Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963

Abstract

Rebecca DeWolf traces the origins and development of the equal rights amendment (Era) in considerable and enlightening depth, from its inception immediately following the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification to the passage of the Equal Pay Act (1963), a federal statute that fell far short of the comprehensive vision of constitutional equality long envisioned by the Era's proponents. DeWolf's narrative centers on enduring tensions between “protectionists,” who asserted gender-specific claims to legal and political rights for women, and “emancipationists,” who advocated for the elimination of such distinctions based on sex. Unlike previous scholarship utilizing this model, however, DeWolf holds that these positions are best understood as “competing civic ideologies” that contested the very nature of American citizenship rather than “a struggle between divergent feminist ideologies” that shaped twentieth-century women's movements (p. 9). DeWolf concludes that, ultimately, the inherent limitations of the protectionist position hindered rather than advanced women's citizenship. Chapter 1 explores the radical implications of the Nineteenth Amendment in positing women as full citizens, a significant departure from their common-law legal status as the dependents of men. Chapter 2 traces the rise of the regulatory state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and DeWolf argues that this development actually solidified women's dependent status, particularly in laws aimed at safeguarding the health and safety of female workers. In chapters 3 and 4, the author traces the ascendance of the emancipationists as women's contributions to the national welfare were thrown into sharp relief by profound economic and social dislocations brought about by the Great Depression and World War II. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the re-emergence of protectionism in the postwar period within discourses that reasserted traditional familial roles for women as critical to the protection of social order and national security. In a thoughtful epilogue, DeWolf considers several key legal developments that have shaped the current status of the Era. She concludes that women's constitutional equality will succeed “only when the prevalence of protectionist patterns of thought has faded from view and more people are willing to question the equity of America's gendered citizenship” (p. 242).