https://femmefrugality.com/myth-busting-womens-banking/
It's a funny myth but not true. Women were doing their own banking in America as far back as the 1700sm I'm not super up on my Soviet space programs but I think that's a few years earlier.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Yes, and black Americans became fully equal citizens in 1868. /s
You can't judge history and civil rights off of the exceptions or the ideas written on paper. I'm sorry. Acting like this is what the meme is talking about is just denying centuries of patriarchy in America.
The article literally says
the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed (1974), which, among other things, required banks to consider credit applications in a woman’s own name regardless of marital status
Gee, I wonder why a very specific act had to be passed to deal with this "non existent" issue that was solved in the 1700s. Gee. Weird.
Though, again, depending on where you lived, you may have already been protected from that discrimination by state law for deposit accounts in technicality if not practice.
Just an absolute garbage article you linked. Seriously. Reconsider your ability to think critically if you can't understand how much this article is trying to downplay patriarchy from this quote alone.
Women were still largely dependent on being married and dependent on their husband to have any form of banking well into the timeline the meme is referring to. That article is like saying "I couldn't find a law specific to race in the Jim Crow South related to voting".
I don't mean to overuse the analogy of racial discrimination. But I feel like people don't actually understand how discrimination and laws actually work in reality when it comes to patriarchy. So, I'm hoping you at least understand it for other historical contexts.
Laws aren't written to be "X identity group can't do Y". And trying to analyze the actual material outcomes by only looking for laws like that is going to give you the results the article you linked came to.
Laws of discrimination are written to be vague enough that the powers of white supremacy and patriarchy are allowed to be enacted at individual levels on mass scale - without directly writing them down.
Edit: this was originally just the /s comment. But holy shit that article they linked was so bad and ahistorical I couldn't stop editing. Seriously. Please learn to think about what you're reading. Don't just upvote a comment because they had a "source".
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Just one random counter example: wiki/First Women's Bank (New York):
It opened in 1975 and was part of a broader movement to address the financial needs of women who faced barriers in obtaining credit and financial services from traditional banks.
There was enough of a need for this 50 years ago that it made literal capitalist financial interest to make it happen.
Financial freedom in a modern word can be privileged (but absolutely essential for actual survival) and groups (like women, ie half of humanity) can be denied the necessities. If a women needs a man's signature to get a loan, have a credit card, or even open a banking account, they are not free from that man. And that (one aspect) really changed only in the 80s (slowly & with newer gens).
Saying some women had bank amounts in the 1700s is like saying "land of the free" in reference to USA (at any point in history actually).
Or saying how racism in USA ended with a (any) specific law.
The "meme" is still funny in comparing a basic necessity for a majority vs bcs ofc not a notable % of any human groups have been to space (even including billionaires).
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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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Woops, this aint Lemmy.ml so you cant ban all the replies fact checking your misinfo
Wish I could upvote things more than once lol. Idk how many things I'm banned from cuz I called out the user CowBee for being a state paid poster or bot or something. 2 years, 18k comments or something insane like that. All shilling for the CCP in China. Mod there must also mod other places.
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I suggest reading the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Russia#The_Revolution_and_Soviet_era
It's more complex than this. First, obviously the bank account thing is a myth. When people cite that women couldn't open a bank account, they're mostly referring to the date that a law was passed that prevented banks from discriminating against women. Plenty of banks were already doing business with women. The law just required all banks to do so. Hell, the first bank for women in the US was opened in 1879. It was still a very important victory to have anti-discrimination laws passed. But if a woman wanted to get a bank account in the 1950s or 1960s US, she could.
https://daily.jstor.org/a-bank-of-her-own/
But more critically, as the article I linked notes, the Soviet Union was not a paradise for women's equality. Here's the polit bureau in 1975:
But beyond top leadership, the problems were more fundamental. Yes, the Soviets were an immense improvement over what came before in terms of women's liberation. But women's liberation in the USSR was never a cultural movement like it was in the US. The party opened up some career opportunities that were previously closed to women. And cosmonaut was a high-profile example. But in the 1970s, the Soviet Union had a higher gender pay gap than the US.
This was a great read, thanks!
Women were allowed to vote in the US before anyone was allowed to vote in the USSR.
The working class was able to vote in election once the Tsars were removed, and the ballot extended to the bourgeoisie and land owners in 1937
Remind me how many parties they could vote for?
They didn't vote for parties. Elections happened at a local level where people knew candidates personally. Elected local councils ('soviets') would then elect members to higher councils in a 'tiered' system, all the way up to the supreme soviet.
A good-faith criticism of this model might be that it has a high degree of inertia, in that it may respond slowly to sudden changes in popular opinion.
So the Bolsheviks weren't the dominant party that eliminated all the others after they won the Civil War?
And remind me what happened to public figures who spoke against the premier in any way? I'm sure nobody complained because they loved the government so much that they'd never say a bad word about it...
Yes, that's right. The point I'm making is that elections worked very differently to the party politics people are used to, with an emphasis on people personally knowing their representatives. To the average voter, the bolshevik party wasn't very relevant when they were choosing between two guys who lived on their street.
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I think, there were some more events, and maybe they involved elections, too. And after that all the other parties were eliminated, because it turned out that it's easier to rule when there's no other options
Because eliminating representatives who might disagree with you is much more democratic than allowing a multiple party system.
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The purpose of a system is its outcome. If the elections only ever produced comically landslide victories for the ruling party, then that is a guarantee of a sham election.
Even if you assume every Soviet voter was a full-on true believer Communist, you would still never have such outcomes in fair elections. You would end up with multiple communist parties, each practicing a slightly different flavor of communism, vying for the vote.
Any voting system where the ruling party endlessly wins overwhelming victories is guaranteed corrupt and a sham.
But can they vote in USA in 2028?
Is there talk within the legislature to repeal the 19th Amendment? I will bet you literally any amount of money that women will be able to vote in 2028.
While this isn't true for the US, it is true for Switzerland. Valentina Tereshkova went to space in 1963, while Swiss Women's Suffrage was established by a referendum in 1971.
True, but it was just for propaganda reasons. It would be almost 20 years before the Soviets let another woman become an astronaut.
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did you know that Adolf Hitler was born in Idaho, US and was put in power in Germany by FDR?
and 100 more false factoids!
While Soviets had no money so they didn't need bank accounts.
Not sure about Soviet Union but in communist Poland people had lots of money. They just didn't have anything to buy with them.
In Soviet Russia, bank account opens you!
Wrong comm?
And before man went to space they sent stray dogs.
Okay. And how was life living under the thumb of the USSR? 😂
lot of people say it was fine, they had a home, food, work etc. does that mean it was roses and glitter, most certainly not but then go walk through a homeless encampment in the US.
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