Would women be scrambling had ERA happened?

Today’s hemorrhaging regress makes me wonder
By Carolyn Bennett

The Equal Rights Amendment: “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 need for a federal Equal Rights Amendment remains as compelling as it was in 1978, when now Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the Harvard Women’s Law Journal: ‘With the Equal Rights Amendment, we may expect Congress and the state legislatures to undertake in earnest, systematically and pervasively, the law revision so long deferred. And in the event of legislative default, the courts will have an unassailable basis for applying the bedrock principle: All men and all women are created equal.’  

The ERA in Congress 112th Session (2011-2012): On June 22, 2011, ERA ratification bills were introduced in the Senate (S.J.Res. 21) by lead sponsor Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and in the House of Representatives (H.J.Res. 69) by lead sponsor Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).

 

I think ─ 

We have been too long getting this done and failing. If we had not gotten so terribly distracted on wedge issues (and we still are), divided among ourselves as women, we might not have regressed as far as we have done.  

The evidence for this thinking is in current outrageous act-outs and speak-outs by men (those publicized) in powerful office and elsewhere and the equally outrageous debates (led by men) attacking women’s rights: their lives, their bodies, their stature, their right to think independently and take action in their own behalf, their very being. 

We might have avoided this regress had we stayed focused, progressed sufficiently among ourselves to have the presence of mind and sensibility to throw open our movement to all women (bar none); and together achieve full national ratification or requisite states’ ratification of the ERA.

 

Lost States author Michael J. Trinklein takes another angle. 

“Do you think women should have the same rights as men?” he asks. “At least 15 U.S states’ legislatures are not so sure. The Equal Rights Amendment is not the law of the land because more than a dozen state legislatures have voted against it. And this isn’t some complex 5,000-page omnibus proposal. The ERA is just 24 words:

‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.’

He continues with this flashback.  

In the 1970s when this was hotly debated, opponents said that passing the ERA would mean unisex bathrooms and women fighting on the frontlines in war.  

The notion that men and women are not identical got mixed up with the question of equal rights.  

People got scared and the whole thing crashed and burned just 3 states short of approval.  

Opposition was fiercest in the south, but even Illinois couldn’t find the votes to ratify the amendment.

 

“Creating a map of this debate is revealing,” Trinklein writes in the article “Half-Pint vs. Scarlett.”  

Many of the traditional red states in the mountain west split from their counterparts in the south on this issue “because, historically, westerners have held a slightly different perspective on the role of women. 

Wyoming, for example, was the first state to allow women to vote. This related, in part, to an understanding that it took particularly robust women to survive in harsh conditions of the pioneering west.  

A woman tough enough to chop off the head of a chicken and go months without bathing and live in a sod house is not going to be told she cannot vote. Those Little-House-on-the-Prairie women were a lot scrappier than Scarlett O’Hara.

 

4ERA seems to capture what I found missing 

Advocating, informing, educating, reaching out, networking, researching, writing, training ─ 4ERA is a multi-partisan core group of ERA advocates founded and headed by Idella Moore and composed of a historian, a geologist, a community leader, a physicist, a student, an artist, an accountant, an educator, a federal employee and a philosopher who “believe that a new campaign needs a new organization committed only to the Equal Rights Amendment.”  

4EAR’s strategy, according to its website, “is to increase advocacy for the ERA by extending participation in the ERA campaign beyond the realm of multi-issued women’s organizations and out to the general public that overwhelmingly supports the ERA and whose active involvement is needed to succeed.” 

Though unaffiliated with other organizations and taking no stance on other issues, 4ERA assumes as part of its mission “to build unity and increase support for the ERA and sometimes work in coalition with other ERA endorsing organizations.” The group also “seeks to add to its core group of advocates and advisors” and invites those interested to become more involved. 

Commenting five years ago, 4ERA founder Idella Moore said, the idea promoted by ERA opponents, that the ERA is a proxy case for same-sex marriage, is a “30-year case of propaganda.” The Equal Rights Amendment “has nothing to do with same-sex marriage,” she said.

 

 

Sources and notes

The Equal Rights Amendment, http://equalrightsamendment.org/default.htm http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/viability.htm

 

4ERA, http://www.4era.org/index.html

“ERA map: Half-Pint vs Scarlett” (Michael J. Trinklein), http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/07/era-map-half-pint-vs-scarlett.html

Michael J. Trinklein is author of Lost States

4ERA: advocates, informs, educates, reaches out, networks, researches, writes, and trains, http://www.4era.org/about.htm

WeNews commentator Idella Moore, January 17, 2007, http://womensenews.org/story/commentary/070117/era-has-nothing-do-same-sex-marriage

 

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