This Just In – Ever so slowly, we’re getting there.
When I moved to North Carolina at the tender age of 20, I had already experienced some strange expectations. I got married at 19. When I went into work the next day and announced that my husband and I had tied the knot the night before (a Wednesday), my co-workers and my boss wanted to know if this meant that I was quitting my job.
Seriously. I was a teenager (now a married teenager) yet many presumed that I would stay at home and (I guess) occupy myself all day with cleaning our one-bedroom apartment. I mean, I could have done that for several weeks before exhausting the need, but good grief.
Applying for work in Chapel Hill after we arrived in the fall of 1978, most employers thought I was a student. After I explained that I had relocated here with my husband who was brought here by Blue Cross, I was asked some standard questions. None of them had to do with my qualifications or occupational ambitions.
“Do you plan to have children?” they’d ask. Then it was … When? And how many?
To be clear, I wasn’t seeking employment with my mother, but I sometimes wondered if she was the ghostwriter for many of these interview questions. We also wondered when we would have children and how many, but first, we thought we’d like to buy some groceries and maybe a house one day.
Even my innocent 20-year-old mind knew what the law recognized sometime later. These questions were nobody’s business but ours. As long as I’m venting about this … I was a high school graduate applying for entry level clerical jobs. Was my being out for two months to have a baby really going to cause an insurance company to crash and burn?
When we did buy our first house in 1979, we qualified using only my husband’s income and credit rating. That’s because he HAD a credit rating. It was many years after that that I was able to establish credit in my own name, based on my own income.
In the 20th Century, women secured the right to vote, the ability to control if and when they would get pregnant (a very big deal when it comes to financial security), the right to get a credit card regardless of marital status and the right to have their jobs (same job or equivalent) held for them if they had to take time off to have a baby or take care of a family member.
These are all tremendous building blocks toward financial equity for women but with all these steps forward, we’ve seen in recent years an urge to yank back those changes where possible.
The Dobbs decision by the current Supreme Court rescinded the Constitutional right to an abortion, but that’s not all it did. It also reminded all of us that civil rights that have been conveyed by way of legal precedent (instead of statute or constitutional amendments) can be undone at the will of five of nine Justices.
A Court that will undo precedent so capriciously can (and likely will) have a look around for anything else that displeases them. That includes but is not limited to access to birth control, voting rights, marriage rights and all sorts of rights related to property ownership and inheritance.
When my husband and I bought our first house, it was pointed out to me that if he should die, I would inherit the house (and have to pay taxes on that). If I died, he did not inherit the property because he already owned it. This was true for all of our money and belongings as well.
It’s perplexing to think that you may not be able to afford to inherit what you already own. While we’re in the middle of these inequities, it’s hard to appreciate the progress we’ve made, but it does exist. Those who would like to turn this ship around and go backward are working hard at finding ways to shut down the forward movement, but we see them. We’re working hard, too.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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