Signed by Him, Paid by Her

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 Feenstra opened her door to a foreclosure notice. Her husband had mortgaged their home without asking. The law: the “head and master” rule, said he didn’t have to. He was the master; she was the consent that never mattered.

But Joanne didn’t go quietly. She fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and when Justice Thurgood Marshall struck down Louisiana’s law, he didn’t just correct a technicality. He split history down the middle, before her and after her.

It’s astonishing to think how close this history sits.

1981 was the year Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman on the Supreme Court. The same year our mothers were already grown women, building lives inside systems designed to shrink them. I was a born a year later only.

We like to pretend progress moves in straight lines. Well, it doesn’t. It’s a tug-of-war, every inch gained by women like Joanne Feenstra, who refused to be erased by the laws written around her.

So when I hear that 2025 marks fifty years since women could apply for a mortgage without a man’s permission, I don’t hear trivia. I hear a gavel echoing through the bones of our grandmothers. I hear the soft creak of a door finally opening.

They called it head and master.

Ha, we call it ours.