The Barbara Collins Case: Regulating Women's Lives in the Modern American Consumer Information and Insurance Markets

In 1972, the Farm Bureau Insurance Company rejected Barbara Collins for an automobile insurance policy after a credit bureau produced an investigation report that characterized her as a sexually promiscuous "excessive drinker." This article examines the Collins case and its broader historical contexts to reveal the way insurance and consumer information markets depended on the private lives of women to generate wealth and accumulate capital. Beginning in the early twentieth century, insurers and credit bureaus surveyed women's social ties and family relations to judge them fit for access to private-sector insurance markets. These judgements functioned by imposing market-based patriarchal norms onto women, which rendered any woman who did not conform to insurers' narrow gendered metrics as declinable. As a result, a broad swath of women found their economic autonomy constrained with the cruel irony being that consumer information and insurance markets forced women to witness their own lives weaponized against them.