When Could Women Open a Bank Account
in Their Own Name in Australia?

The short answer is 1984.

Not 1884. Not 1904. 1984.

That is the year the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) came into force in Australia, making it unlawful for financial institutions to refuse a woman a bank account, loan, or mortgage on the basis of her sex or marital status. Before that year, a bank could turn a woman away, or require her husband’s signature before lending to her, and do so entirely legally.

If you were born before 1984, this was the legal reality when you came into the world. If your mother tried to get a mortgage in her own name in 1983, a bank could say no, and often did.

But wait, didn’t women get property rights in the 1800s?

Yes. And that is where it gets complicated.

The Married Women’s Property Acts, passed in each Australian colony between 1879 and 1897, dismantled the legal doctrine of coverture: the system under which a married woman had no separate legal identity from her husband, and everything she owned or earned legally belonged to him. After those Acts, married women could own property and keep their own wages.

But owning property and being treated equally by financial institutions are two different things. The Acts gave women legal rights on paper. They did not stop banks from applying policies requiring a husband’s consent before lending to a married woman. They did not stop employers from paying women less, or from requiring women to resign upon marriage. And they did not stop the financial system from treating women as second-class customers for another century.

A timeline of financial independence for Australian women

The path from coverture to equal access to financial services took the better part of two centuries. Here is the shape of it:

• Settlement to 1879Full coverture applies across all Australian colonies. Married women have no separate legal identity. Everything they own passes to their husband upon marriage. Their wages belong to him. They cannot sign contracts or sue in court.
• 1879New South Wales passes the first Married Women’s Property Act in Australia, giving married women the right to own property and keep their earnings.
• 1884Victoria and South Australia follow with their own Acts.
• 1890–1897Queensland (1890), Western Australia (1892) and Tasmania (1897) complete the set. Coverture is formally abolished across what will become the nation.
• 1902White women gain the right to vote in federal elections under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, one of the first countries in the world to do so. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and men are excluded.
• 1942The Commonwealth Public Service lifts its bar on married women working, but only for the duration of World War II. The bar is reinstated after the war.
• 1960s–1970sState by state, Australian governments begin removing the marriage bars that required women to resign from public service and teaching roles upon marriage. The Commonwealth public service removes its bar permanently in 1966.
• 1971The Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) becomes the first Australian bank to grant women loans without requiring a male guarantor, after campaigning by women’s liberation activists. The change is voluntary. No law yet requires it, and other banks are slow to follow.
• 1974The Whitlam government introduces equal pay for women in the public service, following a 1972 equal pay decision by the Arbitration Commission.
• 1984The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) comes into force. A financial institution can no longer legally refuse a woman an account or loan because she is a woman.
• 1992Superannuation becomes compulsory under the Superannuation Guarantee. For the first time, all working Australians have super contributions made on their behalf.
• 2025Super on Commonwealth Parental Leave Pay becomes law, effective 1 July 2025, the first time super is paid on parental leave at the federal level, addressing one of the key structural drivers of the gender super gap.

What the timeline tells us

Two things stand out when you look at this in sequence.

The first is how recent it all is. Equal access to banking services has only existed in Australia for 42 years. The compulsory super system has only existed for 33 years. Super on parental leave, which addresses one of the most significant structural causes of the gender super gap, only came into force last year.

The second is that a change at one bank is not the same as a right. The Bank of New South Wales dropped its male-guarantor requirement in 1971, but a woman’s access still depended on which bank she walked into and who was behind the counter. It did not become a right until the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 made discrimination unlawful. Even then, legal change and cultural change did not move at the same pace. The Act did not immediately change how banks assessed women’s creditworthiness, how financial products were designed, or how financial education was delivered. Women who grew up before 1984 absorbed the message, explicitly or implicitly, that money was not really their domain. That message does not disappear the moment a law changes.

Why this matters for money confidence today

The gender confidence gap in personal finance is well documented. When women say they feel behind with money, or that they never really learned it, or that they feel like they are supposed to already know things they were never taught: that feeling has a history. It is not a personal failing. It is the long tail of a system that spent centuries keeping women out, and only very recently started letting them in.

Understanding that history does not close the gap on its own. But it does change the question. The question was never why aren’t women better with money? The question is why was the system designed to exclude them for so long, and how do we catch up?

That is exactly what Her Long Game is here to do.