Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92. The announcement came from her own Instagram account and her foundation’s, and it said she kept working for equality until the very end. Secretary Hillary Clinton, paying tribute, put it better than I could: “She pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her…..”
What I want to write about is narrower, and it is one thing I know how to do, which is read the law. Because here is what I have come to believe after a few years of representing people in front of the IRS: statutes are a confession. They’re where a society writes down what it assumes and then charges money on that assumption. And the assumptions about women (and others) are still sitting in the Internal Revenue Code, some of them in the past tense, some of them very much not.
First, the personal part
I would not have a tax practice without women.
My Family
My great-grandmother, who always thought I was capable of anything and always wanted me to succeed in business. Sadly, she didn’t live long enough to see that happen.
My grandmother, a retired enrolled agent. That’s how I even knew what an EA was. As a child, I witnessed her tirelessly advocate for her clients and represent them before the IRS. She worked extremely long hours in an era that lacked technology and most certainly didn’t see women as equal.
My mother, who has always been my biggest supporter. From good to bad, she is always there to listen or go to war on behalf of her children if needed.
My sister Hollie, who works alongside me. EA, MBA, amazing mother, and the person who catches the things I may not think about. No version of The Youngblood Group functions without her.
My friends
I wouldn’t stay sane (okay, fine, semi-sane) without the women in my life.
Meg (who is not in tax) and I text a lot, at strange hours, about a wide range of topics. She also does a lot of my editing for writing for publications. It is nice to have a friend outside of the industry so you can get a different perspective.
Natalie taught me so much about real estate but has also, over the years, given me unique perspectives on various world issues I wouldn’t have considered.
Shannon and I host a podcast together, an idea that arose over good vegan food and talking about the troubles of the industry. We also went through the USTCP process together (we’re still waiting on admission). Shared trauma, perhaps?
I met Sherrill a few years ago at a dinner. She convinced me I could do something very hard and always gives her honest opinion. Honest, straightforward feedback is rare these days, and I treasure it.
Amber was perhaps the first tax professional I became friends with. I will never forget my first tax conference, and being the very introverted person that I am, she made sure I talked to people. She has also given advice and referrals, and has been known to vigorously defend her friends in social media “discussions.”
Now, therapists aren’t our friends; they are our therapists. However, I think we should all have one, and Candy has certainly contributed to my success.
“Not that long ago” is doing a lot of work
Here is the thing most people, including most tax professionals, have no feel for: the legal architecture that made women financially dependent was not dismantled in some long-forgotten era. It came down in the lifetime of people who are currently working.
Let’s look at the actual dates.
The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was signed on October 28, 1974, and took effect one year later. It did not give anyone a right to credit; nobody has that. It made it unlawful to discriminate in a credit transaction on the basis of sex or marital status. (Race, color, religion, national origin, age, and additional protections came in the 1976 amendments.) Before that, federal law did not prohibit a lender from denying a woman credit or pricing it higher because she was a woman or because she was unmarried. Banks routinely required a male cosigner, a husband or a father or a brother, on applications for credit cards, loans, and mortgages. Regulation B, which gave it teeth, took effect alongside the statute in 1975.
The federal Fair Housing Act did not prohibit sex discrimination in housing until August 22, 1974, when a provision of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 added “sex” to its protected classes. The original 1968 Act covered race, color, religion, and national origin. For six years, a landlord could turn a woman away, or charge her more, on the basis of sex, and the Fair Housing Act had nothing to say about it.
Billie Jean King won Wimbledon six times in singles and holds a record twenty titles there overall. In 1971 she became the first woman athlete to earn more than $100,000 in a single season. And in the early 1970s, by her own account, she still could not get a credit card in her own name. Credit ran through her husband’s income, and her husband was a law student she was supporting.
You will often hear that women could not open a bank account before 1974. That is not entirely accurate. There was not a federal law that barred women from holding a bank account, but the states and bank policy varied significantly.
What was true is arguably worse, because it was structural rather than statutory. Credit was rationed by marital status as an ordinary, lawful business practice. A married woman’s card was issued as “Mrs. Husband’s Name,” and here is the part that matters: the credit history accrued to him. She could pay every bill on time for twenty years and have no file of her own. So when he died, or when the marriage ended, she was not a person with damaged credit. She was a person with no credit, starting from zero at fifty.
Translation: the law did not have to forbid her from participating. It just had to permit a system in which, when she did participate, the record belonged to somebody else.
Now, let’s talk about some tax implications.
Moritz v. Commissioner: Caregiving, Gender, and the Tax Code
Before the innocent spouse cases, one detour, because it may be the oddest feminist tax case in American law, and it is strange because the taxpayer was a bachelor from Denver.
Charles E. Moritz was a never-married man who worked and cared for his elderly invalid mother, who lived with him and whom he supported. He was an editor for a Philadelphia publishing house, running its western division out of his home in Denver and traveling eleven states to visit authors. In 1968, he paid for nursing help so that he could continue going to work, and he claimed a dependent-care deduction under what was then IRC § 214.
At the time, former § 214 did not make the deduction available to every taxpayer who paid dependent-care expenses in order to remain employed. It drew categories. In substance, the deduction was available to a taxpayer who was a woman, a widower, a divorced man, or a husband whose wife was incapacitated or institutionalized, but only where the care was for the purpose of enabling the taxpayer to be gainfully employed.
That meant the statute could reach a working woman. It could reach a widower. It could reach a divorced man. It could reach a married man whose wife was incapacitated or institutionalized. But it did not reach Moritz: a man who had never married and who was paying for care for his dependent mother so he could keep working.
The Code did not expressly ask who was actually doing the caregiving. It sorted taxpayers by assumptions about who needed relief from caregiving duties to work. The premise was gendered: caregiving was treated as women’s work, and the tax benefit was structured around that assumption.
The IRS disallowed Moritz’s deduction. He took the case to the Tax Court himself, without a lawyer, and lost. On appeal, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg took the case and argued it together, she as a constitutional lawyer building a sex-discrimination strategy, he as a tax lawyer who understood the Code’s mechanics.
On November 22, 1972, the Tenth Circuit reversed. In Moritz v. Commissioner, 469 F.2d 466 (10th Cir. 1972), the court held that former § 214’s classification violated the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The Supreme Court declined review, leaving the Tenth Circuit’s decision in place.
The strategy matters because it captures the Ginsburg method in miniature. The vehicle for a foundational sex-discrimination argument was not a woman excluded from the workplace, but a man denied a caregiving deduction. A legal regime built on assumptions about women also confined men. And a court that might not yet see the full injury when discrimination ran in one direction could be made to see it when the same stereotype injured someone on the other side of the line.
Here is a detail that makes the case stranger still. By the time the Tenth Circuit ruled, Congress had already rewritten the statute. The Revenue Act of 1971 removed the sex-based classification from § 214, but only for taxable years after 1971. Moritz’s case was about 1968. He was left to fight over the year when the old rule still applied.
The statutory story did not end there. Former § 214 did not survive the decade. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 repealed it and replaced the deduction with a credit, originally codified as IRC § 44A and now reflected in IRC § 21.
Today’s dependent-care credit under IRC § 21 is framed differently. It applies to employment-related expenses paid for qualifying individuals, including certain dependents who are physically or mentally incapable of self-care, where the expenses are incurred to enable the taxpayer to be gainfully employed. Under those rules, care for an elderly parent may qualify when the statutory requirements are met.
The deduction that assumed care was women’s work did not survive. But Moritz remains important because it exposed the deeper flaw: when law writes stereotypes into tax rules, it does not merely burden the group supposedly being “protected.” It organizes everyone’s life around the stereotype.
Innocent spouse, and who actually walks through the door
When two people file a joint return, § 6013(d)(3) makes them jointly and severally liable for the entire tax. Not half each. Each of them, for all of it. The IRS may collect the whole balance from either one, and it does not care which of them earned the income, wrote the checks, or understood the return.
I want to be fair about this before I go further. Innocent spouse relief cuts both ways. I have represented men on these claims. I have seen cases where the requesting spouse was the one running the scheme and the claim was opportunistic.
The statute is written in neutral terms, and it should be.
But you cannot look at the history of this provision, or at a caseload, and pretend the neutrality is the whole story. For most of the twentieth century, the household model the joint return was built on had one person earning, one person managing the money, and one person signing where she was told to sign. And as we just covered, federal law still permitted creditors to discriminate on sex and marital status, while ordinary credit reporting practices could leave a married woman without an independent financial history of her own.
Put the two dates next to each other. The modern joint return, with income splitting, arrived in 1948. Congress did not prohibit sex and marital-status discrimination in credit until 1974. That is twenty-six years in which a wife could be held personally liable for the entire tax on a joint return while a lender could lawfully turn her down because of her sex or her marriage, and while ordinary credit-reporting practice could leave her with no independent record of her own.
Congress noticed slowly. The first innocent spouse provision came in 1971, in Public Law 91-679. The modern framework, IRC § 6015, dates to the 1998 restructuring act, with three doors: traditional relief under 6015(b), allocation of the liability under 6015(c) for spouses who are divorced, legally separated, widowed, or who have not lived in the same household for the preceding twelve months, and equitable relief under 6015(f) when neither of the first two fits. For those of us in community property states, § 66(c) provides separate relief from the operation of community income rules, generally in non-joint-return cases.
A Name to Know
Cathy Lantz. Her husband was a dentist who went to prison for Medicare fraud. They had been married six years. He told her he would take care of the tax problem. He did not. He asked the IRS for the innocent spouse form, called her “the innocent spouse” in his own correspondence with the Service, and died before he filed it.
By the time she sought innocent spouse relief, she was unemployed and broke. In 2006 the IRS took her $3,239 refund and applied it to a joint 1999 liability that had grown past $1.3 million. That is what finally sent her to file. The IRS did not reject her because the equities were weak. It conceded she would have qualified. It rejected her because she missed a deadline, a two-year deadline the Service wrote into its regulations for equitable relief under § 6015(f).
The Tax Court held that deadline invalid, in a divided opinion, with a law school clinic at Valparaiso University handling her case. Congress had put two-year limits directly into §§ 6015(b) and 6015(c), but not into § 6015(f), the catch-all equitable-relief provision. That omission mattered. If Congress had wanted the same deadline there, the Tax Court reasoned, it knew how to say so. Lantz v. Commissioner, 132 T.C. 131 (2009).
The Seventh Circuit reversed. In Judge Posner’s opinion, the agency could impose a filing deadline even where Congress had not written one into the subsection itself. So Lantz lost, not because the case against relief was compelling, but because the court upheld the regulatory time bar. Lantz v. Commissioner, 607 F.3d 479 (7th Cir. 2010).
And the detail I cannot get out of my head is this: in the same opinion that enforced the deadline against her, the court walked through the hardship tools the Service already had. Release of a levy that creates economic hardship under § 6343(a)(1)(D). Currently-not-collectible status. And then the court noted the irony that the Service had already declared the taxes owed by her husband, the crooked dentist, currently not collectible, and that she was entitled to the same relief a fortiori, with no deadline for seeking it. In other words, the system had tools for mercy. It had used one on him.
She lost. But the IRS later abandoned the two-year deadline for equitable relief anyway. In Notice 2011-70, the Service announced that § 6015(f) requests would no longer be barred merely because they were filed more than two years after the first collection activity. Rev. Proc. 2013-34 carried that approach forward. Then in 2019 Congress wrote it into the statute itself. The Taxpayer First Act added § 6015(f)(2): for unpaid liabilities, a request is timely if made within the § 6502 collection period; for amounts already paid, within the refund-claim period. The rule that beat Cathy Lantz no longer controls.
Strangely, its two-year language is still sitting in the 2002 regulations, even though the IRS stopped applying it to § 6015(f) claims in 2011 and Congress superseded it in 2019. (Treasury and the IRS withdrew the long-pending proposed § 6015 regulations in December 2025 rather than finalize them. The core framework today is the statute, the 2002 regulations apart from that obsolete deadline, and Rev. Proc. 2013-34.)
She lost the case and helped win the rule. Which is a very specific kind of unfair.
The arc, laid out:
2009: The Tax Court strikes the regulatory deadline.
2010: The Seventh Circuit reverses. Lantz loses.
2011: Notice 2011-70. The Service abandons the two-year rule on its own.
2013: Rev. Proc. 2013-34 rebuilds the equitable framework around abuse and financial control.
2019: Congress writes the timing rule into § 6015(f)(2) and generally confines the evidentiary record in Tax Court review through § 6015(e)(7).
2025: Treasury and the IRS withdraw the proposed regulations rather than finish them.
Sixteen years. And the woman who started it had $3,239 taken from her.
Rev. Proc. 2013-34. This one is quieter, and I think it is the most important administrative development in this area in twenty years. It changed how the IRS accounts for abuse and financial control by the non-requesting spouse. Under the older framework, knowledge of the item giving rise to the understatement could be a serious obstacle to relief. Under Rev. Proc. 2013-34, actual knowledge is not weighed more heavily than other factors. And if the non-requesting spouse abused the requesting spouse, or controlled the household finances by restricting access to financial information, and that abuse or control kept her from challenging the return for fear of retaliation, the knowledge factor can weigh in her favor even if she knew, or had reason to know, of the item.
Read that against the credit history point above.
In 2013, the IRS formally acknowledged that financial control and restricted access to information can fundamentally change how a spouse’s knowledge should be judged.
Thirty-nine years after ECOA. The tax system catches up eventually. It just does it at the speed of a revenue procedure.
What this means at my desk
Consider the implications of every joint balance for § 6015, and in community property states for § 66(c). Not just the ones someone asks about.
Before you ask who knew, ask whether there was a valid joint return at all. Signature, tacit consent, and duress can decide the matter before § 6015 is ever reached.
Ask who signed and who knew, separately. They are different questions, and clients answer them differently.
Develop the financial control facts, not just the abuse facts. Rev. Proc. 2013-34 gives you room here, and practitioners underuse it because control is harder to document than a police report. Who had online banking credentials. Who saw the mail. Who needed permission to spend.
Build the administrative record like you expect to litigate it. Since the Taxpayer First Act added § 6015(e)(7), Tax Court review generally rests on the administrative record plus newly discovered or previously unavailable evidence. Treat the administrative record as the case, not as a warm-up.
Explain joint and several liability during the engagement, not after the notice. It is the single most under-explained concept in a divorce, and most people learn it from a levy.
Be mindful of conflicts of interest, and do not assume a waiver cures one. Under Circular 230 § 10.29, you can represent both spouses only if you reasonably believe you can competently and diligently represent each of them, the representation is not prohibited by law, and each affected client gives informed consent confirmed in writing (within thirty days, retained for thirty-six months). An innocent spouse claim can make the spouses’ interests directly adverse. Some of these conflicts cannot be waived, and the right answer is often that one spouse needs separate representation.
Many clients assume that if they are married, then they must file together. I have seen this particularly in older clients who feel like there is something “weird” if they don’t file jointly.
The same fear, in a different room
I said Rev. Proc. 2013-34 was the most important administrative development in this area in twenty years. Here is the part of it that reaches past tax.
In 2013 the IRS conceded, in writing, that a person can know something is wrong and still not challenge it, because challenging it would cost her more than staying quiet. Fear of retaliation is now an accepted reason why an innocent spouse did not speak. It took the Service decades to say that out loud.
We should be able to recognize the same thing in our own profession. Circular 230 holds us to standards of competence and diligence. How we treat other professionals should be a standard we hold ourselves to whether or not anything requires it.
For too many years at conferences and various events, I have heard not only rumors but also direct accounts from women who have been sexually harassed or subjected to unwanted sexual advances in this industry. This has probably been allowed to happen far longer than many of us know. It must stop.
Many of the people it happens to do not speak up, for exactly the reason the IRS finally acknowledged: the cost of speaking out falls on the person who was wronged. Anyone who does choose to speak should be taken seriously and supported. But the burden of cleaning up a profession should not sit with the people it harms. Conference organizers, firms, professional associations, and the rest of us in the room have that obligation. This should never be chalked up to “boys being boys.” (I hate that statement.) This is misconduct we, as an industry, should never tolerate. I am always perplexed when women dismiss it, but I am equally perplexed when men dismiss it.
You should not need to imagine that she is your wife, your daughter, or your mother. A colleague deserves safety and professional respect because she is a colleague, and because she is a person. That is enough.
Ninety-two
Steinem was 92. She lived to see § 214 repealed, ECOA signed, the Fair Housing Act amended, and a revenue procedure quietly acknowledge that financial control can change how a spouse’s knowledge should be judged.
Most people who spend their lives in this slow fight do not get to see the statutes change.
The changes she did not live to see are ours to make.