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[–] 15 points 3 months ago (1 child)

It's a good link, busting the myth clearly and with good sources.

However:

1862: First state (California) allows women to open bank accounts regardless of marital status.

But that's still a century before female cosmonauts, so I'm just being pernicketty really.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I love and encourage persnicketiness!

    I also feel that technically, at least according to the source, my comment is correct.

    As the piece notes:

    Women could participate in the economy — including banking — in Colonial America.

    To me, this meets the "American women could open a bank account" criteria but that's just my opinion and one with which reasonable people can disagree.

    Though, the piece's source gets delightfully snarky about it:

    Though a small percentage of all bank customers, women held accounts in many northeastern banks in the early national period, a fact that apparently has eluded business and women's historians alike.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Your are indeed technically correct (but I maintain that as the worst kind of correct, who trusts bureaucrats?), but the added information that that section details as once/if women married, their finances, assets, bank accounts became their husbands.

    So while unmarried and widowed women could do banking, meaning that women could - social pressure and expectations made it difficult to impossible for the majority of most women's lives.

    You are correct in the bar of "a certain subset of >1 women could open bank accounts" was true for, potentially the entire history of banking in the US/thirteen colonies. (When was the first settler bank set up in N. America? Probably a Spanish one in the Caribbean, but British people probably didn't use that one.)

    We are mostly in agreement, just drawing the line either when first crossed (fair and valid) or when all could cross (racial discrimination aside (and that's a big aside)).

    Salutations and respect to a fellow lover and encourager of persnicketiness.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    but I maintain that as the worst kind of correct, who trusts bureaucrats?

    Love it!

    Yup, you make great points. I just think that if the comparator on the other side is "women in space" we're not talking about a large percentage of the population. (Though, an admittedly fair perspective is the number of women as a share of the total people in space.)

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I'd foolishly overlooked the considerations of what kind of line was drawn on the space side. That's a really good point.

    Thanks for the polite, pernicketty, chat.

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