Bankers in the Bedroom

Abstract

Nationwide, men and women today don't have equal access to credit. Banks, savings and loan associations, credit-card companies, finance companies, insurance companies, retail stores and even the federal government discriminate against women in extending credit. – Representative Martha Griffiths, 1972 “Discrimination is a necessary function in the extension of credit to determine whether a person has the ability and willingness to repay the debt,” wrote Arvonne Fraser in a letter to senators as they prepared to vote on a bill that would have outlawed sex discrimination in lending. Fraser was the president of the Women's Equity Action League, which belonged to a larger coalition of women's and civil rights groups that had helped to lift the issue of sex discrimination in lending to the public agenda beginning in 1972. Their aim was to convince the government to extend the existing ban on mortgage discrimination by race, national origin, and color to cover marital status and sex as well, and for legislation that dealt with sex discrimination in consumer lending generally. Another year would pass before the 1974 Housing and Community Development and Equal Credit Opportunity acts would accomplish these goals. Reformers faced several challenges in introducing nondiscrimination policies into an industry that, by its nature, discriminates. By the 1970s, racial discrimination in home lending was often concealed and typically not codified, but lenders were direct and blatant about their need to hold female applicants to different standards than male applicants. For decades, lenders had maintained that such differential treatment was necessary to protect banks’ financial interests – that differences between the sexes created valid concerns about default risk. The federal government largely agreed, with several agencies explicitly requiring banks whose loans they underwrote to hold female applicants to a different standard than male ones, and others implicitly condoning sex discrimination by their failure to regulate it. Credit discrimination against women emerged in the national political agenda in the early 1970s. In a multistage model of collective action common to boundary groups – and evident in civil rights groups described in the previous chapter – feminist credit advocates and their allies played four roles. First, they collected women's individual experiences of lending discrimination and aggregated those individual (and private) difficulties into collective grievances.