My father opened a bank account for me when I was first earning money in the fields and orchards harvesting fruit and pollinating the crops to yield seed for sale. I was fifteen.
Women I knew, as I reached adulthood, didn’t have credit cards. If their husbands trusted them, some few had checkbooks, but I knew a good number who only used cash. Doled out once a month by husband or father.
First time I stayed in a hotel by myself, I pre-paid by mailing the office a check. I was a freshman in college then, in 1975. I never had a credit card until I was twenty five or six (yes–I worried about the temptation to spend money I didn’t have.) But I remember an older woman, a Researcher of rank at Yale University who was refused a car rental at her destination in the Mid-West because she had no credit card…only a checkbook, her ID and driver’s license. The year was 1983. What shape is your money? With money goes power.
My father was a very different person than his peers. In this time, 2023, with deep thankfulness, we have actually come to a very different world than I was born into, and I am glad, but progress is slow, and there is always a group that you cannot haul into the future just because the future has arrived.
There is a large population of women out there who still do not control their own bank accounts, have no credit or credit cards, and many find the prospect threatening and awful because they have been taught from birth that they are not capable. That it is easier and better to not be responsible for such challenging and venial things.
We wonder why so many women vote against their best interests? It’s because they have nowhere else to go.
They have not yet imagined it. They do not nurture their future; they do not see their present.
robinwinter 
Insightful, and all too true! This also presents am interesting quandary on the media front. As social and traditional media pushes today’s narrative that credit is only a good thing, it moves some to the opposite extreme of overusing their credit cards. I don’t ever remember having a consumer economics class in high school or junior high (or middle school depending on where you come from!) where I believe it is most needed. My Mother as a teacher in junior high lobbied for, and created what she called a “business” class. It included many of the basics needed to live in a lively capitalistic society, including how to write a check, how to open a bank account, filling out a job application for make believe jobs she created, and budgeting a make believe income. Thank you for sharing!
And I worry when I see the kids I have tutored, how little they hear of the rules of living that actually rule how they will experience their lives. The class your mother created sounds like exactly what is needed. Thank you, Margaret, for sharing this story!