"Put Your Money Where Your Movement Is": The Feminist Credit Unions of the 1970s

Abstract:Between 1973 and 1977, at least twenty-seven feminist credit unions (FCUs) opened their doors in the United States. These financial institutions sought to address discrimination against women in lending and to provide a place to "recycle" money within the movement to fund feminist projects. During this same period, in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), which made discrimination in lending based on sex or marital status illegal. This article weaves together the history of the ECOA and FCUs to highlight the limits and possibilities of feminist institutions and reform. While historians have written about FCUs as examples of cultural feminism, this article uses internal documents, newsletters, and membership data to argue that FCUs were valuable and contested sites of intergroup organizing and feminist theorizing about capitalism, community, race, and class that defied simple categorizations.