Gloria Steinem died recently. Her efforts on behalf of equality for women started before I came of age as a college student and lasted for decades. Hers was a remarkable journey and an inimitable life. Her push for fundamental rights for women to control their own lives and make their own decisions made her both a hero and a target, depending on perspectives. She was forceful, to be sure, but she also has been described as never raising her voice. That may have been her super power.
One of the important rights that is being discussed within the context of Gloria Steinem’s death is equal credit rights for women. Many young women today, especially, do not realize that the legislation assuring those rights is not that old and that until 1974 the right did not exist. Before then, women could not get bank loans or credit cards without the support of a male. Husbands and fathers were required to co-sign to provide the assurance that the woman would live up to her financial obligations.
I wrote a law review article about this in the early 1980s. Credit Opportunity for Women: The ECOA and Its Effects was published in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1981. At the time, I was a young associate working for a client on some credit matters and came across this history. I was active with the DC Women’s Bar Association, and I was asked to write a paper and present it to a joint meeting of the bar and students at Georgetown Law. That paper later became a law review article.
The thing I remember best about presenting the paper was the gasp in the lecture hall when I announced to the young women gathered there that six years earlier, when they were in high school or college, they could have been denied a credit card by Bloomingdales or Woodward and Lothrop, a DC favorite at the time. Presumably most of them had not applied for credit in the past, and these young women were as clueless as I had been. I think I noticed them clinging to their credit cards as they left the lecture hall.
There are many rights that women have fought hard for and won in my lifetime, but this one is special for me and affects women on a near daily basis. Think about it. How would a woman today carry on her life without access to credit? How would she shop on-line now that most of the shopping malls are gone? How would she renew her driver’s license without traipsing over to the closest DMV to spend half a day waiting in line? How would she secure a home loan?
Yes, babies, we have come a long way. Longer than you may have realized.
