On its face, the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act was a win in this country’s ongoing struggle for gender equality. The Act made it illegal for lenders to discriminate against applicants based on sex or marital status. It applied to retail and credit cards as well as to banks and home mortgages.Footnote 1 I became interested in it while working on a book about racism and credit discrimination. Yet when I began to investigate its passage, I discovered something odd.
Scholars write respectfully about the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977—all of which, like the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), fought credit discrimination. While scholars acknowledge that these laws, like virtually every piece of civil rights legislation ever passed, did not eradicate the problems they addressed, scholars nevertheless view them as useful.Footnote 2 From the 1970s through the early 2000s, writers and scholars similarly praised the ECOA for helping to ease blanket restrictions on women’s access to credit. Starting in the 2010s, however, first-rate scholars in history, political science, and sociology published analyses of the ECOA that critiqued it in oddly similar language. First, they depicted the women who fought for the ECOA as “affluent,” “individualistic,” selfish, and racist (and, by extension, white). Second, they minimized the ECOA’s successes in challenging credit discrimination against women, instead critiquing the law as deeply flawed or even “meaningless.”Footnote 3 They seemed to hold feminist activists to unusually high standards of moral perfection, and the law itself to expectations of comprehensiveness rarely applied to other anti-discrimination laws. Ironically, their implication that credit discrimination against women was of concern to affluent white women only also impeded their ability to write intersectionally about the ways that racist and sexist discrimination (in this case in the granting of credit) together created obstacles for Black economic well-being.
Recent scholarly critiques of the ECOA and the activists who fought for it are worth interrogating. In the following essay, therefore, I write about two eras. First, I focus on the 1970s, when feminists organized to pass the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.Footnote 4 To challenge recent scholars’ assumption that credit discrimination against women was largely a white bourgeois concern, I begin by showing how credit discrimination affected women of all classes and races before the 1974 passage of the ECOA. I discuss African American women’s experiences of credit discrimination based on gender, and its impact on their communities. I then turn to the 1970s activists who fought for the passage of the ECOA, particularly Representative Leonor Sullivan (D-MO), who was key to the law’s passage. I pay particular attention to their expectations of the law and their assumptions about the law’s beneficiaries.
The second part of this essay turns to the 2010s. I look at four scholarly works about the ECOA published in that decade and consider whether their depictions of activists’ beliefs and of the law’s limits are historically accurate. I also pay close attention to these scholars’ use of terms such as “affluent,” “individualistic,” and “selfish” to describe the law’s supporters. Such words deserve scrutiny because, as I will describe below, they echo misogynist tropes that have long been invoked to describe women who contest their place in the social order. (To be clear, I am not arguing that these excellent scholars used such language with misogynist intent; the recurrence of these tropes across scholarly works of the 2010s was surely inadvertent).
I highlight characterizations of ECOA proponents as rich, selfish, and individualistic to make this larger point: Scholars who write about women must learn to identify misogynist tropes. Scholars who have not been trained to notice and, at the very least, seriously question misogynist tropes can easily slip into using them. They are more likely to do so during periods of misogynist backlash, when such tropes permeate popular culture. Starting in the 2010s, we are arguably experiencing such a period, as shown, for example, in recent losses in reproductive self-determination, the pressure on ever-younger women to police their own appearance and to engage in risky sexual behaviors, the emergence of “tradwives,” and, not least, popular and scholarly belittlement of white women and “white feminism” (discussed further below). Today, attacks on “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals” permeate conservative media, even as attacks on so-called “Karens” (spoiled, demanding white women who symbolize white liberal racism) remain commonplace in progressive communities.Footnote 5 Recent scholars’ mischaracterizations of the ECOA—a law they depict as passed by and largely benefitting selfish, politically narrow-minded, upper-middle-class or “affluent” white women—may inadvertently demonstrate how, during periods of misogynist backlash such as our own, scholars’ uncritical use of misogynist tropes can compromise their efforts to write accurately about past feminist activism.Footnote 6
Credit Discrimination Against Women Before the ECOA
Before 1974, women of all races and classes suffered discrimination in the granting of credit. They had difficulty accessing everything from credit cards and consumer loans to home mortgages. The 1968 Fair Housing Act was intended to end credit discrimination in the rental or sale of homes, but “sex” or “marital status” were not among the identities it protected. This was a major omission. For example, racial discrimination in mortgage lending was sometimes subtle and, after 1968, illegal on paper. Yet discrimination by sex and marital status was overt and legal. As a 1974 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights study on mortgage lending found, lenders’ criteria “virtually require sex discrimination.”Footnote 7
Institutionalized sex discrimination in the granting of credit hurt all women, but it had a particularly harsh impact on African American women and communities. We can start with discrimination against married women. Lenders either discounted or excluded the earnings of married women when considering a couple’s income, and hence their ability to repay a loan. They excluded wives’ earnings, in whole or in part, because they were assumed to be inherently unstable. This was because wives could become pregnant at any time. As women’s rights historian Flora Davis wrote in 1991, the credit industry treated “all women as if they were walking wombs, perpetually pregnant or on the brink of pregnancy.”Footnote 8 To hedge the threat of pregnancy, which lenders assumed would inevitably be followed by wives’ withdrawal from paid labor, many lenders required female borrowers to produce a “baby letter.” Written by her physician, it detailed the form of birth control she used. Some lenders even demanded that a wife promise to “terminate pregnancy” should she conceive.Footnote 9 Because of the assumption that only women cared for their children, men were free of such demands, although they too could become fathers at any time. Lenders demanded this information of married women even though by 1972, 42 percent of all married women in the United States worked for wages, as did almost 52 percent of Black married women.Footnote 10 Lenders, nevertheless, insisted that it was risky to include the income of working wives in their calculations.Footnote 11
Discounting wives’ income had harsh implications for Black families. As noted, while congressional testimony in 1972 estimated that 52 percent of married Black women worked for wages, a 1974 report claimed that in two-thirds of Black families where a husband and wife were present, both held paying jobs. When Black men were the sole breadwinners, Black family income was 66 percent that of median white income. When both husbands and wives worked, their joint income was 89 percent of median white income. This could enable home ownership—but not if the wife’s income was automatically discounted. Discrimination against working wives thus blocked Black Americans’ access to home mortgage loans. Although the intersectional damage of credit discrimination against women has been overlooked by twenty-first-century scholars, it was understood in the early 1970s. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights summarized in 1974, “The discounting of a working wife’s income may result in discrimination against race as well as sex, … because of the greater reliance of the minority family on the wife’s income for housing and other necessities.”Footnote 12
There were other ways that credit discrimination hurt all women, including Black women. Many married women worked part time. Part-time work was discounted by lenders as “unreliable,” despite lack of empirical evidence.Footnote 13 When calculating borrowers’ creditworthiness, lenders accepted a higher proportion of the salaries of wives working in “professional” fields, such as business executive, teacher, or nurse. Even these women were lucky if 50 percent of their income was counted. Earnings of female store clerks, bank tellers, or domestic and other service workers were entirely disregarded.Footnote 14 Because Black women faced discrimination in professional jobs, they were disproportionately relegated to “blue collar” or service jobs, where their income was ignored by lenders. They were therefore disproportionately impacted by institutionally sexist (and classist) lending practices.Footnote 15
Single women, whether unmarried, divorced, or widowed, faced severe and overt credit discrimination as well. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ 1974 study explained, they were suspect because of “their status as women who are not part of a male-headed household …” All credit criteria were applied more stringently to them, based on the assumption that “the female is inherently unstable and incapable of conducting her own affairs.” Unmarried women of all races were refused loans—even if they had earned their own living for decades—unless they had a male co-signer. Single women could not get mortgages for multiunit buildings, because lenders believed that women could not handle repairs and maintenance.Footnote 16 Widows were routinely denied mortgage loans for similar reasons. As one loan officer who refused a mortgage loan to a widow with children and a guaranteed income explained, “What does a woman need a house for?”Footnote 17 Such biases could hurt women of any race. However, since Black women were more likely to be unmarried, discrimination against single women impacted them disproportionately.Footnote 18
Access to credit was also scarce for women who were separated or divorced. When women married, lines of credit they may have previously held were reissued in their husbands’ names. Divorced or widowed women were left with no credit record—regardless of their actual contributions to their families’ finances.Footnote 19 Such women were barred from former husbands’ accounts, even if they had formerly paid the family bills. However, a former husband’s credit problems were held against women even after divorce.Footnote 20 This made economic survival difficult for separated or divorced women.
Many African Americans already lacked access to fairly priced credit because of endemic racism in the finance industry.Footnote 21 Black Americans’ preexisting credit exclusion may have lessened the effects of women’s loss of credit upon separation, divorce, or widowhood. Yet, like other such women, divorced or separated Black women remained responsible for husbands’ debts. They too could be hurt by credit barriers facing divorcees, such as the need for an ex-husband’s signature to obtain a loan for a car or other credit purchase, should they overcome credit biases against their racial identity.
Finally, some lenders refused loans to divorced women because their very existence was evidence of “family discord.” Lenders viewed this as problematic because they associated creditworthiness with a “traditional” family structure.Footnote 22 This impacted Black women, whose marriages could buckle under the strains of discrimination faced by themselves and their spouses. Mixed race couples also faced obstacles to credit because of lenders’ assumptions about the “inherent instability of such marriages.”Footnote 23
In sum, sexist credit discrimination hurt women across class. When combined with credit discrimination against nonwhites, it created obstacles to wealth creation in Black communities. This combined effect of distinct forms of discrimination is the very definition of intersectional oppression.Footnote 24 This matters since, as we will see, 2010s scholars tended to treat racial and gender discrimination in credit as distinct issues, and dismiss the latter as an elite white women’s issue. Instead, lenders’ sexist practices blocked Black married couples’ access to mortgage loans. They could be devastating for Black women whose marriages failed, leaving them responsible for husbands’ debts but unable to get their own credit. They hurt unmarried Black women’s chances to purchase property on fair terms, whatever their income level. They contributed to the economic stresses facing Black urban neighborhoods, where, by 1968, poverty was twice as common in households headed by women.Footnote 25
Welfare Recipients’ Fight Against Credit Discrimination
Black women living in majority-Black neighborhoods were especially disadvantaged by their lack of access to fairly priced consumer credit. In the 1960s, most male-headed, white middle-class families—and many in the working class as well—had access to “revolving” credit accounts at large department stores. These stores charged 1.5 percent interest on their credit accounts. In contrast, most Black urbanites of any gender had difficulty accessing consumer credit, regardless of their income or spending habits.Footnote 26 For example, a Federal Trade Commission study of a major consumer finance institution’s lending in 1970–1971 found that applicants were required to state their racial identity, whether white, Black, or “of Spanish origin.” Applicants received seven points for being white, four points for being of “Spanish origin,” and zero points if Black. Some companies also refused to lend in certain “blacked out” areas. As an FTC official reported, these were “largely black, low-income neighborhoods in large cities.”Footnote 27
In low-income minority areas, 93 percent of retailers’ sales were made on installments, with payments spread out over months or years. In contrast to the 1.5-percent interest rate charged by department stores, installment merchants sold shoddy, overpriced merchandise at interest rates of 33 percent or higher.Footnote 28 Thus, in consumer credit as in housing loans, Black women and Latinas experienced the double impact of racist and sexist credit practices.
This might explain why the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) fought to get its members access to fairly priced credit in 1968, two years before the larger feminist movement tackled this issue.Footnote 29 In the decade before the passage of the ECOA, welfare recipients were almost entirely women and disproportionately African American. Several scholars have discussed welfare recipients’ fight for fairly priced consumer credit, casting it as a legitimate civil rights issue.Footnote 30 In contrast to more recent scholars who treat consumer credit as a concern for elite white women only, late-1960s activists knew that poor people, including poor Black women, needed credit for survival. As NWRO head George Wiley explained, poor women’s income was received in “small periodic amounts,” but “living costs cannot be paid in small periodic amounts…” Credit was therefore not a “lascivious indulgence,” but a necessity.Footnote 31
Installment merchants were notorious for taking advantage of welfare recipients’ vulnerability, for example, by raising prices on the day welfare checks arrived, or threatening to inform case workers about their purchases, thus threatening their bare-bones income.Footnote 32 Black women on welfare faced obstacles to reasonably priced credit because of their race, their gender, their marital status, and of course, their poverty. When such women applied for credit at downtown department stores, such as Sears or Montgomery Ward, which served working- and middle-class clientele, they were denied automatically. Most had few alternatives to the overpriced, high-interest goods available in their segregated neighborhoods.Footnote 33
As historian Felicia Kornbluh explains, the National Welfare Rights Organization protested these conditions. In 1968, they created programs to provide members with fairly priced consumer credit. For example, the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization screened and certified members for creditworthiness. Those who passed would be eligible for low-priced credit at certain department stores. As organizer Margie Jefferson explained, this program helped free recipients from “buying inferior merchandise at high prices in the ghetto.”Footnote 34
The Philadelphia program was copied by other welfare rights organizations. They achieved some victories, including temporary credit agreements with Sears department stores in Philadelphia; Memphis; Pontiac, Michigan; and Portsmouth and Cincinnati, Ohio, and with a Korvette’s department store.Footnote 35 NWRO protests inspired a backlash, epitomized by a white male ironworker’s complaint, captured by journalist Pete Hamill, about “some fat welfare bitch … demanding a credit card at Korvette’s,” when “I work for a living and I can’t get a credit card at Korvette’s … you see that, and you want to go out and strangle someone.”Footnote 36
Yet the NWRO’s protests also likely raised public awareness of welfare recipients’ and other poor individuals’ need for fairly priced consumer credit.Footnote 37 Mid-1960s urban uprisings also revealed the problem of exploitative credit practices in Black urban areas. During some of the upheavals, the shops of installment credit merchants were targeted and their records burned.Footnote 38 This prompted congressional hearings on “Consumer Credit and the Poor,” held in April 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder. The hearings were convened by Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), a “tight-money progressive” who would play a key role in passing laws to fight bank redlining.Footnote 39 They spurred the passage of the 1968 Consumer Credit Protection Act, which created a National Commission on Consumer Finance. The latter soon turned its attention to credit discrimination against women.Footnote 40 Battles against sexism in credit thus emerged in tandem with struggles against other forms of credit discrimination.
The Origins of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act
Although the National Welfare Rights Organization highlighted poor women’s lack of fairly priced credit in 1968, the issue attracted wider attention among feminist groups in 1970. That year, new and overtly discriminatory rules were proposed by the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA, or Fannie Mae). FNMA was a “government-sponsored enterprise” that created liquidity in the mortgage market by purchasing mortgages from financial institutions. Following standard credit practices, FNMA announced in 1970 that when evaluating creditworthiness, it would count no more than 50 percent of a wife’s income. It would also exclude consideration of income from overtime, bonuses, or part-time work.Footnote 41 Such policies, as noted above, could hurt women of many races and classes, but had particularly harsh impact on African American women.
As scholar Chloe N. Thurston ably recounts, FNMA’s announcement outraged the Center for National Policy Review (CNPR), founded by a former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund attorney to monitor compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws. The Center pulled together thirty organizations, representing racial minorities, labor, consumers, seniors, and women, to fight it. As the CNPR noted, FNMA’s new guidelines “flagrantly discriminate against members of minority groups, blue collar workers, families with working women, and senior citizens.” They would make it “difficult or impossible for many” in these groups to “obtain conventional mortgages.”Footnote 42
To fight the new guidelines, Thurston explains, the CNPR drew on Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed federal assistance to institutions engaging in racial or sexual discrimination. It then pressured George Romney, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to deny FNMA permission to “enter the secondary market [for the purchase of mortgages] until the guidelines are purged of their discriminatory provisions.” FNMA caved quickly. It removed its guidelines about women’s income and even asked the CNPR to help design new underwriting standards.Footnote 43 The CNPR next tried to convince other federal regulators, such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, to reject credit policies that were unfair to “women and minorities.” These regulators failed to follow FNMA’s example; they refused to excise such language because there was no law barring the discounting of wives’ income when making credit decisions.Footnote 44
The CNPR quickly gained allies in its struggle against gender and racial bias in lending. By 1971, the National Organization for Women (NOW) had started a Task Force on Consumer Credit. The ACLU and the recently formed Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) also investigated credit discrimination against women. So did the Center for Women Policy Studies, which opened in 1972.Footnote 45
Representative Leonor K. Sullivan’s Battle Against Credit Discrimination
Although she receives only passing mention in recent scholars’ accounts, the most important ally in the struggle against sexism as well as racism in credit was Rep. Leonor K. Sullivan (D-MO), the first woman sent to Congress by the state of Missouri.Footnote 46 Sullivan, a white woman, succeeded her husband John, but she did not simply step into his position after his unexpected death in 1951. Although Sullivan had spent years as her husband’s campaign manager and congressional aide, Missouri Democrat leaders chose a man, Harry Schendel, to replace him. Ultimately, Sullivan ran against six male Democratic rivals in the 1952 election, beating them all. She was re-elected eleven more times, serving until her retirement in 1977.Footnote 47
In 1972, Sullivan submitted a bill to end credit discrimination against women. Sullivan later became known as the only woman in Congress to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment. She feared that it would threaten marriage and undercut laws protecting women in the workplace. (She was not alone in this view. The ERA had long divided women’s rights activists, many of whom feared, as Sullivan did, that it would destroy hard-fought protections for women workers).Footnote 48 Yet Sullivan was a progressive and influential legislator. She repeatedly sponsored legislation to create a federal food stamp program. She fought to change income tax laws to allow widows and working mothers to take deductions for childcare.Footnote 49 Her passion was consumer rights. She challenged companies producing shoddy and dangerous products. She fought predatory installment buying and wage garnishment common in Black communities. In 1968, she wrote the section of the Consumer Credit Protection Act that created the National Commission on Consumer Finance and corralled the House votes needed to pass it.Footnote 50
Sullivan helped convince the Commission to hold hearings on the “Availability of Credit to Women” in 1972. Those hearings “instantly won the greatest public interest” of any of its hearings to date, she recalled. Before the hearings, there was not a single law in any state or in either House of Congress to stop credit discrimination against women. Immediately after, dozens of bills were introduced to Congress and in states to address this problem.Footnote 51 After the hearings, feminist organizations continued mobilizing women to write to Congress about their experiences of credit discrimination. “In the 22 years I have served in the Congress, I have seldom seen an issue take fire as quickly” as credit discrimination based on sex and marital status, Sullivan noted in 1974.Footnote 52
The Passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)
In 1972, Sullivan submitted a bill that prohibited discrimination in credit based on sex, age, or marital status, as well as race, color, religion, and national origin. The bill failed to get out of committee. In part, this was because laws already barred credit discrimination by race, color, religion, and national origin.Footnote 53 Instead, the narrower Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974. The ECOA outlawed credit discrimination against applicants based on sex or marital status. It applied to retail and credit cards as well as to banks and home mortgages.Footnote 54 It passed after Sen. William E. Brock III (R-TN) appended it to the Depository Institutions Act of 1974. Brock’s actions were among the parliamentary maneuvers that enabled additions to the Depository Institutions Act that were “desperately sought by the homebuilding industry,” Sullivan recalled. His ECOA had the added benefit, from some perspectives, of sidelining Sullivan’s more comprehensive anti-discrimination bill.Footnote 55
Many Congressional leaders hailed the ECOA as a victory for women’s and civil rights organizations.Footnote 56 Feminist responses were divided. NOW praised it as “well balanced.” Other feminist credit advocates viewed it as a “half measure.” Barbara Shack, of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, noted that the “bill appears to have many severe limitations,” because it lacked provisions barring race or age discrimination. Sullivan described it as “a start,” but noted that it had not gone “as far as it should have gone” in curbing credit discrimination.Footnote 57
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act Amendments of 1976
Sullivan immediately proposed amendments to “strengthen … the weak [ECOA] law now on the books …” She insisted that along with stopping discrimination based on sex and marital status, “it is essential also to effectively prohibit discrimination in credit by reason of race, color, religion, national origin, or age.”Footnote 58 The Equal Credit Opportunity Act Amendments of 1976 (Public Law 94-239), successfully added race, color, religion, national origin, and age (“provided the applicant has the ability to contract”) to the law’s original ban on credit discrimination by sex or marital status. It was sponsored by Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI). In a move that would have pleased the NWRO, “receipt of public assistance benefits” was added to the categories protected against credit discrimination. As then-Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) explained, this would “prohibit credit denials to welfare or social security recipients merely on the basis of distaste for the source of the applicant’s income …”Footnote 59 The 1976 amendments strengthened the law, making it a tool for women and men of all races and classes to fight credit discrimination.Footnote 60
Unfortunately, lenders evaded the ECOA’s strictures against credit discrimination by creating new methods of credit scoring—ones that appeared to replace personal assessments with neutral algorithms. The new techniques merely obscured lenders’ discriminatory practices. For example, computerized credit scoring no longer explicitly cited identity categories, such as “woman” or “of Spanish origin,” as a reason to deny or overcharge for credit. Instead, it used supposedly neutral categories, such as location (say, in a predominantly Black ZIP code) or profession (say, a “woman’s job” such as nursing), to deny an applicant credit. Not surprisingly, women continued to report experiences of credit discrimination.Footnote 61
Historian Louis Hyman writes that, “In computer models, feminist credit advocates believed they had found the solution to discriminatory lending, ushering in the contemporary calculated credit regimes under which we live today.” No footnote supports this statement.Footnote 62 His claim that “feminists” never understood that computerized credit scoring could preserve old biases was countered by Leonor Sullivan. She opposed new forms of credit scoring, whether based on ZIP codes or other variables, when they were mere stand-ins for identity categories. Sullivan “tried and failed in Committee to strike” the section of the ECOA that enabled creditors to appear to abide by the law as long as they excluded language about ‘“race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, or marital status’” from their determinations. As Sullivan wrote, “I find these words unclear and a potential loophole of vast dimensions.” She begged that “statistical data” showing disproportionate refusal of credit to women “at least be permitted to be taken into consideration, particularly when the figures are so flagrantly lopsided as to indicate pretty strongly that the creditor may be discriminating …”Footnote 63
The ECOA did not stop credit discrimination against women, but it curtailed its most overt and grotesque forms. This made it among the most successful acts against credit discrimination of its era. As Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY) correctly noted, the ECOA ended “the blatantly discriminatory practices that women encounter all over the country.”Footnote 64 Single women faced less discrimination simply because they were unmarried. Married women no longer automatically lost their credit identity upon marriage. Lenders no longer counted their incomes by half, or not at all, when determining creditworthiness—a practice that had disproportionately impacted Black married couples. Although women faced significant economic losses after divorce, they no longer faced, in addition, the erasure of their credit history. After the 1976 amendments to the Act, the ECOA gave those suffering credit discrimination based on race, religion, age, national origin, and receipt of public aid a new weapon to add to others in their arsenal. Although impact is hard to measure, one indication of the ECOA’s effects may have been the rise in single women purchasing properties, presumably with mortgages. By 1980, one-third of the condominiums sold in the United States were sold to single women, who also made up one-tenth of the nation’s home purchasers. The benefit of such purchases to borrowers, including single women and lesbian couples of any race, was likely substantial.Footnote 65
The 2010s: A New Wave of Scholarship on the ECOA
Like all civil rights laws, the ECOA was an important but imperfect tool to fight discrimination, in this case in the granting of credit. Yet starting in the 2010s, prominent scholars of the ECOA—four in all—describe it in tones ranging from disappointment to contempt. Before discussing these scholars’ characterizations of the law, a bit of framing is necessary.
It is possible that recent critical treatments of the law and its proponents are simply another example of scholarly bias against liberal versus radical activists. As historian Nancy MacLean points out, there is a long history of scholars “writing off older activists as liberal elites interested only in formal equality and unconcerned with the needs of working-class people,” a depiction, she adds, that is “grossly misleading.”Footnote 66 I would argue that something else (or in addition) is at work in recent critiques of ECOA supporters. The relevant comparison is not to scholarship about younger and presumably more radical activists, but to scholarship on similar laws passed in the same era that also tackled credit discrimination, such as the Fair Housing Act (FHA), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The scholarly difference in tone that I am discussing is clear when comparing apples to apples (scholarly treatments of credit laws that do not include discrimination against women versus scholarly treatments of credit laws that center discrimination against women), rather than apples and oranges (scholarship on a credit law banning discrimination versus scholarship on other, ostensibly more radical forms of activism that do not center legislative change).
In the ten years I worked on my book Cash on the Block, a history of racism and reinvestment strategies from the 1960s through 2010, I read numerous studies of the FHA, the HMDA, and the CRA. I did not come across even one that attacked those supporting these laws as selfish, racist, or affluent.Footnote 67 The same is true of scholarship on the ECOA published before the 2010s. Lizabeth Cohen’s treatment of the ECOA in her 2003 monograph A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America was typical of pre-2010s approaches. Cohen noted that the ECOA, like the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Community Reinvestment Act, enabled “effective challenges to discriminatory real estate sales and mortgage-lending practices,” even if “unequal treatment” persisted after their passage. She did not impugn the motives of feminists who supported it, or treat the law as a failure.Footnote 68
The tone of scholarship on the ECOA published since 2011 is markedly different. Some recent scholars attack ECOA promoters as classist and racist. They present the law as yet another example of white feminists’ selfishness. Historian Louis Hyman set the tone in 2011, when he caricatured those who fought for the ECOA as “affluent white women.” Their self-interested struggles “ultimately and unintentionally aided poor, black consumers as well,” Hyman claims.Footnote 69 In 2018, political scientist Chloe N. Thurston asserted that “members of the feminist credit movement” embraced a “narrow” approach by limiting anti-discrimination provisions to sex and marital status. She claimed that [implicitly white, affluent] “feminist credit advocates were particularly uneasy where race met class.” Their response to race and class discrimination, she writes, ranged “from silence to defensiveness.”Footnote 70 In 2021, historian Suzanne Kahn insisted that “policymakers and feminists repeatedly chose to explicitly protect married and formerly married upper- and middle-class women’s access to credit while doing little to help low-income women.”Footnote 71 Writing in 2017, historical sociologist Greta Krippner was the kindest toward the ECOA. Yet she too cast it as overly “individualistic.” She called it a failure because it did not transform the ways that credit is granted in the United States—an impossibly high standard.Footnote 72
Scholars writing in the 2010s and 2020s have used a variety of tactics to cast ECOA proponents as caring only about “affluent white women.”Footnote 73 One is to interpret common political or legislative strategies as indicators of white feminists’ affluence. Suzanne Kahn’s otherwise excellent 2021 book Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era makes this move. She notes that the National Organization for Women encouraged women to shut down their accounts at banks that would not give them credit. Kahn takes this strategy to mean that “NOW expected its members to have savings accounts large enough to affect their banks if they withdrew their money …”Footnote 74 In other words, the bank boycott tactic indicated NOW’s belief that its members were so wealthy that banks depended upon their deposits.Footnote 75 Kahn’s interpretation of NOW’s bank boycott supports the “affluent” white feminist trope invoked in Hyman’s work. Yet the withdrawal of funds from discriminating banks was, by then, a time-worn strategy. For example, in 1955, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. organized a boycott of white-owned banks in Harlem that would not lend within that community.Footnote 76 In 1966, ministers affiliated with Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket encouraged their congregations to withdraw their money from banks that refused loans to Black borrowers.Footnote 77 I know of no historian who has interpreted these actions as indicating the extraordinary affluence of Black communities.
Because the 1972 hearings on the “Availability of Credit to Women” featured many women who held professional jobs, yet were denied credit, recent historians cite them as additional proof that “feminists” were white and affluent. As Thurston explains, “feminist credit advocates made their claims on the back of a model upper-middle-class professional woman who should have been qualified on the basis of income alone, and who was clearly disqualified on the basis of her sex.” She adds, “This upper-middle-class professional woman was also presumed to be white.” This sentence, which is in the passive voice, could be true only if one ignored Leonor Sullivan and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project’s arguments about the need for protections based on race, age, nationality, and other categories in addition to sex and marital status.Footnote 78 Furthermore, as Thurston notes elsewhere in her study, testimony from professionals, whether Black men or white and nonwhite women, at such hearings was obviously a strategic choice, intended to prove that even those with impeccable credentials were denied credit because of personal identity alone. This was why supporters of the 1968 Fair Housing Act presented testimonies by Black professionals who had the means to leave “ghetto communities,” but could not because of racist banking and real estate practices. For example, their hearings featured a Black U.S. Navy lieutenant, a Black college professor, and a Black physician.Footnote 79
This does not mean that non-professionals do not need protection against discrimination, in either housing or credit. Yet both Thurston and Hyman cite the testimony of some female professionals to argue that advocates of fair credit for women sought a “narrow” law and were indifferent or hostile to women who were not rich and white. As Hyman claims, the “affluent, mostly white women” who testified at the hearings were “the exact opposite … of the ghetto rioters of a few years earlier” whose actions had spurred credit reform. He cites the professional status of some women who testified as proof that “credit for these professional, married women was not a strategy of survival but an expression of class privilege” and personal pride.Footnote 80
In fact, the 1972 hearings showed that credit discrimination impacted women of diverse class backgrounds. As a NOW official testified, “credit today is scarcely obtainable by women; and that includes poor women, middle class women and even women with wealthy husbands.”Footnote 81 At the hearings, Rep. Martha W. Griffiths (D-MI) read letters from several women who were clearly working class, and whose racial identity was not specified. “My husband has been ill for several years and naturally has not worked steady,” one woman explained, leaving her to “work seven days a week at two jobs (one full time, one part time)” to support their family. But presumably because she and not her husband was the family breadwinner, her application for a loan to buy a car to help her travel to her jobs was turned down by multiple credit institutions.Footnote 82 Another woman added that “to women and to blacks” the denial of credit was both economically stressful and “devastatingly symbolic of their second-class status in American society.”Footnote 83
Hyman and Thurston overlook Leonor Sullivan’s ultimately successful struggle to include race and other categories in the ECOA. They also try to prove that feminist ECOA supporters were racist by citing a single statement made by Martha Griffiths during the 1972 Hearings on Availability of Credit to Women. Hyman states that wealthy white women in these hearings “explicitly juxtaposed their class-based ‘right to credit’ against welfare subprime mortgage programs for poor blacks …” Again, he provides no footnote for this statement.Footnote 84 However, he was likely referring to a comment by Griffiths that Thurston cites to support her claim that feminist credit advocates were classist and racist. Thurston overlooks Griffiths’ many descriptions of poor and economically struggling women hurt by credit discrimination.Footnote 85 Instead, she notes that Griffiths “complained that the ‘right of a woman on welfare with illegitimate children to buy housing under Section 235 of the Housing [and Urban Development] Act makes a mockery of the same Housing Act to guarantee a middle class woman the same right to buy a house.’”Footnote 86
First, this grammatically confusing sentence misquotes Griffiths. Her actual statement was that welfare mothers’ ability to buy housing under Section 235 of the 1968 HUD Act “makes a mockery of the failure of the same Housing Act to guarantee a middle-class woman the same right to buy a house.’”Footnote 87 Second, Thurston misreads as well as misquotes Griffiths. While Griffiths’ mention of “illegitimate” children was insensitive at best, her point was that as of 1972, no provisions existed in any of the nation’s housing laws to bar credit discrimination against women. While Section 235 (a part of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act) helped women on welfare purchase housing, no law helped women who were not on welfare acquire housing.Footnote 88 Thus, for Hyman and Thurston, a single, misquoted, decontextualized statement from one ECOA supporter bears more explanatory weight than Sullivan’s well-documented efforts to ensure that the ECOA included sanctions on discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, and age, as well as sex and marital status.Footnote 89
In sum, 2010s and early 2020s scholars assume whiteness and “affluence” among feminist supporters of the ECOA without proof; read activists’ tactics in the worst possible light; misrepresent and homogenize activists’ beliefs and goals; overlook testimonies that indicated a cross-class need for the ECOA; and use a single, misquoted sentence to prove (implicitly white) ECOA supporters’ racism and classism.
Attacks on the ECOA for Not Revolutionizing the U.S. Credit System
One 2010s scholar of the ECOA, historical sociologist Greta R. Krippner, avoids such claims about the law and its proponents. Krippner’s article is primarily a theoretical analysis of inequality intrinsic to credit transactions. Seeking a model to overcome that inequality, Krippner looks to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which aimed to stop banks from redlining (or refusing loans to) entire communities. Krippner praises CRA supporters for taking a communal approach. They argued that because banks accepted “our money” (that is, the collective deposits of an entire neighborhood), banks ought to lend these funds back to residents.
In contrast, Krippner notes, the ECOA offered protections for individual women with decent credit but ignored the “structural features of markets that produce group disadvantage …”Footnote 90 The ECOA’s overly “individual” approach made it inferior to the communal demands of CRA proponents. Once again, a 2010s scholar describes the ECOA’s approach to fighting credit discrimination against women as overly individualistic. The irony is that CRA scholars view the activist argument Krippner praises—that banks should lend in areas where residents have collectively made deposits—as inappropriate and outdated, since by the 1970s, banks no longer collected deposits solely from local residents.Footnote 91 Krippner, like Kahn and Thurston, also faults ECOA proponents for accepting that income could legitimately count toward credit scoring, because women often earned less than men and hence would receive less, or higher-priced, credit. She argues that the ECOA failed because it did not challenge “structural features of markets,” though of course, neither did the CRA (or any other credit law). Krippner sets an impossibly high standard for the ECOA that no antidiscrimination law or constitutional amendment ever has reached or ever could reach, as anyone who studies the functioning of the U.S. legal system knows.Footnote 92 Krippner does not consider that for women of all races, simply having one’s income fully counted was an achievement.Footnote 93
Kahn and Thurston come close to dismissing the ECOA because it did not achieve the utopian goal of enabling women to get credit based solely on their unpaid labor in the home. Kahn does conclude that overall, the ECOA was a “critical victory” for one subset of women—those who were divorced. She also praises the ECOA for creating “a new right—to a fair and equal consideration of creditworthiness regardless of sex, marital status, or type of income …”Footnote 94 Yet she notes that because of most women’s confinement to low waged work and their childcare responsibilities, ending overt credit discrimination would not give women “equal credit.” Instead, “the market also had to be regulated” (in some unspecified manner) to ensure that women earned credit for their “unpaid work in the home.”Footnote 95 As Thurston similarly (and disapprovingly) notes, the “question of whether women’s unpaid labor should still qualify them for credit was noted, and deliberately set aside.”Footnote 96 As a result, Kahn summarizes, the ECOA “created neither an absolute right to credit nor a right to fairly administered credit, but only a right to fair consideration of one’s creditworthiness.” Feminists knew this right “was meaningless,” since it merely “targeted aid to middle-class homemakers and women who were employed.”Footnote 97
Kahn is correct that the ECOA was not a perfect law. She is also correct that for about two years, until the 1976 amendments, it offered “nothing to stop credit discrimination against women who worked in the home supported by AFDC [welfare] payments.”Footnote 98 Yet it is odd to call a bill that outlawed previously widespread, humiliating, and economically devastating forms of credit discrimination against women “meaningless” because it provided no ”absolute right to credit.” The charge of failure to transform “structural features of markets” or provide “absolute rights” (to credit or other goods) could be used to dismiss every piece of anti-discrimination legislation ever passed. Yet recent scholars seem to impose such impossibly high standards only on laws promoted by “individualistic” (or rich, white, racist, classist, selfish) feminists.
Context for Recent Scholars’ Attacks on the ECOA: The Stories We Tell About Feminism
The terms that 2010s scholars use to characterize female supporters of the ECOA—such as elite, selfish, and overly “individualistic”—share something in common. All are misogynist tropes that have long been used to characterize feminists’ supposedly distasteful self-involvement. While misogynist tropes never disappear altogether, they tend to grow less visible in periods of feminist gains, and more ubiquitous in periods of anti-feminist backlash.Footnote 99 Given the explosive growth of social media promoting conservative models for women and attacking those who deviate, the long and ultimately successful campaign to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, governmental and private attacks on transgender people and those who challenge the gender binary, and, as discussed below, the denigration of “white feminism” as elitist and useless at best, the past fifteen years are arguably such a period in U.S. history.
Scholars Clare Hemmings and Kate Manne provide useful frameworks for understanding recent scholars’ negative depictions of the ECOA and the 1970s feminists who supported it. Hemmings analyzes the stories told about feminism. She highlights underlying narratives of progress, loss, or return that structure histories of feminism, along with the emotional affect (such as disdain, pride, or melancholy) that accompanies them. For example, the “progress” narrative charts an evolution from a lesbian, essentialist, racist, and implicitly white 1970s feminism, to a righteous, inclusive, Black or multicultural 1980s feminism, to a 1990s postmodernist approach that rejects the subject “woman” altogether in favor of sophisticated analysis of difference, multiplicity, and the workings of exclusion in all social movements, feminism included. As Hemmings shows, this progress narrative erects false, absolute distinctions between decades. It erases complexities within and across decades (by flattening or parodying the insights of 1970s lesbian feminists, simplifying the understandings of identity circulating in that decade, and erasing that era’s nonwhite lesbians and feminists). In this narrative, 1970s feminism “carries the weight of essentialist anachronism” that all sophisticated scholars must reject.Footnote 100
Recent scholars’ dismissal of the ECOA includes some features of the progress narrative Hemmings identifies—specifically, the caricaturing of 1970s feminism as white and racist (and classist, scholars add). However, to understand why otherwise excellent contemporary historians and scholars dismiss or minimize the only credit law that fought discrimination against women, we must also examine older misogynist tropes. Doing so helps clarify the ongoing power of misogynist tropes to shape scholars’ understanding of past feminist activism during periods of antifeminist backlash, when such tropes flow more freely in the culture at large.
As moral philosopher Kate Manne explains, misogynists, who can be of any gender, do not hate women. They respect women who serve and support others (men, children, or “people” understood in a non-gendered sense). They are troubled, however, by women who seem “selfish,” “entitled,” or “demanding”—that is, who pursue power, equality, or even basic human rights for themselves rather than on behalf of others. Feminists are therefore “natural targets” of misogynist rage. Women who resist subordinate positioning trigger an “inchoate discomfort and hostility,” much like that triggered when “any well-entrenched system of social norms is being dismantled.” Such women provoke anxiety because they do not appear to “give enough, or to the right people, in the right way, or in the right spirit.”Footnote 101
Manne notes that when women’s actions are attacked, while similar actions by or on behalf of men (or not specifically on behalf of women) fail to trigger similar levels of anger, mockery, or discomfort, the likely culprit is misogyny.Footnote 102 As detailed above, scholars write neutrally about laws barring credit discrimination based on race, age, or class, but cast ECOA proponents as selfish, affluent, individualistic, racist, and worthless (since their law supposedly benefited only themselves). Although scholars’ use of such misogynist tropes to describe ECOA proponents is surely unwitting, they nevertheless distort the historical record.
Context for Scholars’ Use of Misogynist Tropes: The 2010s Attack on White Feminism
Since at least the 1990s, historians have published critiques of white women’s rights activists, from Antebellum white female abolitionists, to those active in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and of course, the 1970s women’s liberation movement. Although most of these studies have been nuanced and thoughtful, they also point out some female or feminist activists’ selfishness, racism, or classism, thus inadvertently contributing to a new orthodoxy that casts all white feminists as selfish.Footnote 103 In part, historians may have been correcting earlier journalism and scholarship that lionized activist women. Yet attempts to counter past pro-feminist biases may have gone too far in the opposite direction. An unfortunate result is that an image of feminism as a movement that is and always has been white, racist, selfish, and elitist has become practically baked into gender studies classes.Footnote 104 But just as scholars should know better than to use racist tropes such as incompetence, corruption, and violence when discussing African American activists, or antisemitic tropes such as money-loving and controlling of the media (and the world) when discussing Jewish activists, so should we think twice before using words like “affluent” and “selfish” to describe feminists, given that these are misogynist tropes commonly wielded against women who step out of line.
Instead of recognizing and questioning misogynist tropes, some journalists and scholars of the 2010s incorporated them. One likely context for some scholars’ unselfconscious or, at times, overt attacks on feminists as spoiled, selfish, racist, useless, and even destructive is our era’s burgeoning literature on “white feminism.” This phrase, which emerged on the internet in the early-2010s, suffers from the distortions typical of any hostile, externally imposed label. Books on white feminism often use the words “feminist” and “white woman” interchangeably, while casting the latter as middle-class or elite, racist, classist, selfish, and power hungry. Of course, we should reject bad ideas sometimes labeled as feminist. For example, there is a long history of individual and organizational attacks on supposedly inferior “cultures”—meaning, generally, non-white and non-Christian ones—that are tarred as peculiarly oppressive for women. Although some feminists have fallen for this toxic idea, numerous others have long critiqued it as racist and colonialist.Footnote 105
Unfortunately, the term “white feminism” targets not bad ideas, but a bad identity—that of “white” women—as the element that degrades feminism.Footnote 106 This approach pervades literary scholar Kyla Schuller’s 2021 book The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, whose very title equates feminism with white women. This slippage enables Schuller to call any white woman a feminist, including female Trump voters and female white supremacists who support “access to abortions for people of color …” Since Schuller downplays differences of ideology, class, education, ethnicity, or religion among white women, she assumes that the political choices made by conservative women must be a manifestation of a monolithic “white feminism.” She even casts President Donald Trump, a serial sexual predator who is responsible for ending federal protection of abortion rights and notorious for his vicious, grade-school-level insults about the bodies of women who challenge him, as a feminist (citing his daughter Ivanka’s words to this effect).Footnote 107
Schuller traces a lineage of racism, greed, and self-involvement in white feminists and writers of the past two hundred years, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Beecher Stowe, and Margaret Sanger to Betty Friedan and Sheryl Sandberg. These women’s flawed politics provide historical grounding for Schuller’s depiction of contemporary (white) feminism as “advancing individual women up the corporate ladder; protecting reproductive freedom, which it defines solely as the ability to prevent and terminate pregnancy; and heightening prison sentences for rapists and abusers.” Theirs is an “individualistic, status quo-driven paradigm” that attempts to “empower women to assume positions of influence within a fundamentally unequal system.” Thus feminist goals such as equal pay, reproductive rights and justice, accessible childcare, or, by extension—as noted above—access to credit, are selfish, individualistic, and “destructive,” since they “liberate privileged women while keeping other structures of injustice intact.”Footnote 108
Recent scholars’ critiques of the ECOA for not transforming the credit structure of the United States echo this extraordinarily high standard for legislative change—one that casts any law that fails to overturn white supremacy, capitalism, and sexism in all its permutations as meaningless or destructive. Like their white feminist forebears, Schuller argues, today’s white feminists do not want equal rights; they want to grant the “privileged” (that is, white women) even more power over others.Footnote 109 Similarly, journalist Koa Beck’s 2021 book White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind defines white feminism as an “ideology” that seeks “personalized autonomy, individual wealth, perpetual self-optimization, and supremacy” (presumably white supremacy, female supremacy, or both).Footnote 110
These works display an affect of disdain, mockery, and rage toward (white) feminists. For example, Schuller calls white feminists “a problem,” a “lurking threat,” “posturing,” “destructive,” “dangerous,” “self-absorbed,” “white supremacy in heels,” “theft disguised as liberation,” perpetrators of “active harm” “outraged Beckys,” and people hoping to “install women at the helm of systems that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse and to declare the battle won, cleansed by their tears”—all within her first eleven pages.Footnote 111 In contrast, Black women–led “intersectional feminists” are bearers of cosmic insight. They promote a “spiritual cosmology of justice whose final aim is harmony, not the seizure of power,” a vision that “far exceeds the realm of the human, extending into the universe.”Footnote 112
There are several problems with this approach. First, the claim that “mainstream” or “white” feminism cares only about corporate success and individual power is a parody that distorts the priorities of the vast majority of feminist organizations of the past sixty years.Footnote 113 Second, it is not true that only “privileged” (and implicitly white) women are held back by sexist laws and practices, and are thus the only ones helped by laws opposing sex discrimination (in this case, the ECOA). As I have argued above, this assumption distorts our understanding of the intersectional struggles of nonwhite women, which can be understood only if racism and sexism (at a minimum) are considered. Third, it is wrong to assume without evidence that “feminists” (including those supporting the ECOA) were white, wealthy, selfish, and unaware of or actively supportive of racism and classism.Footnote 114 The ultimately successful battle of Leonor Sullivan and other ECOA supporters for a more expansive law makes it clear that this was not the case. Rather, scholars’ uncritical acceptance of misogynist tropes may predispose them to seek out behavior that confirms an image of feminists as wealthy, spoiled, and “selfish,” even if this requires massaging the evidence.
In short, scholars not attuned to the ways that misogynist tropes are used to police women’s behavior may instead find themselves wielding them, thereby distorting our understanding of feminist activists of earlier eras. This is why understanding misogyny and its tropes should be an essential foundation for any scholarly analysis of women—just as we should expect scholars writing about African Americans or Jews to have a basic understanding of racist or antisemitic tropes, and to avoid reliance on such tropes whenever possible.
What Recent Scholars Miss About the ECOA
Depictions of women’s battles against credit discrimination as elite, white, narrow, and self-serving erase the mostly African American women of the National Welfare Rights Organization from this history—even though they pioneered the struggle. Such scholarship also undermines analysis of the intersectional effects of such discrimination (which requires attention to both race and gender discrimination, at a minimum). It obscures the ways that credit discrimination against women was damaging across class and had particularly pernicious effects on Black women and Black communities—even though this problem was recognized in the early 1970s. Scholarship that wittingly or unwittingly echoes a “white feminism” critique of feminists as always white, wealthy, and selfish inevitably simplifies how social change occurs. It erases the existence of white feminists who were or are working class, socialist, ecological, anti-racist, or anti-capitalist. In the case of the ECOA, it erases feminist credit advocates who understood that credit discrimination could hurt most women, whatever their race or class status. It can lead to a misreading of the ECOA’s legislative history, presenting it as a tainted victory for (affluent, selfish, white) feminists. It minimizes or overlooks Leonor Sullivan’s and other feminists’ critiques of the original bill as too narrow, as well as their successful battle, a mere two years later, to expand its coverage to include race, color, religion, national origin, age, and discrimination against public aid recipients.
Ironically, scholars’ attacks on feminists as “affluent” echo those that conservatives in earlier generations wielded against nonwhite activist women, including those in the National Welfare Rights Organization. In the late 1960s, these women were called “the aristocracy” of welfare recipients by one author, and “the most glamorous and visible of the poor” by another. President Ronald Reagan’s famous attack on such women as “welfare queens” merely built upon pre-existing misogynist tropes that cast women on welfare who fought for their own rights as elite, pampered, and selfish.Footnote 115
While scholars usually applaud when groups enduring discrimination struggle to protect their own interests, our culture’s deeply ingrained misogyny makes women’s battles to protect their own interests deeply suspect. When scholars fail to interrogate such suspicions, they risk allowing misogynist tropes to distort historical understanding—just as racist tropes casting Black Americans as incompetent, corrupt, and violent have long distorted scholars’ (and contemporary journalists’) depictions of Black activism. Academics who write about activists of the past must learn to recognize and reject tropes depicting white women as spoiled and selfish, nonwhite men as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt, and Black women as all of the above. They must stop treating sexist discrimination as an issue that concerns only “privileged” women—an approach that is particularly inappropriate given today’s profoundly antifeminist political climate. Until scholars learn to identify and question misogynist tropes, their work will remain flawed. They will inadvertently add to the swelling numbers of academic works that denigrate activist women, particularly those who are white; contribute to the splintering of vulnerable populations; and block careful historical analysis that could potentially contribute to pressing, present-day struggles.
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