Wilma P. Soss, Corporations’ Nemesis, Dies at 86

Wilma Porter Soss, whose antics at stockholders’ meetings endeared her to the hearts of women in corporate America but often offended their male counterparts, has died of a heart attack at her Manhattan apartment. She was 86 and died Oct. 10 although her death went unreported until Thursday.

Mrs. Soss once told The New Yorker magazine that her mission was to point out to corporate executives that they were not working for themselves or the company, but for the stockholders, many of whom were women.

“The truth is we shareholders own the corporations,” she said.

Carried Mop and Pail

Perhaps her most widely reported performance came in 1960 when she dressed up as a cleaning woman and, carrying mop and pail, went to a CBS stockholders’ meeting. Referring to the then-raging television quiz show scandals, she said she had come dressed to “clean up everything.”

She had once worked in public relations, representing department stores, motion picture studios and the silk industry.

But in the late 1940s, at a stockholders’ meeting of what was then U.S. Steel Corp., she quit her job in public relations and devoted the rest of her life to changing the perception of women in the world of high finance.

In 1949 she attended a U.S. Steel stockholders’ meeting dressed in a Victorian costume, saying the two-piece suit and large hat “represents management’s thinking on stockholder relations.”

Women as Directors

She called on large corporations to simplify their shareholders’ statements, institute regional meetings that would permit wider attendance by stockholders and include women on their boards of directors.

She often went to meetings at the corporate board rooms armed with a list of questions and was not afraid to press executives for answers.

But theatrics aside, her aim, she once said, was to educate women and eliminate what she called financial illiteracy.

She founded the Federation of Women Shareholders in American Business and with her own votes and those of proxies traveled from meeting to meeting armed with a list of complaints.

A widow, one of her last corporate meetings was at The New York Times Co. in September. She sharply pressed the newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, for explanations of some of the newspaper’s actions and policies. The The New York Times Thursday quoted Sulzberger as saying she “represented the small shareholders with dignity, pride and courtesy. Sometimes we may have grown a mite impatient with her long lists of questions, but she never provoked dismay or anger.”