US Authoritarianism

So you have a source for that? Sounds plausible but also too good to be true.

My grandmother's aunt fled to Australia after half her family died of dysentery. It was a very sad story for a very long time in the family and the town. Her husband moved the whole family across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada away from her immediate relatives in England because of a good job and land prospects. But their household was stricken with a bloody flux a few months later and sadly only the women survived, alone in a foreign country with nothing. It was just a sad and dark part of our family history growing up, we were taught to respect our great great aunt because she'd "been through a lot and faced it bravely" with watching her family die. As a teenager I could tell there was more going on by the way the older adults glanced at each other, but never knew what.

I was 30 when mum told me that my great great uncle was an abusive pick who moved his wife overseas to isolate her so he could get away with more, and it wasn't a coincidence that he and his "apple that never fell off the tree" son both shit themselves to death after eating a family dinner, but his wife was fine.

Doublechecking numbers, like @phdepressed said, while also making sure that all the pertinent pages had been legibly scanned before incinerating the originals.

Making sure things have/had been paid appropriately by both sides is still important.

It means "Our useful idiot will make us even richer!"

Well you can't have those teachers leaving in the middle of the school year for something stupid like giving birth, teachers are supposed to be the paragon of innocence

You also couldn't get a divorce for incompatible differences, you had to prove your husband was at fault for some kind of marital crime like adultery or physical abuse. He could leave you with a single penny to your name, lock you out of your shared bank account, and go live with his mistress in another state, but if you couldn't prove he'd put his dick in her, no divorce for you. Which means you can't re-marry someone who will let you have access to a bank account, and depending on the exact year you couldn't even travel alone to chase him down.

Since you have a list going, add jury service to it. Even after women were allowed to be summoned, lawyers would strike them for cause on the grounds that they were too temperamental or could not focus enough. And then after that wasn't allowed, lawyers would strike them all with peremptory challenges, until finally in like 1980 or something the Supreme Court had to step in and say "if you start striking women and it seems like you're just striking women, the judge should ask you why, and if you can't give reasons, your challenges will be denied."

A lot of people like to shit on jury service, likes it's no big deal, but I think it's one of two or three of the most patriotic and freedom loving things people can do for their country, up there with joining the service and voting. Like anyone that wants to talk to me at all using words like liberty or justice, better turn up when it's time to talk about jury service, or else they expose themselves as full of shit.

Sometimes it wasn't that grandma couldn't have a bank account and suffered financial dependence, it was that even if she needed a jury to sort through some bullshit, men could make sure it was men that judged her conduct.

A prosecutor once told me that the worst juror to have when trying to convict a rapist is a woman whose never been raped, because to convict they must first admit the fact it could happen to them; that's a hard fact to force on soneone. With that same logic, think of how men might judge a woman who leaves or defends herself from an abusive husband, or takes her kids somewhere safe, etc.

All the more reason to just be accurate and say "banks were still allowed to deny opening accounts for a woman" rather than say "women couldn't hold bank accounts until 1974," which just isn't true. The truth is still plenty bad, we don't need to pull a Vance card.

I disagree entirely, I understood it as "no women were allowed to have a bank account anywhere in America before 1974" and I guarantee I'm not the only one. The very existence of this discussion thread proves your statement wrong.

I don't think that's the point in dispute, but that's not what the quoted post is saying.

"Women weren't allowed to open a bank account in the USA until 1974" implies that, until the year 1974, there were no women in the US who had opened bank accounts.

The more accurate statement would be "The right for women in the US to open bank accounts wasn't nationally established until 1974," which aligns with the reality wherein many American women were still able to open bank accounts before then.

That's not what was said, though. "Some banks weren't legally required to let women open bank accounts" is a very different statement than "women couldn't open bank accounts."