Yeah, this is why diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Because they can be pawned if a woman has been abandoned and needs to have money on hand to rebuild a life.
tl;dr yes, women have absolutely been oppressed economically for a variety of reasons throughout US history (and elsewhere, this article focuses specifically on the US) but women owned and operated banks in the early 1900s and yes, had accounts and made deposits etc. Women could own property in the 1800s. They could make land claims. (Women: we can do genocide too!) Women could handle cash and payments. Women, in the workforce en masse during WWII, had bank accounts.
In fact, here is a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research which mentions that female servants in the 1850s in Philadelphia used their bank accounts to “[amass] large nest eggs through steady and slow accumulation” on the very first page! https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w4126/w4126.pdf
As per the jstor article, it was a formal protection of economic rights that came into action in 1974: “In the meantime, governments began to recognize the need to enshrine financial rights. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 gave every American woman, married or not, the right to open her own bank or credit account. It outlawed discrimination by both sex and race in banking.”
I’m not saying that women had equal opportunity, access, rights or privileges to banking as men. I am not saying banks and the banking industry as a whole did not have sexist policies for example some absolutely did want men to co-open accounts with women.
I am saying that A) believing these types of myths stops you from seeing the long and grueling fight for gender equality, which includes a lot of two steps forward three steps back, lies about how good and bad things were then and now, and purposeful forgetting to make you believe we’re fiiiiiinally at a point where ‘things are so good’. Playing into that is not helping gender equality.
B) i’m begging you please do even the most basic investigation when something sounds super shocking to you. Sometimes it may be true but often it’s exaggerated or outright false. a lot of the time it’s just way more nuanced and things fluctuate. what was true in the US in any given year may not be true 10 years later, it may not have been true 500 years earlier, it may or may not have been true at different locations throughout history. If we do not acknowledge this we’re again, living in a delusion about Now Is Progressive, Be Thankful For It And Forget History.
This is much clearer context, thanks.
Also, a family anecdote: my mom was telling me that back when she had a joint bank account with my dad, all the credit cards (including the one she used) were issued in his name only. She tried really hard to get one with her name and the banks were just like “this is how we do it, we use the husband’s name.” This would have been in the late 80s, early 90s.
Almost always, when you see a fact that “X demographic didn’t get Y right until [shockingly late date!]” it means that it wasn’t codified into federal, nationwide law (in the US) until that date.
Married women got the federal protection to open a credit card/bank account in their own name in 1974. Before that, it was a patchwork of state laws and company policies whether a married women needed her husband’s signature or not to do so. In 1973 (in 1960, in 1950, in 1940, in 1900) some women had the ability to open bank accounts in their own name, and some didn’t, depending on circumstances. In 1974 it was ruled that there were no circumstances where they weren’t allowed to do so.
It’s like saying that abortion was only legal after 1973: well, yes and no, depending. It’s like saying gay marriage was only legalized in 2015: well, yes and no, depending. It’s not that nobody had these rights beforehand; it’s that these laws and these rulings made it so that these rights applied to everybody.
Even saying “women got the right to vote in 1920” is like this! Women had a patchwork of state and local rights to vote in some state and local elections depending on where they lived and what the local laws were for decades before 1920, but only in 1920 was the federal right enshrined for all women citizens* to vote in all elections regardless of where they live or what their status is.
*and for example, at this point, only certain Native Americans were considered citizens—so when you say (as I see on tumblr periodically) “Native Americans didn’t get the right to vote until 1924,” it’s the same thing. Native Americans could be US citizens before this if they gave up their tribal citizenship, until a federal law was passed in 1924 called the Indian Citizenship Act which recognized all Native Americans within US borders as US citizens. It’s not that before 1924, no Native Americans were allowed to vote or be US citizens; it’s that afterwards, all Native Americans got US citizenship rights. Which also doesn’t mean discriminatory state laws didn’t prevent Native Americans, Black people, immigrants, women, etc. from voting, which is why the Voting Rights Act had to be passed and the Civil Rights Movement and the American Indian Movement and the Feminist Movement all had to happen—but. It’s not like a switch gets flipped and beforehand, no one has rights anywhere, and after, everyone has rights. That’s not how it’s ever worked.
amhrancas 