Social revolution and the Equal Rights Amendment

Abstract

Even before the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) expired in 1982, activists and scholars were analyzing the reasons it fell three states short of becoming the twenty-seventh amendment to the Constitution. A recently published annotated bibliography (Feinberg, 1987) on the ERA covering the years 1976-1985 devotes an entire chapter with 191 entries to its defeat-and four new books on the ERA have appeared since then. The ERA has attracted so much attention not just because it was an unsuccessful attempt to amend the Constitution, but because it symbolizes a revolution in relations between the sexes that has been in the public eye for the last twenty years. Those who applauded its defeat did so in the mistaken belief that the revolution was also defeated. Those who were angered knew that its defeat would change little of what had changed during the battle but deeply resented the denial of recognition a Constitutional amendment would have accorded. The ERA has been controversial since first proposed in 1921, but the reasons and the partisans have changed over time. It was written by Alice Paul, founder and guiding light of the National Woman's Party (NWP), which had acted as the militant wing of the Suffrage Movement. After Suffrage, Paul and her supporters decided that the next step was removal of all legal discrimination against women and that the most efficient way to do this was with another federal amendment. The ERA was aimed at the plethora of state laws that restricted women's jury service, their rights to control their own property, contract, sue, and keep their own name and domicile if married; gave them inferior guardianship rights over children; and generally stigmatized them as lesser citizens. It was vigorously opposed by progressive reformer Florence Kelley and her allies in the National Consumers' League, the Women's Trade Union League, and the League of Women Voters, because she feared it would also destroy the protective labor laws for which she had spent her life fighting. The preponderance of these laws limited the hours women could