October 28, 1974: THE EQUAL CREDIT ACT
Fifty years ago today, President Gerald Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Until then, women could not get mortgages, business loans or credit cards in their own names. Without a male cosigner -- husbands, fathers, brothers or friends, who were assumed to be more credit worthy – banks were unwilling to loan women money. The laws kept women financially dependent. Today anyone age eighteen or older can apply for a credit card or loan, based only on their credit history.
In 1974, sixteen women served in the House of Representatives (14D, 2R) and none in the Senate. There were three women on the Banking and Currency Committee (today the Committee on Financial Services): Margaret Heckler (R-MA), Lenore Sullivan (D-MO) and Corinne Boggs (D-LA). Sullivan was the senior member, Heckler wrote the draft law and Boggs, who had not yet served a full term, amended it.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was part of an amendment to the 1950 Federal Deposit Insurance Act. The ECOA outlawed discrimination against credit applicants on account of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age or the use of public assistance. During mark up, the process of correcting text before printing, Boggs added “sex” and “marital status.”
Boggs was a seasoned politician but a new addition to the committee, having won a special election in March 1973. When the original draft failed to include protections for women, Boggs inserted the necessary words, took her version to the copier, and returned with the amended pages. As she handed them out, she observed, “Knowing the members of this Committee as well as I do, I’m sure it was just an oversight that we didn’t have ‘sex’ or ‘marital status’ included. I’ve taken care of that and I trust it meets with the Committee’s approval.” The committee unanimously endorsed her wording.
Representative Corinne (Lindy) Claiborne Boggs (D-LA) was the widow of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, whose seat had been declared vacant after his plane went missing on a trip to Alaska. Coming from a family engaged in Louisiana politics for centuries, she was a skillful politician. Half of a DC power couple, the mother of three had managed her husband’s office and run his campaigns. In the 1974 general election, she would garner 80% of the vote in her New Orleans district. Boggs served eighteen years. One colleague declared her “the only widow I know who is really qualified – damn qualified – to take over,” a compliment that insulted many capable Congresswomen. Boggs said her only reservation about running had been doing it “without a wife.” She believed “almost all women’s issues are economic issues. Women vote their pocketbooks.”
Even though Democrats controlled the House, in a more bipartisan era, Heckler was the bill’s lead sponsor. The ECOA was introduced in the House in October 1973 and passed in February 1974, by 282-94. The Senate passed an amended version in June by 89-0. Because of the Senate’s changes, the bill went to conference committee. Its version passed the House 355-1, the Senate approved it on a voice vote and President Ford signed it on October 28, 1974. Enforcement was the responsibility of the Federal Reserve Board. Passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act transferred that authority to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
President Ford signs the Women’s Equality Day bill in August 1974. Lindy Boggs and Peggy Heckler are third and second from right.
Historically, across cultures and continents, women were considered the physical property of men. Common law, based on precedent rather than statutes in England and its colonies, derived from French feudalism. It divided females into femme sole, “woman alone,” or femme covert, literally a “covered [married] woman.” Coverture meant that women under the protection of men had no legal identity. Femmes sole were unmarried, widowed, divorced or protected by a prenuptial agreement -- and rare. Daughters were married off, women seldom survived to become widows, divorce was unacceptable and few women had any income to control. Married women, protected and controlled by husbands, shared the status of the infant, infirm, or insane.
Married women could not independently own or inherit property, keep wages, make wills, sign contracts, bring a lawsuit, divorce or have custody of children, who legally belonged to their fathers. Were an abused wife to escape her marriage, she could take only the clothes on her back. Husbands were responsible for their wives’ debts and had to provide their widows with a “dower right” or one-third of their estate. (Think the Dowager Duchess of Bridgerton, who did not immediately retire to the Dower House, because her daughter-in-law, the new Duchess, needed her help, as did the Netflix series plot.)
Among the first challenges to coverture in the United States were married women’s property laws. At the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton railed against sundry “injuries and usurpations” by men, including making “married [women], in the eye of the law, legally dead . . . upon the false supposition of [male] supremacy.” Motivated by economic self-interest, wealthy fathers like hers did not want their assets squandered by untrustworthy sons-in-law. The conservative Judge Cady lobbied the Albany legislature to enact married women’s property rights later that year. It was one of the few times father and daughter were allied.
The New York statute became a template, but it was not the first. In 1839, Mississippi granted married women the right to own but not control property in their own name. It was enacted to allow Betsy Love Allen to keep slaves she had inherited from her father from her husband’s creditors. Technically she did not own the slaves but held them in trust. In 1842, New Hampshire allowed wives to own and manage property during the incapacity of husbands. In 1844, Maine granted married women licenses to trade.
The catalyst for change was never economic equality. These reforms were intended to keep assets intact or deal with domestic emergencies. As the Illinois Supreme Court declared in 1867, “it is simply impossible that a married woman should be able to control and enjoy property as if she were sole, without practically leaving her at liberty to annul the marriage.”
The exception was the American West, where scarcity made women valuable. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory offered women the right to vote, hold public office, serve on juries, own and inherit property, have custody of children and earn equal pay as teachers. An effort to repeal this blatant attempt to attract women was vetoed by the governor, because Wyoming needed a population of 60,000 to apply for statehood. Western states – Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, and Montana – were the first to grant women suffrage before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1916, Montana sent the first woman to Congress, Republican rancher Jeannette Rankin.
National suffrage did not immediately lead to removal of other gender-based legal limitations. Coverture lingered into the 1970s. For example, in 1972, when Billie Jean King, five-time Wimbledon singles championship, threatened to boycott the US Open to secure equal prize money, she could not get a credit card in her own name. King, the first female athlete to earn more than $100,000, supported her graduate student spouse, because credit was based on a husband’s income.
Before the ECOA, if a woman was over thirty, half of her income counted as an asset. Her entire salary counted if she was over forty or had been sterilized. Divorced and single women were considered poor credit risks. Women with absent, abusive, hospitalized or imprisoned husbands were required to have their signatures on leases or contracts.
Women still confront obstacles to economic equity. Working women are hampered by lack of access to affordable childcare, limited family leave policies, wage differentials and deeply rooted sex-role socialization. Working mothers are expected to stay home with a sick child or be on-call for emergencies. Ruth Bader Ginsburg once reminded a school principal that her children had two parents.
The ECOA does not comprehensively protect LGBTQ people. Many states and localities deny LGBTQ people mortgages, credit cards, student loans or other types of credit. Efforts have been taken to remedy the issue by amending the ECOA with the Freedom from Discrimination in Credit Act, but it has not yet passed. In rare cases, some courts have expanded the legal definition of “sex” to include LGBTQ people.
Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, 77, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for advancing our understanding of women in the work force. She described the 1970s as a “revolutionary” period for women. Higher levels of education, available birth control and later marriage allowed women to make major advances in the labor market. Her research also identified how uneven closing the gender wage gap has been. Women in the US still make 80 cents for every dollar men earn. In the past, the differential was explained by different choices men and women make in college majors and occupations. Dr. Goldin has shown that the difference in earnings between men and women in the same job kicks in after the birth of a first child. Her conclusion: “We are never going to have gender equality until we have couple equality.” Couples also need to be supported by institutions and employers willing to change their traditional patterns and practices.
SOURCES:
Photo credit: public domain
Catherine Allgor, “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know but Should,” National Women’s History Museum (September 4, 2014), www.womenshistory.org/articles/covertyre-word-you-probably-dont-know-should
Lindy Boggs, Washington Through a Purple Veil: Memoirs of a Southern Woman (Harcourt, 1994).
Elisabeth Griffith, Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
Jessica Kratz, “On the Basis of Sex: Equal Credit Opportunities,” National Archives (March 22, 2023), https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/03/22/on-the-basis-of-sex-equal-credit-opportunities/
Jenn Smialek, “Claudia Golden Wins Nobel in Economics for Studying Women in the Work Force, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/economy/claudia-golden-nobel-prize-economics.html
This was so important to my mother and me. She was managing the family finances since my alcoholic father could not. I could get a credit card without his signature.