Prior to 1974, it was legal for banks to require a man’s signature for a woman to open a credit card, and many banks chose to require this.
The requirement for women to provide a male co-sign for lines of credit was one of the last vestiges of coverture (the notion of the household as the primary legal unit, with the husband/father as the one ultimately responsible for the household owning all the assets but also holding all the debts and in some cases responsible for crimes done by family members) to go. Because under coverture, the only women who owned their own assets and were responsible for their own debts were femme sole (single women who are not under their father’s household, typically orphans, widows or spinsters) which meant loaning money to a woman who was or might feasibly become married within the terms of the loan created a scenario where the debt had to be collected from someone who was not a party to the debt being created which made things more difficult for the lender. The whole point of requiring a male co-sign was that way they had someone they could more easily enforce collection against than the debtors potential future husband who wasn’t himself a party to the loan. Once we tossed coverture, it took a bit for policy at private institutions to catch up unless/until they actually needed to.
I agree that the facts are very frequently misrepresented.
There’s a dichotomy to it you see in descriptions of other things, where unless all women could do the thing nationwide without exception then women couldn’t do the thing but if any men could do the thing, then men could do the thing. For example, some women in the US could vote since the founding, because voting rights were determined at the state level and not all of them restricted it by sex. At the same time, most men couldn’t vote either in most states until the mid-19th century with the push for so-called Jacksonian Democracy (ironically, women actually lost the right to vote in New Jersey when voting rights were expanded - the previous wealth requirement was not restricted by sex).
The requirement for women to provide a male co-sign for lines of credit was one of the last vestiges of coverture (the notion of the household as the primary legal unit, with the husband/father as the one ultimately responsible for the household owning all the assets but also holding all the debts and in some cases responsible for crimes done by family members) to go. Because under coverture, the only women who owned their own assets and were responsible for their own debts were femme sole (single women who are not under their father’s household, typically orphans, widows or spinsters) which meant loaning money to a woman who was or might feasibly become married within the terms of the loan created a scenario where the debt had to be collected from someone who was not a party to the debt being created which made things more difficult for the lender. The whole point of requiring a male co-sign was that way they had someone they could more easily enforce collection against than the debtors potential future husband who wasn’t himself a party to the loan. Once we tossed coverture, it took a bit for policy at private institutions to catch up unless/until they actually needed to.
There’s a dichotomy to it you see in descriptions of other things, where unless all women could do the thing nationwide without exception then women couldn’t do the thing but if any men could do the thing, then men could do the thing. For example, some women in the US could vote since the founding, because voting rights were determined at the state level and not all of them restricted it by sex. At the same time, most men couldn’t vote either in most states until the mid-19th century with the push for so-called Jacksonian Democracy (ironically, women actually lost the right to vote in New Jersey when voting rights were expanded - the previous wealth requirement was not restricted by sex).