Fifty years ago, women in America needed a man’s permission to get a mortgage. Forty-four years ago, a woman had to sue her own country to stop her husband from mortgaging their home without telling her. There was a time, and not in some dusty century, but in the same decade that gave us MTV and the first IBM personal computer, when a woman could wake up in the home she helped buy and discover that her husband had signed it away to pay his legal bills. Louisiana, 1981. Joanne