One auspicious day in the mid-1970s, we went to the bank to apply for two credit cards.

Right away, the details of the story don’t synch with today. Credit card applications started flooding the mailbox decades ago. Nobody has to go to the bank to get one. They come for you.

Bank credit cards had been around by the 1960s, and store-brand charge cards before that. But in the 1970s banks like the former Hartford National were pushing them as a new consumer product in New London County.

A big part of the appeal was to establish credit ratings. That would make it possible to apply for a mortgage when there was enough saved for down payment on a house.

Now the story reveals what a real throwback it is. The bank would be happy to give a couple two cards, but both would belong to the husband. His name would be on each, although he could give written permission allowing his wife to use one.

The ensuing credit rating would be in his name alone.

Until Oct. 28, 1974, a married woman needed her husband’s signature on a credit application, and if she got one, the credit history went to creating a rating only for him, not her. An unmarried woman generally had to get a male relative to sign for her.

Last Monday, NPR took note of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

What, you never knew we needed that? The law was based on such an obviously sensible principle that, as soon as it passed it became business as usual.

It began with women like Emily Card, a worker in a Washington senatorial office. Card had found, as had other women, that she could not establish a credit rating under her own name, even though she earned more than her husband.

Card joined other women in pushing for equal credit opportunity. The draft legislation did not at first specify discrimination against women, but Louisiana Rep. Lindy Boggs tacked on words to this effect: “Just a couple of sentences about not discriminating against women on account of sex or marital status. They didn't use the term ‘gender’ back then.”

That quote comes from the oral history Card has recorded for the future Smithsonian American Women's History Museum. It is expected to open within the next decade on the National Mall.

The ECO Act passed in a bipartisan landslide. President Gerald Ford signed it into law.

The law made the people who historically did most household buying — women — full-fledged consumers. Adult women, single or married, could now establish their own credit.

That step opened the doors for women-owned businesses and for women getting mortgages to own their homes.

Where would the American and the global economy be without that? Small business, mobile banking, cryptocurrency, LLCs and the modern structure of American retail and commercial banking have arguably developed faster and stronger than if their potential customers and investors were only half the population.

ECOA permanently settled the question of women’s self-determination or “agency” in money matters. But although it seemed for 50 years that the prior major step in women’s right to self-determination, the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, was also permanent, it has proved not to be.

Since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision eliminating Roe as the standard, various states have rushed to restrict women’s access to procedures that would or could terminate a pregnancy. In reaction, voters in some other states have rejected similar propositions in referendum voting.

Agency over one’s body is primary. Agency over one’s finances supports the ways a person can live, work, earn and be part of a family and a community. They work together.

The people Americans elect to Congress this week will soon be debating whether to pass national standards similar to those of the Roe decision; to ban certain types of health care altogether; or to agree that the states should continue to knit a patchwork of uneven and unequal laws.

If women can lose the right that non-women have to control their own bodies, what’s to say that the next thing would not be eliminating their right to manage their own finances? And it could apply to all women, before, during and after their childbearing years.

I don’t see women, no matter how badly they deplore abortion, finding that to be a remedy to the abortion dilemma. They won’t stand for something that makes all women into second-class citizens.

It would be an economic disaster. But do not imagine no one would try to make it happen.

After all, a few years ago it seemed that women could absolutely depend on access to care that might be needed to save their lives.

Lisa McGinley is a member of The Day Editorial Board.