My Late Family Financier
Mother is rejected as co-signer for my student loan.
Sometime in 1968 — it was early summer, I think — my mother, an established New York suburb gift shop owner, was rejected by her local bank in co-signing a loan on my behalf.
At the time, I was 23; mother was 55.
Here, fifty-some years later, is our story.
In 1963 I didn’t want to go to college which was a grave disappointment to my father who had paid in part for my four years at a college preparatory boarding school in Connecticut. I explained that I wanted to go to art school, not college nor university, and that art school was the surest path to becoming a “commercial artist,” my aspiration. To my credit I had applied to and been accepted at a prominent art school in Manhattan, School of the Visual Arts on East Twenty-third Street.
My father was not impressed.
“You’re no Picasso, and I am not paying for it. I will pay for four years of college, and that’s it. You want to go to art school, then you find a way to pay for it. Don’t ask me.”
Next, I made my first and, at the time, worst financial decision: I caved to my father’s appraisal and applied to and was accepted at a four-year liberal arts college. The college boasted a skeleton of a fine arts department mostly focused on the study of art history which I majored in — a far cry from a wannabe career as a commercial artist.
The drive to be a self-supporting artist led me to pursue independent study during the summer with “working artists.” I slowly built up a portfolio which by graduation was lacking by graduate art school standards and so in 1967, rejected by graduate schools I had applied to and armed with what I felt was a worthless degree, I resigned to going back to art school, to build up a portfolio.
My new efforts at career preparation required funding. Going back to my father for any financing, or borrowing, was not an option. Our family income level ruled out applying for financial aid. Mother, who in 1968, had successfully purchased and rehabbed a gift shop, came up with an idea: why not co-sign a bank loan to help pay for my art school? She knew the President of the local bank and trust company, where she banked.
Surely, he could help.
Unbeknownst to me was my first financial setback at age 22: our plan foundered during the bank interview.
“You know Virginia, I can’t do this. You know we don’t make loans of this kind,” the banker replied.
Indignant, mother pressed her case. “Charlie, you know me… why Alice (his wife) is a good (credit) customer. And you have (pointing to me) a good risk. I know him. He’s trustworthy. We’re good for it.”
Charlie suggested to my mother, why not discuss this with my father and have him co-sign the loan? Something in me snapped, and I said, “Forget it, Mother.” I couldn’t bear witnessing her humiliation any longer. We walked out to a chorus of “Let me know if I can help.”
In her 2022 memoir, “Dinners with Ruth,” Nina Totenberg tells how she first encountered Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1971, when Totenberg corresponded with former Justice Ginsburg’s regarding a Supreme Court brief, Ginsburg’s first of many. Totenberg, a reporter for The National Observer, was 27 at the time, Ginsburg, a Rutgers Law School Professor, was 38.
The brief didn’t have to do with a woman’s privacy, as one might expect, but broadly with women’s rights under the Constitution. As Nina Totenberg tells it,
“One of the cases that at first mystified me was Reed v. Reed, a challenge to an Idaho law that automatically preferred men over women as executors of estates. The combatants were Cecil and Sally Reed, the divorced parents of a son who had committed suicide. Each parent applied to administer their deceased son’s estate. Sally Reed didn’t even receive a hearing. The probate judge automatically appointed Cecil because Idaho law decreed that ‘males must be preferred to females,’ when more than one person was qualified. If Sally had at least been granted a hearing, she likely would have argued that her son died using a gun owned and kept in the house by his father, and she was thus more qualified to administer the estate. Sally’s lawyer refused to appeal the decision, saying that she would certainly lose. Sixteen additional lawyers refused to take her case, until finally attorney Allen Derr agreed. He also thought that she would lose, but he believed it was an important case, with a constitutional issue at stake.
“As Derr had predicted, Sally Reed lost in every lower court. Her last appeal was to the US Supreme Court. But on this appeal, Sally Reed and Allen Derr were joined by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be the principal author of the brief, even though Derr would argue the case before the Court. The brief asked the Court to do something revolutionary: to declare a law unconstitutional, because it discriminated ‘on the basis of sex.’
“…I flipped to the front of the brief and saw that it was written by a law professor at Rutgers named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her telephone number was listed under her name… when I called Ruth, I used my phone card, rather than pocket change. She was in her office. I introduced myself and asked my very simple question: I thought the fourteenth Amendment applied to African Americans after the Civil War. How does it apply to women? Ruth spent an hour walking me through her argument, that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law to all persons, and ‘women are persons,’ as she put it. I emerged from that phone booth like a goose that had been stuffed in preparation for foie gras. Or as Ruth later put it, ‘That was our first conversation, and we have been close friends ever since.’
“… Reed v. Reed was argued on October 19, and slightly over a month later, the Court delivered a 7–0 decision, a unanimous decision because there were two vacancies at the time. The decision didn’t address what the standard should be for evaluating gender discrimination claims. It simply said that ‘to give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” (1)
Three years earlier in Rye, New York, my mother had tried unsuccessfully to co-sign a loan on my behalf. In retrospect my mother’s attempt was a latter-day frustration with an abiding history: American women had unsuccessfully petitioned government and financial elites for a piece of America’s financial wealth going back to the mid-nineteenth century land grabs. (2)
The first “unofficial” women’s bank opened in Boston in 1879. It’s founder, a fortune teller by the name of Sarah Howe, was investigated and accused of bilking customers through what was to become a precursor of a Ponzi scheme. (3) Forty years later, as the 19th Amendment was being ratified, on October 6, 1919, The First Woman’s Bank opened in Charlottesville, Tennessee.
“… When First Woman’s began to struggle in 1926, it was absorbed by the First Trust and Savings Bank of Clarksville. Bigger fish kept swallowing smaller ones, as banks tend to do, but it never completely closed, and survived under one name or another through the Depressions and subsequent calamities until it came under the massive umbrella of Bank of America.” (4)
During the postwar years, women’s wealth continued to grow, as women emerged as an economic force in the workplace. Despite their emerging occupation as (bank) “cashier-clerks’ (5), women were not able to open a bank account, let alone apply for a bank loan, until 1974 and the passage of the Equal Opportunity Act, which “gave every American woman, married or not, the right to open her own bank or credit account.”
In 1975 I walked by the First Women’s Bank at Park and 59th. I was an exhibiting coop art gallery member and a private school art instructor.
I recall admiring the graphics on the entrance canopy. The brash sans serif red of “Women’s” stood out from the polished brass entrances of neighboring financial institutions and “men’s only” clubs. It was a crisp fall day. 1968 was a memory and I had embarked on a career, thanks in no small part to mother’s gumption and generosity.
January 2
Notes
1- Nina Totenberg, “Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships,” (2022), pp. 34–37.
2- Ian Rose, “A Bank of Her Own,” daily.jstor.org, January 11, 2023
3- “The passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 signaled one of the most important advancements in the economic rights of women. Infamous for encouraging the seizure of land in the American West from native tribes in the service of pioneer settlement and for exposing indigenous people to colonial violence, the legislation offered many women their first opportunity to own property. Under the terms of this law, any woman — single, widowed, divorced, or abandoned — could claim up to 160 acres for herself and in her own name. In some territories, up to 20 percent of land claims were made by women. Yet for women who were unwilling or unable to move West, there remained few options for building wealth.” -Ian Rose, “A Bank of Her Own,” daily.jstor.org, January 11, 2023
3- Rose, ibid.
4- Rosemary Crompton, cited by Ian Rose, ibid.
