06/18/2026
When I got married in 1977, my first husband still held the belief that I shouldn’t have a credit card of my own. He went so far as to tell me it wasn’t allowed without his signature. I was young & didn’t know…til I did.
In the spring of 1974, an American woman with a steady salary, a credit history, and a job title could not, in most states of the union, walk into a bank and open a credit card account in her own name. If she was married, her husband had to co-sign. If she was divorced, a male relative had to guarantee her debts. If she was single and successful, her father had to vouch for her income, even if her income exceeded his.
This was not the relic of a vanished era. This was the law in the country in which Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record, and Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
Half the adult population of the United States was, in financial terms, a legal minor.
Congress, that summer, sat down to fix it.
Then they wrote a draft that left women out.
The bill in question was the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. It had been working its way through both chambers since the previous year. Its purpose was to prohibit lenders from discriminating against applicants on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, or whether the applicant received public assistance. By the time it reached markup in the House Banking and Currency Committee in June of 1974, the draft language did not include any reference to the s*x or marital status of the borrower.
This was not, the historians of the period have written, a matter of conscious exclusion. The men who had drafted the bill had simply not thought of women as a category of borrower to whom the protections of the legislation needed to apply.
There was one woman in the room when they were about to vote it out of committee.
Her name was Lindy Boggs. She had been born on a sugar plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, in 1916. She had graduated from Newcomb College in New Orleans in 1935. She had married a young Tulane Law School graduate named Hale Boggs in 1938. He had been elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1940 and had spent the next thirty-two years in it, eventually rising to House Majority Leader. They had four children. Lindy had run his Capitol Hill office for most of that time, organized his political campaigns, and built one of the most respected social networks in Washington. She had not, throughout that career, held an elected office of her own.
On October 16, 1972, a small twin-engine aircraft Hale Boggs had boarded in Anchorage, Alaska, en route to a campaign event in Juneau, had disappeared. A military search lasting thirty-nine days had turned up no wreckage. The aircraft had never been found. In January of 1973, after his death was formally recognized, his House seat had been declared vacant.
In March of 1973, Lindy had run for it. She had won. She had been sworn in on March 20, 1973, as the first woman ever elected to Congress from Louisiana. She had been fifty-seven years old. She had been a widow for five months.
By June of 1974, she was the only woman on the House Banking and Currency Committee.
She read the draft of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act carefully. She saw the categories it protected. She saw the category it did not.
According to her own account, given in her 1994 memoir Washington Through a Purple Veil, she did not raise the issue in open debate. She took the bill back to her office. She wrote, in pen, into the margin of the draft, the four words "s*x or marital status." She had her staff make copies. She returned to the committee room. She distributed the amended draft to every member of the committee with a smile. Then she said, in roughly the words that became the most quoted line of her career, that she was sure it had been an oversight that this committee would not have wanted to leave out half the population.
Nobody objected. The amendment passed.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, as amended by Lindy Boggs, was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on October 28, 1974. From that day forward, no lending institution operating in the United States of America could legally deny a credit card, a mortgage, a small business loan, or any other form of credit on the basis that the applicant was a woman, or that the applicant was unmarried, or that the applicant was divorced, or that the applicant was widowed, or that the applicant was married but applying in her own name without her husband's signature.
The history of American women's financial autonomy, as a matter of federal law, dates from that signing. Tens of millions of working women alive today have signed their first mortgage, opened their first business account, and built their first credit history because of the legislative consequence of five words added to a draft by hand in the spring of 1974, by a fifty-eight-year-old widow from Louisiana who had thought, when she made the change, that she was simply pointing out an oversight.
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