Estelle Strongin became a stockbroker in her middle age, and kept at it until just days before her death February 19, at 94.

Originally hired by Shearson, Hammill & Company in 1959, she stayed with the company through many permutations, until at the end her letterhead read Smith Barney, a division of Citigroup.

Strongin, of Russian Jewish heritage, grew up in Brookline, Mass. Her father, who died young, ran a cafeteria on Harvard Square. Strongin managed to garner a scholarship to Radcliffe, but after she graduated, at the depths of the Depression, found that employment for French majors was scarce. The family suffered something of a reversal during the early 1930s, and they all moved to New York, where Strongin’s older sister, Miriam Landey, had a successful modiste business on East 53rd Street.

Strongin found work as a window dresser for Macy’s, but abandoned a budding career for husband. Harry Strongin was a Brooklyn pediatrician, the old-fashioned kind who made house calls at a few bucks per visit. He had little head for finance, though, and it was Strongin who kept the books and forced him to raise his fees every few years.

Stockbroking seems to have been her own idea, but it was hardly a conventional choice for a wife and mother in the 1950s, and even her husband had his reservations.

“Some of our friends were shocked. ‘Her husband is a successful doctor. Why is she working?'” Strongin said as she recounted to Studs Terkel in an oral history interview collected in the book “Coming of Age” the questions people asked regarding her decision. “Our social set looked down on stockbrokers – vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. [Laughs.]”

She took a correspondence course to qualify for her broker’s license.

Thanks to a network of contacts, Strongin quickly built up a list of clients that included a renowned Wall Street figure, Bob Wilson. But if she was something of a pioneer on the street, she hardly embodied the women’s lib ethos. “The editor of Ms. Magazine, whom I knew, asked me to write a piece about breaking into men’s areas of expertise, because it would encourage other women to become brokers,” she told Mr. Terkel. “I wrote about the help I had received from all the men at Shearson. I had no difficulties. They didn’t publish it. [Laughs.]”

She was eventually joined in business by her daughter, Anne, also a broker.

Strongin collected art, and was a serious enough amateur – she studied with the noted sculptor Hugo Robus – to have contemplated a career in it. But, she said she found the studio too solitary a place for her gregarious disposition. After her husband retired, in the mid-1970s, they moved from Eastern Parkway to an apartment on the Upper East Side, across the park from her daughter.

She soldiered on, working through myriad health difficulties in recent years, and never lost the ability to gently scandalize her children. “Sex is just the parsley on the platter,” she once said in an interview for a women’s magazine.

“My children are very lucky that I have this job,” she told Mr. Terkel. “What a pain in the neck I’d be if I didn’t work.”

Estelle Landy Strongin
Born May 30, 1911, in Brookline, Mass.; died of heart failure February 19 at her Manhattan apartment; survived by her daughters, Anne Navasky and Landey Strongin, and three grandchildren.