THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

The Amendment

Debate over ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment provided one of the key political struggles of the 1970s. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. However, before it could become part of the Constitution, it had to be ratified by three-fourths (thirty-eight) of the states. The text of the amendment was simple:

1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Quick Support in 1972

Congress first considered an equal rights amendment in 1923, and the proposal came up regularly after that. Proponents never overcame the opposition of social reformers and labor unions concerned about how the ERA would affect labor legislation protecting women and children. By 1972 organized labor dropped its objections, and in March of that year Congress passed the ERA. The only contentious issue was whether the amendment should explicitly exclude women from the military draft. ERA proponents objected to any special treatment and managed to defeat the provision. Many states were eager to ratify the ERA. Twenty-five minutes after it passed Congress, both houses of the Hawaii legislature voted unanimously for the amendment. By early 1973 twenty-five of the required thirty-eight states had ratified it.

Slowing Down

Ratification slowed after that, how-ever. Ten more states ratified the amendment by the end of 1977, leaving the amendment only three states short of adoption. Proponents were able to get Congress to extend the original 1979 deadline for ratification to 1982. However, no state ratified it after 1977, and three states rescinded their ratification (although it was not clear that they could legally do this). In 1982 the amendment died.

What Happened?

The Equal Rights Amendment always had support from a majority of Americans, both men and women. However, ratifying a constitutional amendment requires more than majority support. It requires that proponents secure majority support in each of three-fourths of the states. An amendment must have extraordinarily broad support and little concerted opposition. Opponents of the ERA were able to emphasize several key issues that stopped ratification. These issues were most important in conservative southern states. Many Americans feared changes in the roles of men and women, especially in families. Phyllis Schlafly, a politically active conservative woman, organized the STOP ERA campaign based on these concerns. Opponents convinced people that the ERA would bring radical changes to their lives: an end to husbands' obligations to support their wives and families, single-sex bathrooms, the drafting of women into the military. These claims about the effects of the ERA were exaggerated, but they struck a responsive chord among Americans concerned about families and the changing roles of men and women in society. They were enough to generate concerted opposition in the conservative southern states that had not yet ratified the ERA.

Public Opinion and the ERA

A substantial majority of Americans favored the ERA during the whole time the states were considering ratification. However, saying they supported the ERA meant that they agreed in principle to equality, not that they supported changing the traditional roles of men and women. For example, a 1977 poll revealed that 66 percent of Americans who supported the ERA also believed that a preschool child would suffer if the' child's mother worked. Sixty-two percent said that if there are a limited number of jobs, a married woman should not be employed if her husband is able to support her. Fifty-five percent believed that it is more important for a wife to support her husband's career than to have one herself.

Waiting for Changes in State Legislatures;

Recognizing the importance and difficulty of winning in all regions, few proponents of the ERA supported working on the amendment again. They argued instead that it was more important to work on election of women to state legislatures. State legislatures are responsible for many policies that affect women, such as family and divorce law, welfare, and equal employment. They felt that electing women to the legislatures would accomplish more than would enacting an Equal Rights Amendment.

Source:

Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was the most highly publicized and debated constitutional amendment before the United States for most of the 1970s and early 1980s. First submitted by Congress to the states for ratification on March 22, 1972, it failed to be ratified by its final deadline of June 30, 1982. If ratified, the ERA would have become the twenty-seventh amendment to the Constitution. The proposed addition would have read, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

The ERA was written by alice paul, of the National Woman's Party, and was first introduced in Congress in 1923. No action on the amendment was taken until the national organization for women, which was founded in 1966, revived interest in it.

When the amendment was first submitted to the states in 1972, Congress prescribed a deadline of seven years for ratification. Because an amendment must be ratified by the legislatures or conventions of three-fourths of the states, the ERA required approval by thirty-eight states.

Advocates of the ERA intended it to give women constitutional protection beyond the equal protection Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. They believed that the ERA would compensate for inadequate statutory protections for women and sluggish judicial enforcement of existing laws. According to a report that accompanied passage of the ERA resolution in the House, the ERA was necessary because "our legal system currently contains the vestiges of a variety of ancient common law principles which discriminate unfairly against women" (H.R. Rep. No. 92-359, 92d Cong. [1971]). These vestigial principles, the report argued, gave preferential treatment to husbands over wives, created a double standard by giving men greater freedom than women to depart from moral standards, and used "obsolete and irrational notions of chivalry" that "regard women in a patronizing or condescending light."

The ERA encountered significant opposition, particularly in southern states. Opponents of the amendment held that certain inequalities between men and women are the result of biology and that some legislation and state policies must necessarily take this fact into account. Some also contended that the ERA would undermine the social institutions of marriage and family. Others argued that women already had sufficient constitutional protections and that the ERA was made unnecessary by recent liberal Supreme Court decisions, including frontiero v. richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 93 S. Ct. 1764, 36 L. Ed. 2d 583 (1973), which struck down a federal law that gave preferential treatment to married males over married females in securing salary supplements while in the armed services.

Frontiero also serves as an example of the way in which the ERA influenced the Supreme Court. In a concurring opinion, Justice lewis f. powell jr. cited the pending ERA ratification as a reason to delay gender-related constitutional interpretation. He favored waiting for the results of the ERA's ratification process so that the political process might guide the Court's constitutional interpretation.

By 1973, less than two years after its submission to the states, thirty states had ratified the ERA, and the success of the measure seemed likely. Only five more states ratified the measure, however, by the end of the seven-year deadline, leaving it three states short in its bid to become law. In June 1979, Congress extended the ratification deadline to June 30, 1982. During the extension, ERA supporters organized economic boycotts of states that failed to ratify the amendment. Despite all these efforts, and even though public opinion polls indicated that a majority of U.S. citizens supported the measure, no more states ratified the ERA.

Supporters of the ERA reintroduced the amendment in Congress yet again on July 14, 1982. The House of Representatives voted down the proposal on November 15, 1983.

further readings

Corwin, Edward S. 1978. The Constitution and What it Means Today. 14th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press.

Daughtrey, Martha Craig. 2000. "Women and the Constitution: Where We Are at the End of the Century." New York University Law Review 75 (April): 1–25.

Schwarzenbach, Sibyl A., and Patricia Smith, ed. 2004. Women and the United States Constitution: History, Interpretation, and Practice: A Collection of Essays. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

cross-references

Equal Protection; Women's Rights.

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT. Drafted by Alice Paul, a leader of the National Woman's Party, and first proposed as an addition to the U.S. Constitution in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) stated that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." Supporters argued that the Constitution must include the principle of equality of rights for women and that such an amendment would remove sex-based discrimination. Opponents of women's rights objected, as did some women's rights advocates who feared it would jeopardize recent legislation providing female industrial workers minimum protection against exploitative working conditions. The Supreme Court had upheld protective legislation for women in Muller v. Oregon (1908), claiming the need to protect citizens able to bear children. Convinced that Congress would not extend labor protections to men and that the Court would therefore deny it to women if the amendment passed, organized labor opposed the ERA. It remained bottled up in the House Judiciary Committee for forty-seven years, despite efforts to secure passage.

The 1960s brought renewed attention to the amendment. Although women's roles in the economy had changed, hopes had faded that the Supreme Court would use the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to subject laws that discriminated on the basis of sex to the same strict scrutiny applied to laws discriminating on the basis of race. Thus, when protective legislation was revealed to have harmed the very group it was intended to protect, liberal feminists had an additional reason for urging passage of the ERA. After a massive lobbying campaign, Congress, in March 1972, voted overwhelmingly to submit to the states a revised version of the ERA for ratification within seven years. Twenty-two states rushed to ratify, but, by 1975, momentum had slowed. As the ratification deadline approached, Congress extended it by three years, to 30 June 1982. Even after this extension, supporters could secure favorable votes from only thirty-five of the thirty-eight states needed for passage. Five states, meanwhile, rescinded their endorsements. In December 1981 a federal judge ruled that those rescissions were legal and that Congress had acted illegally in extending the ratification deadline. Before ERA supporters could appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, however, the deadline for ratification expired, leaving opponents of the amendment victorious.

Opposition to the ERA in the 1970s and 1980s differed in important ways from that encountered in previous decades. Conservative legislators, mostly in southern and western states, voted against the amendment. They believed it would mean an intrusion of federal power that would diminish their ability to govern and would interfere with the right of individuals to live as they chose. Such politicians could vote according to their apprehensions and still claim to be responsive to the wishes of female constituents who opposed the amendment. Another factor was the skill with which far-right activists transformed popular perceptions of the amendment. By equating ERA and feminism, especially radical feminism, and making it appear dangerous to women, opponents succeeded in eroding the national consensus for the amendment. Although some states passed equal rights amendments to their own constitutions in the 1970s, efforts to secure congressional passage of a new federal amendment failed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Susan D. Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Berry, Mary Frances. Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Hoff-Wilson, Joan, ed. Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Mansbridge, Jane. Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Whitney, Sharon. The Equal Rights Amendments. New York: Watts, 1984.

Jane SherronDe Hart/c. p.

See alsoDiscrimination: Sex ; Frontiero v. Richardson ; Muller v. Oregon ; Women's Rights Movement: The Twentieth Century ; and vol. 9: NOW Statement of Purpose .

Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), written by Alice Paul and sponsored by the National Woman's Party, was first proposed in 1923, on the seventy‐fifth anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls women's rights convention.Inspired by the Nineteenth Amendment, which had just secured equal suffrage for women, it was intended to push the feminist cause beyond political equality. The original wording declared that “men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction.” The ERA, which if ratified would have called into question the entire body of special protective labor legislation for women workers, created acrimonious divisions among former suffragists for four decades. Nonetheless, Paul and her small band of followers pushed the ERA year after year, in 1940 securing Republican party endorsement. Serious prospects for the amendment developed in 1966, when a new feminist generation took up the cause. Now the wording demanded that “equal rights under the law shall not be abridged or denied on account of sex,” thus assuming that the purpose of the law was not to advance equality but to look without distinction at men and women. Carried forward by the energies of a new feminist wave, the ERA won quick congressional approval in 1972, but in the process stimulated an aggressive opposition, led by right‐wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, who claimed that ratification would mean unisex toilets, gay marriages, and women in combat. Despite a congressionally authorized extension of the process to 1982, only thirty states ratified the amendment and it died. Nonetheless, the ERA campaign had important results: It helped to build both the feminist and antifeminist movements; and in its wake, judicial decisions regarding sex discrimination were significantly liberalized, in large part based on an expansive new reading of the Fourteenth Amendment.
See also Conservatism; Feminism; Muller v. Oregon; Seneca Falls Convention; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Joan Hoff‐Wilson , Rights of Passage: The Past and the Future of the ERA, 1986.

Ellen C. DuBois

Equal Rights Amendment see civil rights ; feminism .