Roberta Karmel, First Female SEC Commissioner, Dies at 86 (1)

Roberta Karmel, the first woman to serve on the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a critic who said the agency too often tried to make policy through enforcement actions, has died. She was 86.

She died on March 23 at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, the New York Times reported, citing her son, Solomon Karmel. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Founded in 1934 to protect investors who had been hurt in the Great Depression, the SEC had only male commissionersthrough its first four decades under seven presidents.

Roberta Karmel

Photographer: Bill Johnson/The Denver Post/Getty Images

President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, changed that in ...