Getting credit was a major problem for women. No mortgage would be issued to a woman by herself. There were cases of women taking their senile old fathers out of nursing homes to the bank to co-sign their mortgage loans. Apparently the only qualification was having a penis.
I’ve never heard of anything like that (admittedly, I’m too young so I’m ready to be corrected by someone who experienced that, but so far I doubt that). I would guess that banks would care about an applicant’s creditworthiness, not their sex, when approving or rejecting a loan. Granted, there certainly was, and arguably still is, a correlation between sex and income, and certainly there is a correlation between income and creditworthiness; in other words, banks may have rejected a lot of loan applications from women because these women were not considered to have a sufficient income to ensure repayment. But even in the days before the feminist movement, there certainly were women of independent means, or even of considerable wealth, around, and I would find it hard to believe that banks would not give these women a loan simply because of their sex.
The issue was that banks would not consider a woman’s income- she might get married, have kids and stop working and therefore that income could disappear at any time. If a married couple wanted to buy a house , only the husband’s income would be considered when determining how much of a mortgage they qualified for. I’m sure there were some women it didn’t affect - if their wealth/income didn’t depend on them working , then the bank needn’t worry that they would stop working.
And I would guess that restaurants would care about a potential customer’s wallet size and ability and desire to masticate and swallow–not their skin color–when approving or rejecting an attempt to order from the menu.
Turns out my guess is wrong though. 
That analogy fails because the restaurant owner might worry about other patrons, who may well be racist assholes with a dislike for dining in the presence of members of another race. Thus, the restaurant might turn down a black customer in the hope of retaining the other, white, ones. But you don’t have that effect in banking - even the most chauvinist male client A will not care, and indeed not even know, about whether female customer B also got a loan from that bank or not.
It’s an empirical question whether individual restaurant owners refused to serve black people because of their own prejudice, that of others, or some complicated mess of those factors and others.
But it’s almost certain that very many of the restaurant owners were themselves racists who wouldn’t choose on their own to serve black people. It would be really strange if most people in the south except for restaurant owners were racists!
So the point of the analogy–that you can’t account for business behavior completely just by looking at the ledgers–still finds its mark.
Says you. 
So your claim is that, prior to desegregation and the civil rights movement, banks would happily grant mortgage loans to non-white applicants?
My claim was about discrimination by gender, not by colour of skin. But if you want to transpose the argument, then my claim is that even prior to desegregation and the civil rights movement, banks would look at an applicant’s creditworthiness, and not their colour of skin, when making the decision. I concede that the income of black applicants was, on average, lower and less secure than that of white applicants as a result of segregation and discrimination, which made it more difficult for blacks to achieve the same level of creditworthiness. But I think that, all else equal, a sufficiently creditworthy black applicant would have got a loan.
That looks like a fairly objectively answerable question. Ima ax it on the GQ.
You would guess wrong.
If a woman was married, her money didn’t belong to her, but to her husband. If she wasn’t married, she could get married at any time, and her money would then belong to her husband, not to her. He had control of the money, legally.
Now, some wives had pretty much exclusive control of the money, either because she was better at it or because he was henpecked. But legally, all the money was under his control, even money that she had earned or inherited.
You’d be wrong here, too. Bank loan officers DIDN’T look past the color of the applicant’s skin, in most cases. Being black meant that the applicant didn’t stand a chance of getting a loan in most banks. If he could get a loan, then he had to pay a much higher interest rate than an applicant who was almost identical in all ways except race.
It was a different world back then, with very different rules. It was considered perfectly acceptable to judge a person by race, religion, and sex. People were put into pigeonholes, and woe betide the square peg that was being forced into a round hole.
I’m not sure that was the case during the time frame of the ERA. Maybe in some states, but I think you have to go a long way back to find those kinds of laws. The problem at 40 years ago was that there were no regulations stopping banks from behaving in that manner.
Please correct me if I am mistaken.
You’re probably referring to the common law doctrine of femme couverte, aka coverture, whereby on marriage the woman’s legal personality was merged into that of the husband. But this principle was overridden statutorily in both England and the U.S. over the course of the 19th century (cite). It might still be that, as a matter of practice, men would interfere in the management of their wives’ wealth, but after the abandonment of coverture there was no question that a woman’s money was legally hers, not her husband’s. Community property principles may restrict her freedom to dispose of it, but they don’t transfer that freedom to the husband either.
I read the original article. SCOTUS ruled unanimously in 1971 that the 14th Amendment outlawed sexual discrimination. Thank you for pointing out a source that says I’m correct 
In the 1960s, my grandmother inherited some property. My grandfather was able to legally sell this property, against her wishes, because he was her husband. She hadn’t given him the property, or even put him on the deed. However, because he was her husband, he was able to sell it. She consulted a lawyer, who told her that this was perfectly legal in Texas. Maybe the lawyer, the real estate agent, and everyone else were wrong about the law…but this happened, and apparently it was legal in Texas at that time.
That sounds something like community property (IANA lawyer, don’t know the exact definition of community property). But are you saying your grandmother could not have sold property jointly owned by your grandfather without his permission?
It also shows that even a Supreme Court justice is not convinced that the 14th amendment outlaws sexual discrimination, which to my mind indicates an obvious need for an amendment such as the ERA.
Ok guys, why doesn’t the equal protection clause rule out gender discrimination?
I’ll testify, having been alive and pretty politically aware at the time, that I heard an enormous amount of protests from people which fell into the two issues brought up earlier:
- Mandatory same-sex bathrooms.
- Women being drafted.
Another thing which I would hear older people say was a somewhat simpleminded statement that “if the Government declares men and women equal, then men will stop holding doors for women.” I shit you not, I heard older adults say this while their peers would nod their heads sagely. There was this bizarre notion among “the Greatest Generation” that the continual decline of Society from their Pleasant Valley 1950’s world would be accelerated by not treating women as second-class citizens.
The location of the house was also a factor. Even after restrictive covenants became legally unenforceable banks would often refuse a black client a loan to buy a house in a white neighborhood even if he somehow manged to get a real estate agent to show in the house or arranged a private sale with the owner.
I had a maiden great aunt. She was a teacher/missionary and had “some family money”. After moving back to the US from Brazil circa 1960 she decided to buy her first house (having already inherited “the family house” in another state and renting to my grandparents). Her loan officer was new and initially insisted that her little brother (grandpa) cosign the loan. He came close to getting fired after she made a senior VP review her financial info and personally wait on her.
Lynn, do you know if your grandfather ever admitted it was wrong of him to sell the property? Did your grandmother ever retaliate against him for that? I know that when I was a teenager (about 35 years ago), my mother was angry that my father didn’t legally have to list her as a beneficiary of his pension (but did, because she yelled at him until he did). That was when she became in favor of the ERA.