Surprise, Surprise: Another Popular Feminist Claim Turns Out To Be False

Women denied credit cards? Nope.

A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago …. We couldn’t have anything ….” (see 1:50:37).

Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago ….”

The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.

My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.

My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?

Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards.” Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.

A search for the truth led me to a voluminous compilation of documents called Economic Problems of Women, prepared for the United States Congress in 1973, when extensive hearings and investigations were being conducted into the matter. Far from wishing to deny women credit, the authors of the compilation and the members of Congress for whom it was produced were determined to ferret out any form of unfair treatment, no matter how occasional or case-specific. A report on “Equal Credit Legislation” found that difficulties in acquiring credit, where they existed, stemmed from the particularities of marriage and divorce (see a summary on p. 446 of Economic Problems of Women). While real, such difficulties were not based in misogyny and, once identified, they were quickly remedied through protective legislation.

**

The fact that hearings were held, and widely reported, on the question of whether women’s credit applications were being fairly handled demonstrates either that the nascent women’s movement had, by the early 1970s, already transformed America into a feminist-compliant society or—less bombastically—that the country had always been, and remained, attentive to women’s declared needs.

Let’s return to the substance of the false feminist claim. The item in The Globe and Mail begins, typically, with a dramatic untruth:

“Credit cards might seem like an inescapable part of everyday life, but it wasn’t long ago that half the population wasn’t allowed to have one. That’s right: until 1974, women did not have the right to open their own credit cards.”

The statement is an outright lie. The only truth it tells is how easily women’s anger and men’s guilt are regularly manipulated in our post-truth world.

The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.

Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.

Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?

“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own—they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”

The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.

At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.

But what about unmarried women, or married women who wanted their own cards separate from their husbands’ accounts?

They could get cards too, so long as they showed the ability to pay. Here is Mr. Norman Lee, credit supervisor for Bank Americard at the Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, testifying for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, just one year after the anti-discrimination bill went into effect. Admitting that he wasn’t familiar with all the details of the new law, he stressed his and others’ eagerness to market credit cards to as many consumers as could afford them. “What I am trying to say [is that] age, sex, and this is not relevant to our decision,” he told the Committee:

“Remember here again, as I have said before, we are in business to make money, as most banks are, and any time we have a chance to put on a customer to increase our potential income—that application is going to be approved if creditworthy” (Advisory Committee, p. 23).

Is it possible that Norman Lee was lying to protect himself and his bank? That’s what the feminists would say. But why? Did he harbor a desire to prevent as many women as possible from having credit cards, even if it cost him his job and the bank’s profits? Was he willing to sacrifice his own professional advancement in order to pursue a hopeless misogynistic commitment? More likely, he was telling the simple truth about the business interests of the bank he worked for and of other banks he knew. If women were at times denied credit, it was most likely because they had not adequately demonstrated their credit-worthiness. There was certainly no general prohibition on credit cards for women.

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading through a series of reports (Economic Problems of Women) prepared for the 93^rd Congress of the United States in 1973, the year that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed. I also read a (mercifully, shorter) report prepared by the Kansas Advisory Committee for the U.S. government’s Commission on Civil Rights, titled The Availability of Credit to Kansas Women, which quotes from advisory committee hearings in other states as well.

I’ve read the testimony of bank managers, bank employees, credit bureau employees, and women’s advocates. The result is a mixed bag of claims and attestations, many of them unverified and unverifiable, at least some of them by feminist advocates pursuing their agenda. The committees heard from branch managers of banks and lending institutes, many of whom denied discriminating based on sex while, in some cases, acknowledging that they preferred granting joint credit to husband and wife. Most of the specific evidence I quote below is drawn from the Kansas Advisory Committee report.

What that report most clearly reveals is that in the early 1970s, within a decade of credit cards becoming widely used, feminist advocates launched a campaign to make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex or marital status, and American lawmakers eagerly complied. One might even conclude that the lawmakers went out of their way to publicize their willingness to correct a problem that could not definitively be shown to exist. In a few short years after credit cards were introduced into America, legal limits were placed on creditors’ ability to decide for themselves how they ran their businesses.

The hundreds of pages of testimony and findings do not indicate that women were unfairly discriminated against as women. In fact, the Kansas Advisory Committee, which advertised for women to testify and clearly expected to find examples of discrimination, admitted that they did not find a single unmarried woman who reported being denied a credit card for any reason (Advisory Committee, p. 57).

The cases in which credit issues were reported related specifically to married life. Some women complained that joint marital credit accounts, in both husband’s and wife’s names, were created when they married, without their asking for such to be done. Joint accounts could become a problem following a divorce, when the credit history associated with the account would follow the husband and not the wife under the assumption that he had been the one paying the card’s debt. (As the Advisory Committee report notes at p. 19, there was a live question as to whether a man was legally responsible for his wife’s debts in any case.)

If joint credit was assigned to the husband after divorce, a divorced woman could find herself having to re-establish (or establish) credit on her own. “Jaimie Ritchie, of Topeka, told the Advisory Committee that she had worked 4 years during the 5 1/2 year period of her marriage. During that time, she and her husband held several joint charge accounts and paid two car loans. Following her divorce, she said, she could not claim any of this credit history since it had all been reported in her husband’s name to credit bureaus in cities where they had lived” (Advisory Committee, p. 34).

Without specific information on this case, it is not possible to know how severely Jaimie Ritchie was shortchanged after divorce. She seems to have believed herself entitled to claim credit for any amount she had paid into a shared account; but she did not acknowledge how much her husband had paid. She admitted that she hadn’t worked for the full period of the marriage; her husband most likely had. Did she shoulder half the couple’s financial burden? One third? One tenth? Her husband, meanwhile, had all the legal responsibility for the debt in his name; and it is quite possible that Jaimie Ritchie would not have lived nearly so well, or been able to pay back so much borrowing, by herself. Having to establish credit from scratch after the divorce may have been difficult for her, but it was not clearly a case of sex discrimination.

It was possible for a married woman to ask for a credit account in her own name in order to avoid this type of problem; many women didn’t know, or didn’t choose, to ask. The Kansas Advisory Committee heard that the Credit Bureau of Lawrence, Kansas would separate files of married couples upon request at no charge. Not all women wanted their accounts separated.

“Mr. Wesley Fitzgerald told the Advisory Committee: I have encouraged it [married women establishing their own credit files]. I have talked to several groups. Well, let me put it this way--I don’t encourage them to separate it or not separate it because there are many women who don’t want to separate files and· there are many who want separate files. That’s their privilege. All I encourage is if a woman wants a separate file, that she come down and go over it with us and separate the files. In fact, I had ads on the radio--I ran ads 9 months last year encouraging people to go down and look over their credit reports” (Advisory Committee, p. 35).

Again, it is impossible to know how many married women, if any, were discouraged from taking out credit cards in their own names, and how many actually had the capacity to pay for them. Many credit managers were adamant about their policy of non-discrimination. Mr. J.H. Sinnard, the credit manager of J.M. McDonald Company in Hastings, Nebraska submitted to the Advisory Committee that “Based upon the character and capacity of the applicant, the financial position of the applicant, information received from credit bureau checks which will set forth the satisfactory paying habits of the applicant, personal knowledge of the applicant and the credit interview, we will grant credit to any qualified adult.”

He also submitted that the company’s policy pertaining to names on accounts was that “If a woman wishes to open an account in her name, her maiden name or her married name, we will do so. […] In no instance do we require the signature of the spouse before opening an account” (Advisory Committee, p. 53).

More extensive research would be required to unearth all the details behind the many allegations and anecdotes collected in the volumes I consulted. One can certainly conclude, however, that women were not denied credit cards across the board. At worst, some lenders believed married men a more reliable credit risk than married women, and some women had trouble (re-)establishing a credit history after divorce.

**

Sympathy for women permeated the Kansas Advisory Committee report, which concluded that “Credit-worthy women who have been denied credit often find that they must make persistent efforts to obtain the credit to which they are entitled” (p. 65). Whether they were denied due to sex prejudice, bureaucratic mistake, employee carelessness, or simple over-caution is very difficult to determine. Regardless, having to make a “persistent effort” to obtain something is not at all the same as being unable to obtain it at all.

By the time of the hearings and the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the early 1970s, women were active members of America’s consumer society. They found a ready and willing ear in a majority-male government for complaints about their difficulties. Fifty years on, feminists should at last stop fabricating an organized oppression that didn’t exist.