We’ve Got You Covertured
I was legally married for about 22 yrs. I had been in that relationship and “living together” for about 3 yrs before that. My ex and I were pretty fair minded, educated, and attempting to have an equitable relationship (to the best of our ability and keeping in mind unconscious trauma and patriarchal trainings). We put our names equally on everything. Sometimes I had a credit card, sometimes he did. Sometimes I set up the utility accounts, sometimes he did. When we finally managed to buy land, we did it together, and both of our names were on the all of the paperwork.
When we got divorced, we chose mediation, and we attempted to split everything fairly. The idea being that we had walked into this thing with eyes open and fair minds, and we would walk out that way. After all, we still had children to raise, and we intended to be co-parent partners for the remainder.
Sure, I decided to be the one to sign up for a lot of new accounts, paperwork, my own new bank account, and I was also no longer on his health insurance. It took a while to remove myself from all the accounts, and set up my own grown up identity, on my own. The extra labor of this was overwhelming, but I whittled away at it, a piece at a time.
We had moved in together when I was 22 yrs-old. We opened our bank account together when I was 23. Our careers started side by side, and yes… I did take his name when we got married. But I took his name because mine was disputable… I had never lived in my father’s house, and my step-fathers name had been surreptitiously attached to my father’s name somewhere in high school. I liked my ex’s name. It was more a lucky windfall than a subservience. And I wasn’t going to give the name back. I like it, it feels right, it’s mine now.
Being divorced and on my own seemed OK.
Sure, I was struggling to find work. And the years of baby making and then graduate school, had taken me out of the job pool at just the wrong time—both wrong age, and wrong economy. But I was getting by. I was coming up with a strategy to find my feet. I had set up my own household. And more than anything else, the kids seemed OK.
I decided to sell the minivan and buy myself a hybrid. It was good for the environment, and I was tired of the huge car. I sold the minivan and with cash in hand went to buy the car I had researched and chosen.
The first dealer treated me like crap, and wouldn’t let me test drive the car I wanted. They kept trying to sell me other things. This was not unexpected. Car dealers are notoriously difficult, and stereotypically sexist. Watch any scene in movies or television in which a woman is trying to buy a car. It’s difficult.
I had noticed a car in the brand and style I wanted at a lot that was not connected to this dealership. This other place was selling a used version that had obviously been traded in, and it was a good price.
I emailed that car dealer. I told them I had seen the car on their lot, and I wanted it. I said that if they could show me the car, let me test drive it, and manage to be friendly, without making me feel bad or hurting my feelings, I would buy the car.
When I arrived I was greeted by a woman roughly my own age. She had recently divorced. She was a friendly.
We had a great time together. We test drove the car, chit chatted, and talked about dating, kids, starting over. She had only recently been working at this dealer. Six months earlier she had been working at the dealership that had blown me off. We both knew that buying this car from her would give us each the satisfaction of giving the finger to the assholes we mutually disliked. It would be a sweet victory. I liked the car. It was good enough. I said yes.
So, this is where it gets weird. I walked into that dealership with more than half the money for the car, in cash, to put down on it right away. I just needed a small car loan. At the time, I was 49 yrs old, and had the remnants of a 401k, a graduate degree, and had recently sold a rather large piece of property in Santa Barbara with my ex-husband.
The dealer handed me an espresso while I waited. It was that kind of a place. I sat confidently in her office. We had bought many cars in my adult life, usually with way less of a down payment. The time ticked by. It was an unusually long wait. I called my ex to ask him to pick up kids from school, because I wasn’t going to make it. I cringed having to tell him where I was and what car I had chosen. I wanted this experience all to myself.
The dealer finally walked back in. She informed me that she had to do a lot of talking to the floor manager. He wasn’t going to give me a loan at first, since I had “baby credit.”
What does that mean?!
Well, she explained, it turns out that when you get a divorce after spending most of your adult life in a marriage to another human person and you are a woman and they are a man, they get to keep the credit history. You (the woman) are washed clean, like a new born baby, or some sort of finance baptism. You walk away with NO CREDIT HISTORY. It’s as if you didn’t even exist.
This is one of those hard lessons to learn when one is approaching 50 and rebuilding everything else from the ground up. It explains why I couldn’t get a credit card of my own, and had to use the one that we still had from joint accounts, but take his name off of it.
The car dealer took pity on me. I have now been driving my car for several years. I make the payment on time every month (I put it on auto-pay to be extra sure). I pay off all my credit regularly, and I pay my bills on time. My credit is about 7 yrs old now, according to the reports I get. About the age of the average 28 yr-old. I’m still building a career, and I live in a very expensive part of the world, so I don’t know if I will ever have solid enough credit to achieve mortgage status, but I will try for that someday. Maybe when I’m 80.
Meanwhile, I feel the second class citizenship of womanhood in a new way. Being removed from my own credit history, nothing more than a “first wife,” and an expendable appendage, according to the market, is a shock. I imagine if I had not dropped out of corporate work to have kids, built up my portfolio, claimed a certain amount of our assets under my name alone, in a separate nest egg account, and divorced with a cut throat lawyer at my side, I might still have visibility. But then, I wouldn’t be me.
Corporations may be people, but women are commodified objects, with little access to power. We are still subsumed by coverture laws, and more importantly embedded cultural and economic remnants of assumed coverture.
Thank you Dr. Lovejoy for sharing these deeply relevant nuances of older women’s experiences under U.S. democracy.
…and that’s not even looking at obsolete SS benefits for women of the ‘60s Liberation movements, particularly for 1st wives and mothers. “Coverture” continues into 21st Century’s 3rd decade at full-speed.
“Corporations may be people, but women are commodified objects, with little access to power. We are still subsumed by coverture laws, and more importantly embedded cultural and economic remnants of assumed coverture.”