The jockeying to succeed Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board appears to pit Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen against a field that includes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Vice Chairman Donald Kohn. If Yellen becomes the first woman to hold the post -- despite a few sexist swipes from Summers' supporters -- she'll owe a special debt to Nancy Teeters, who broke the glass ceiling at the Fed when she became the first female member of the board in 1978.
Teeter was nominated in a different era, when the Equal Rights Amendment was under consideration and Jimmy Carter was president. Carter had gone on record as supporting an increase in the number of women and minorities serving in senior posts, so when Arthur Burns stepped down from the board in the spring of 1978, the search began. Filling the vacancy was deemed sufficiently important that Carter put Vice-President Walter Mondale in charge of creating lists of acceptable candidates, anticipating by many years the much-maligned "binders full of women" assembled by Mitt Romney's staff.
