STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
You know, getting credit or a mortgage or some other kind of loan can be a life-changing event. If the terms are good, it can drastically increase your financial power. There was a time when many people couldn't do this at all. Banks could legally discriminate against people based on their sex and marital status. Today marks the 50th anniversary of a law that banned that discrimination. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Here's what happened to Emily Card in the early 1970s when she applied for a credit card through her bank.
EMILY CARD: I was turned down. They sent me a letter back saying that I could not have a card in my own name, but if I wished for my husband to apply, he could.
ULABY: That was normal, standard practice - even though Card, at that time, made more money than her husband. She got a job in Washington, D.C., working for a Republican senator from Louisiana. He helped pass what became the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, by tacking it on to another piece of legislation. Card talked about this in an oral history. She said the legal language was simple.
CARD: Just a couple of sentences about not discriminating against women on account of sex or marital status. They didn't use the term gender back then.
ULABY: The law would be amended later on to also ban discrimination based on age, race and disability. It originally passed in 1974, in a bipartisan landslide.
ELIZABETH BABCOCK: It meant so much.
ULABY: That's Elizabeth Babcock. She directs a museum that has not yet opened. The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum should join other museums on the National Mall within the next 10 years. Until then, Babcock team is assembling oral histories, including Emily Card's, for a project about the history of American women's economic power. It kicked off today, to mark the anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. How easy it is to forget, Babcock says, that not only did married women have to have their husbands' names on their credit cards...
BABCOCK: But the credit history, if they were able to get approved, their husband would cosign it, and the credit history would accrue to him, not to her. So if your husband died or you got a divorce, all of a sudden, you were having to kind of start from scratch in trying to get access to capital and credit.
ULABY: And if you were a single woman on this day before 1974...
BABCOCK: You actually had to have another male relative, usually, cosign for any kind of access to credit or a credit card.
ULABY: So imagine trying to start your own business or buy your own house. A reminder, Babcock says, of how far we've come with something we now take for granted. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KARATE BOOGALOO'S "INCREDIBLE WONDERFUL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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