I can remember in the 1970’s and early 80’s that the grocery store was a bank.
It was common for people to cash their entire paycheck at the supermarket. You’d buy your groceries for $20, hand your paycheck of $150 to the cashier, after signing it “pay to Supermarket, Inc”, and the cashier gave you back $130.
The main reason for this was that the banks were open incredibly inconvenient hours, but the supermarket was open till 9 or 10 every night. Plus, I assume that it was a good deal for the supermarket, attracting customers.
You could also write a check for more than groceries cost and get cash back. But those aren’t the same as being a bank- it was more like being a no-fee check cashing service. urban1a is talking about bank branches in supermarkets that open accounts, take deposits and accept loan applications.
ding ding ding ding ding!!
Branch banking was a rarity in the U.S. until after WWII and interstate branches were specifically outlawed in 1927. So there were tens of thousands of banks in the U.S. A few were for the rich. The vast majority of them were for the people in their neighborhood, and almost every neighborhood, small town, and farm community had its own bank.
Banks certainly wanted small accounts. They needed deposits because they had to had enough reserves to make loans, and loans are a bank’s main business. Small depositors didn’t use many services and interest on a savings account always was less than interest on a loan. IOW, banks got capital for servicing large customers by having small customers give it to them. That’s also why banks failed as soon as there was a run on the money.
They encouraged deposits in several ways. First, they were safe. A local bank was conspicuously a “temple of commerce” with thick walls and a prominent huge safe. Depositors were meant to feel that stepping into the bank were a refuge from the dangerous world outside. Besides, they paid interest and money under your mattress didn’t. Moreover, banks often gave away small appliances and other useful items for starting an account.
Kids were taught to use banks from a young age, though a school banking program. Rex Stout, famous for his Nero Wolfe character, developed the first successful system and it made him rich. Then he lost it all in 1929 and started writing popular fiction. An article from 1922 says that 1,295,000 children participated. It was still going on in the late 1950s when I joined it. Literally nickels and dimes, with some quarters.
Here’s a citethat banks could (and often did) refuse credit cards to unmarried women, and married women required their husbands’ permission.
Credit cards are credit. Just like loans are credit. It’s agreed that women could have problems getting credit. Nobody has put forward any evidence that women could not create an account.
In order to get a mortgage or any type of loan prior to 1974, most women had to get a male co-signer. There were tales of successful single woman getting their senile fathers to sign for them. Apparently the only requirement was having a Y-chromosome.
But most banks would open a savings account for you.
In 1972, right after I married, I tried to open a savings account, but was not allowed to without my husband’s signature. This is a little different than the original post because I was married, not single, but it was still extremely annoying to me.
As I noted above, the province of Quebec (yes, I know that’s Canada, not the U.S., but it’s not exactly a Third World backwater) passed a law on the subject. From one of the tributes to Marie-Claire Kirkland, the first female member of Quebec’s National Assembly, who died earlier this year:
[Quote=Diane Bellemare, in Canada’s Senate]
She opened the door to economic independence for a whole generation of Quebec women when, on July 1, 1964, she helped pass Bill 16, a bill that was close to her heart.
This bill made major changes to the Quebec Civil Code regarding a married woman’s legal capacity to have a career and manage her own property. The bill put an end to the legal incapacity of married women by giving them the right to sign leases and open bank accounts without their husband’s written permission.
[/quote]
If, in Canada’s second most-populous province, a married woman had no LEGAL ability to open a bank account by herself as late as 1964, I don’t think it’s a great stretch to imagine married women had practical problems elsewhere. One of Kirkland’s motivations for the bill was that she, a member of her provincial legislature, could not sign a lease for an apartment in Quebec City during the legislative session, but had to get her husband to do so. (Any lease she signed without his consent was void and unenforceable as a matter of law prior to the passage of Bill 16.)
Well of course… Consider the extremely narrow mindset of the 1950’s, especially older male bankers…
A woman was likely to get married, if she wasn’t already; then she’d stay at home and pop out the kids, she’d no longer work, no income. (This was the same old-white-male mindset that would fire women as soon as they got married) In the Happy Days of the 1950s or earlier, the house was in the husband’s name, so was the car and the savings account; so she would have no assets worth chasing, she could happily run up a big debt and there would be no way to collect. I don’t know about the USA, but the joke in Canada was that the banks wouldn’t lend you money unless you didn’t really need it- they were notoriously risk-averse and wanted collateral out the wazoo. Mostly they loaned for house mortgages or later, car loans, where the property could be repossessed if you default. People who really needed money went to household loan companies (HFC was the big one in Ontario - gone, now that banks do consumer loans).
So two things have changed alongside anti-discrimination laws - first, communal property laws among other things mean that neither gender can hide assets from debt collectors in the spouse’s name, and the majority of women work outside the home and take home an income.
I’d like to add that our thinking has become more enlightened too, but sometimes you listen to the news and wonder…
According to Harry Golden’s “The Vertical Negro Plan” written in 1950s at least many of the banks appear not to have been segregated even though schools and restaurants were.
Shortly after my parents married in 1948, my father had to leave work, go to the bank and tell an officer that his wife was capable of handling the family’s money and that the bank should treat her as an equal customer to him. The officer had been telling my mother that women sometimes had difficulty handling these things and could get overwhelmed.
This was Galveston, Texas, around 1950. It doesn’t directly address whether women could open accounts, but it may speak to the attitude held by at least some banks. While it’s true that the words of one guy on the internet may be taken with a grain of salt, I did hear this story without any substantial changes throughout my life.
(On edit: It may be relevant that Mom lived with her father until she married. Even after they married she and Dad still lived with her father, with Dad converting the upstairs half of my grandfather’s house into a duplex apartment.)
It still is in rural areas. In my hometown in Eastern Washington State (about 8000 people) they still accept paychecks from local businesses or government jobs. It isn’t used very often since banking is so convenient these days and most people aren’t carrying huge amounts of cash anyway.
Canada is way ahead of the USA in banking tech, since generally there are only 5 major banks country-wide (and they are cash cows for the shareholders). Almost nobody issues paycheques any more, direct deposit is close to universal.
In one of the smaller towns I used to work in, they started this in the early 1970’s I think; and the joke was that so many of the plant workers had to suddenly explain to their wives why the pay was so much bigger, since they used to stop off at the bar and consume (or gamble away) a significant portion every Friday.
You misread my post.
I didn’t say it was illegal for a woman to have a bank account. It wasn’t illegal for businesses to serve black customers either - if they chose to do so. But many businesses chose to refuse black customers and many banks chose to refuse female customers.
I will concede that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 may not be the law that prohibited this practice. I found some sites that said it did but now that I’ve looked further I’ve found other sites that say the law only covered credit not general accounts. At this point I’m not even sure if it was a law that prohibited banks from refusing to allow women to open accounts; I’ve found accounts that imply it was an executive or judicial direction.
As for the reality of the situation vs legal theory, I found that the First Women’s Bank was founded in 1975 (a year after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was enacted) because enough women felt they weren’t being treated equally by existing banks to create a market for it.
We’re not talking ancient history either. The Supreme Court overturned “Head and Master” laws, which said that the husband had sole control of all marital property, in its Kirchberg v. Feenstra decision. That decision was issued in 1981.
Don’t draw too big a conclusion from one post. In the US direct deposit is ubiquitous:
I can’t find the same stats for Canada, but I doubt they are significantly higher.
Could you tell us where this was and what kind of bank?
The covenants for our HOA specify that if a home is owned by a woman, then her husband can vote for her in any meeting. There is not a reciprocal allowance for a home owned by a man.
My wife was not pleased when I pointed that out to her (the house is in both names, so it doesn’t actually apply).
That happened to a great aunt of mine back in the '60s. Her bank wouldn’t give her a home improvement loan without her younger brother co-signing, despite her making a lot more money than him. One of the excuse they gave her was that she might get married & stop working. She was in her 50s at the time & a confirmed spinster (she wanted to have a career & travel instead of being stuck at home taking care of a man). She eventually managed to go over the loan officer’s head to a bank executive by threating to close all of her accounts on the spot and got her loan.