Jorie Lueloff ruined her credit the same way many women did in 1971: she got married. Now Jorie Lueloff Friedman, she visited Chicago department stores, trying to update her charge cards with her new name, and found she no longer had a credit history. She had a husband instead.
“We don’t care about women,” a clerk at Marshall Field & Co. told her. “Just men.”
That she had a good job — she became Chicago’s first female news anchor after joining WMAQ Channel 5 in 1966 — and a fat bank account didn’t matter. Her husband, globe-trotting lawyer and failed mayoral candidate Richard E. Friedman, mattered. Bonwit Teller closed her account rather than issue it in her new name.
That was common. A single woman applying for a credit card, or loan, would find herself quizzed about her marital plans. A married woman would be asked how many children she had and whether she planned to have more.
But change was afoot. Lueloff Friedman explained what would normally be a private frustration in front of a Washington hearing of the National Commission on Consumer Finance in 1972.
“The implication is that a woman has suddenly become a second-class citizen or an irresponsible child who can’t be trusted to pay her own bills — just because she got married,” she testified. “It’s not only unfair and demeaning, but ridiculous and unreasonable that a woman should have to forfeit her economic identity because she changed her name.”
She noted that American Express began sending her account’s bills to her husband and, when he didn’t pay them because she already had, suspended his card, causing him to be locked out of a hotel room.
Congress acted, passing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. President Gerald Ford signed it into law exactly 50 years ago Monday, on Oct. 28, 1974.
Everything old is new again. With a divisive presidential election close at hand, pivoting on the role of women in American society — can one be elected president? Should women be trusted to make their own reproductive choices? — it’s a timely moment that recalls the struggles that got us here, and the progress that could be undone.
A bit of context might be in order. Unquestioned male authority was on the ropes in 1974. President Richard Nixon had resigned that August. Ford pardoned him in September. Women’s rights were on the rise. In 1972, Title IX became law, allowing women equal access to educational opportunities. In 1973, the Supreme Court decided a woman could legally have an abortion. Illinois was one of 22 states that already forbade credit card companies from denying credit to a woman for reason of her sex alone.
“If your credit card application is rejected, you must be told why, and the reason cannot be that you are a woman or a wife,” Illinois Gov. Dan Walker said, signing the bill in September 1973. “If you can pay your bills, you are entitled to your own credit card.”
Sexism remained rampant. In the early 1970s, newspaper want ads were still divided by gender — men’s jobs and women’s jobs. Ads for men spoke of experience and reliability. Ads for women looked for attractiveness and youth. The former paid more — women earned about 60% of what men did, even doing similar work. (That figure is now about 84%).
Journalists can be lazy about history, and those citing 1974 as the year women could apply for credit cards in their own names without being run through a gantlet of irrelevant questions haven’t bothered looking at the law, an omnibus banking bill that dealt first with deposit insurance rates and only eventually found its way to women.
Nobody was in a big rush. The law didn’t even take effect until a year after it was signed. Banks and department stores needed time to wrap their heads around this change (Sears told the Sun-Times it didn’t like to give women separate accounts from their husband “to avoid confusion.”) Feminists complained the law didn’t have teeth — punitive damages were limited to $10,000. The law was amended two years later to give it more enforcement heft, and add protections for religion, race, age and national origin. A reminder that rights won by one oppressed group tend to expand to others, over time.
But just as increasing rights builds momentum, so does constricting them. There is no guarantee that the rollback of women’s liberty will stop at the third of the country where abortion now is illegal or severely constrained. Indeed, religious fundamentalists are busy pushing for a nationwide ban. They’ve also turned their gaze to contraception, access to which the Supreme Court granted women in 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird.
Staying still is seldom an option in society. We are always either moving forward. Or going back.