90 Days to Financial Stability

Did you know that at one time, companies could change the title of a job so they could pay a woman less than a man? A court case in 1970, Schultz vs Wheaton Glass, changed all that.                        In 1972, Katharine Graham became the first female CEO of a fortune 500 company. 1974 saw the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Until this time, banks required a woman to bring a man with her to co-sign any credit application. It didn’t matter what her income was and a bank could disregard some of it. Sometimes up to 50% of her income! A year later, the first woman-owned commercial bank opens in New York City – appropriately named the First Woman’s Bank. In Ireland in 1976, women were finally able to own their own homes outright. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed in the US in 1978. Now an employer couldn’t fire a woman just bec...

The UK passed the Married Woman’s Property Act and two years later, in Illinois, the freedom of occupational choice was granted to both men and women. Yet, when Myra Colby Bradwell – who studied as her husband’s law apprentice – tried to pass the Illinois bar to practice as a lawyer, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1873 that the Illinois bar didn’t have to grant a license to a married woman. Mary Gage opened a stock exchange for women who wanted to use their own money to speculate on railway stocks. Meanwhile, the Witch of Wall Street – Hetty Green – was consolidating her own fortune. (In a later entry I want to write about Ms. Green) If you were looking at France in 1881, you would see that women are the right to own bank accounts, married women received this right five years later. The US didn’t grant the same rights until the 1960s and the UK, not until 1975. In 1908, Oregon restricted workday hours for females to ten hours – because of course, women were too fragil...

Women are not good with money?  Did you grow up hearing that? I did. At one time, women did not have bank accounts, handle cheques or any of that sort of stuff. Today, I am consulting an article in The Guardian that looks at women’s financial rights from Cleopatra’s time to present. I am also going to do more research so I can relate Canada’s role in this. We are going to start by looking at life in ancient Egypt, 3100 BCE and after. Back then, women had the same financial rights as men. They were able to hold and dispose of property in their name. They could enter into contracts, sue and be sued, serve on juries, be trial witness and witness legal documents. Next, we will look at the biblical era, 1800 BC and after. Consulting Jewish law then, a woman had the right to own her own property and sue in court without a man representing her. However, she could not directly inherit from her husband - unless it was a gift and there were no children – and daughters c...