talent and interest could not be recognized using such “a narrow lens,” which offered “jobs not on the basis of people's interests, their education, or abilities, but rather upon the basis of class, race or sex. . . . Moreover, gender stratification has often prevented women from receiving horizontal transfers within a firm that would provide them with the skills needed for promotion.”44The educational system itself presented another obstacle by discriminating against women being educated in fields believed to be better suited for men. Usually, bookkeeping required only a high school diploma, while accountants needed further degrees. Yet until World War II created a shortage of accountants, some institutions of higher education discouraged or even excluded women from enrolling in accounting courses.45 Even schools that did accept women accounting majors added unnecessary hurdles such as requiring them to take their classes at night.46 Gender bias exhibited by education leaders in Ivy League schools also seemed particularly repressive and passionate. Such deep-seated attitudes, in fact, kept women out of some of these institutions well into the 1970s and early 1980s.47 As with the colleges themselves, professional honor societies also refused to admit women, even those with CPAs, to membership. For instance, Beta Alpha Psi, a society founded in 1919 to honor students in “financial information” majors, finally amended its constitution in 1950 to permit eligible women and minority students to become members.48Although these obstacles could have been disheartening, they had the opposite effect on Haines, who said they told the wrong person that it could not be done. “I had just enough mule in me that I decided I would do it and the obstacles only made me more determined.”49 Her attitude was not surprising to those who knew her. Josephine Starling, a cousin, wrote that “the family agreed that Haines had a will and mind of her own.”50 Haines declared, “I've heard actresses say their work got into their blood and that's the way accounting was with me. I just had to get into the game. . . . Any woman who works for her C.P.A. must have a natural aptitude and interest in the subject, coupled with a persevering ambition to obtain that degree.”51 Thus, by the time she turned thirty, on December 16, 1921, Haines had received a certificate for completing the course in Advanced Accounting and on March 23, 1923, she received a diploma after completing the course in Advanced Accounting and Business Law.52When Haines returned to Utah in 1915, it is not known what positions she held or for whom she worked. It is only known that she worked in various offices around Salt Lake City and by 1919 she was employed at the Utah Light and Traction Company.53 In an interview with Maxine Martz, Haines admitted that she felt she had “sneaked in the back way,” taking a job as an office secretary and managing to get enough experience in accounting to take the CPA exam.54While Haines was back in Salt Lake City pursuing a business career in accounting, Governor Simon Bamberger appointed her to the State Board for the Registration of Nurses on January 12, 1918. This appointment came as a surprise because although she had graduated from nurses’ training in 1912, she was not a practicing nurse. Nevertheless, on the state board, she replaced Ella Wicklund, who had accepted a position with the Red Cross in France to help with World War I, and became the organization's secretary-treasurer.55 By March 25, 1919, Bamberger reappointed Haines to the board, and in July 1921 James Hammond, director of the Department of Registration, extended Haines's appointment.56Haines's position as secretary-treasurer for the board was an important one. All nurses had to pass an exam to be certified to practice in the state of Utah. Haines scheduled, administered, and corrected the exam, and notified individuals of the results. She was also responsible for the board's finances and apparently did a good job, since the board ended 1918 with a surplus of funds.57 In this position, Haines advocated for establishing a standard curriculum and educational program for training nurses in Utah. In addition, she assisted in campaigning to recruit young women to the nursing profession.58 Because of her state-level influence, the nursing community gained respect and confidence in her. She represented the board at the National League of Nurse Education convention in Chicago in 1919 and Kansas City in 1921. In 1922 she represented the Utah Nurses’ Association at a national nurses’ convention in Seattle.59During the years that Haines served on the board, she was involved in a variety of other organizations. She was very active in the Red Cross in Salt Lake City. In addition, she served on a committee that compiled a statewide directory of all nurses in Utah hospitals as well as individuals who either had knowledge about nursing or were “mentally” and “physically” able to undertake nurse training.60 Haines was also active in the Utah Nurses’ Association and was elected its vice president in 1923.61 She routinely looked for opportunities to ensure that women's voices were heard and that women were acknowledged for their work and contributions. For instance, she advocated that the Red Cross place a flag at the Utah State Capitol Building to commemorate the service of Utah's military nurses, in addition to the two flags already there for Utah soldiers and sailors.62In spite of her public appointments, in 1919, when Haines was working for the Utah Light and Traction Company, she had to scrupulously watch her personal monthly budget. She wrote a letter to her parents explaining that the company was going to raise her salary by $10.00 per month, starting from the first of the year. She calculated that with her regular monthly salary of $120.00 and with the $10.00 a month she was receiving for her work with the State Nurses Board, and the fee she received, she would be making about $150 a month.63In 1921 Haines found a better position in the Salt Lake City office of Haskins and Sells, an internationally known accounting firm. As her father had done, her work record shows that she had achieved steady success and career advancement. After two years with the firm, she took the difficult two-and-a-half-day CPA exam in 1923.64 Her achievement was publicly noted in local newspapers. One article stated that “Miss H. Claire Haines has successfully completed the examination for certified public accountant . . . with the distinct recognition of being the first woman to be licensed in this profession in the state. She was the only woman of three taking the recent examination to be passed.”65 And in a letter she wrote to her parents, her personal relief and excitement in achieving her dream poured forth: I am walking on air this morning. I just got word that I passed my examination and am now an honest to gosh CPA in Utah. Oh, I am so happy, happy, happy. The first woman to try it in Utah and to pass the first time when so few get through it at all. Now I hope I'll get some recognition from the firm that has been so long in coming. . . . The exam was given in 27 states and a total of 607 people took it. Of that number, 143 passed, 140 were conditioned on one subject and 324 failed altogether. . . . When I read those figures I wondered if there wasn't a mistake somewhere that I got through.66Another letter dated July 16, 1923, from J. T. Hammond, director of the State of Utah Department of Registration, officially confirmed her license to practice as a CPA in Utah. Hammond wrote, “I want to congratulate you upon the fact that you passed with such a high percentage being between eighty and eighty-five.”67 Her certificate was the twenty-fourth issued to any accountant in the state and “a testimony to the strain her assault on the business world imposed on the ranks of the CPA.” And Utah was obviously not prepared to issue such a certificate to a woman because on the official document wherever “he” is listed, a small typewritten “s” precedes it.68In a 1923 interview, after she was notified that she had passed the exam, Haines stated, It has been a long hard road, with innumerable discouragements and disappointments. Much of the joy of having received the degree of C.P.A. comes from the knowledge that it may encourage other girls to do the same thing or better. There are comparatively few women certified public accountants in the United States, but there is no logical reason why women should not be as successful in the field as men, once the business public become accustomed to women in the line of endeavor.69In this public interview, Haines was confident and self-assured. She understood she had paved the way for more women to follow. As she later recalled, the male-dominated accounting profession was so opposed to women entering it that if her test had revealed her name instead of the number assigned to it, she believed she would not have passed.70 In fact, amazingly, Haines remained the only woman Utah CPA for thirty-four years.71From the time that she was certified until her death in 1974, Haines continually moved from one increasingly important and lucrative position to another. In 1924, before her thirty-third birthday, she received a letter from Charles H. Landers, a trustee of the Seymour Walton Medal Foundation, stating, “Your success in the May 1923 Utah C. P.A. examination evidences your attainment of a high standard of accountancy training, and as a student of the Walton School of Commerce, you are entitled to the Gold Medal of the Seymour Walton Medal Fund,” which she received in a separate mailing.72When Haines launched into her professional CPA career, she ingeniously combined her knowledge of accounting with nursing. In 1924, her two-part article for the Trained Nurse and Hospital Review focused on allocation of costs and budgeting for schools of nursing and opened up unique business opportunities for her.73 Not only was her article published in a professional journal, but she was also sent a thank you note from the Lakeside Publishing company and paid the handsome sum of twenty-five dollars or a sixth of her monthly income.74Administrators at the Salt Lake City office of Haskins and Sells soon recognized Haines's ability, and in 1924, she was transferred to company headquarters in New York City. She was with Haskins and Sells for only a short time before she moved to the accounting department of the Electric Bond and Share Company, a large holding firm for several public utilities.75 However, as lucrative as this career path was, Haines was unhappy in New York City. One portrayal of her declared, “She rapidly tired of too many people, the desperate bustle and crowded subway trains.”76 A friend told her about a job opening at the Bead Chain Manufacturing Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which manufactured chain strings for lamps. The company offered Haines a job, and, in three short years, she was promoted to the position of assistant treasurer.77 Her next move—to Chicago in 1929—showed additional signs of success; there, after a short time, Haines became the owner of a business with a small staff specializing in hotel and property management accounting.78 Although little is known about this development, it was interrupted again by her private life.Owing to her aging parents’ health, Haines moved back to Salt Lake City in 1935.79 There she established a private accounting practice in the Union Bank and Trust building. After having been a budding entrepreneur in Chicago and considering herself “something of an individualist,” she worked alone doing a variety of jobs including tax work, setting up fiscal systems, auditing books, and consulting with local Utah businesses. Haines loved the challenge of finding solutions to accounting problems, and she liked not being pinned down to any one industry or field. Working in her own business offered her the independence and freedom to demonstrate creativity, talent, and intellect, a freedom not always available to women. In addition, as she noted near the end of her career, “Nobody can tell you when to quit.”80Even though professional accountants did not advertise in that era, Haines soon built an active practice. In her words, “You hang out your shingle and wait for people to come to you. After that it is by ‘personal endorsement,’ a satisfied client telling friends about the CPA's services.”81 Over the years, Haines attracted many clients, although her gender in a male-dominated field did create a few memorable, even humorous moments. On one occasion, when she went to audit the books at a garage, the bookkeeper disappeared, vanishing from the office. She finally found him hiding behind a car in the garage. When she asked him why he was hiding, he told her that he was not going to work for any “blankety-blank woman.” Haines telephoned the client and told him what had happened. As she recalled, “That bookkeeper was looking for a job the next morning.” Another time she caught a woman with “her hand in the till,” who called her a “Blank old Blister.”82 Laughing at the incident, Haines simply shrugged off the salty language aimed at her.On a more serious occasion, however, one of her employers called her a “militant female,” a name leveled at her when she asked for better pay and better work, in line with that of her male colleagues. She was accustomed to derision because of her gender and could tolerate being called a name or two, but she explained that “the ‘militant female’ bit has always rankled because it has been proved . . . beyond a shadow of doubt that accounting is an excellent field for women and one in which many women have excelled. We're here; we're going to stay.”83Haines's success as an accountant with her own business led to more success and recognition. In 1954, she was appointed the director to the Union Bank and Trust in Salt Lake City, the same bank where she had first rented space to set up her own accounting practice. This appointment was big enough news to warrant a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune: “S. L.’s Only Woman Director Appointed to Bank Position.”84 In addition, it thrust her into prominence and into working with a select circle of men, bankers whom Haines realized had helped Union Bank grow “from a very small savings bank in 1938 to a commercial and savings bank with resources of almost ten million” in less than sixteen years.85Haines not only created a groundbreaking career path for herself—she also consciously worked to be a role model for younger women to follow in her footsteps. She felt that it was her duty to foster and support women, declaring at one point, “If we can help other women, that is one of the best reasons I know for belonging to BPW,” or the Business and Professional Women's Foundation.86 Haines's professional career included membership in numerous organizations, and she served in leadership positions in many of them. For example, she was the only female member of the Utah Society of Public Accountants. She also belonged to the Business and Professional Women's Clubs and served as president for two years from 1942 to 1944 and later as the parliamentarian. In 1954, she was honored at the annual state convention and given a pin for her twenty-five years of service.87Over the years, Haines continued to be involved in health and civic issues. In 1943, while serving as president of the BPW, she wrote a lengthy piece for the Salt Lake Telegram as part of a series in which the newspaper asked “civic-minded Salt Lakers” what the city needed. In it, she admonished the city leaders to take immediate action to eradicate the rats that were abundant in the “underground portions of our business district in abandoned gas and water lines,” further reminding officials that “rats carry diseases and are dangerous when our city is crowded with military personnel and war workers.” Hai