Who Stopped the Equal Rights Amendment?

The Equal Rights Amendment and the Rise of Emancipationism, 1932–1946 Rebecca DeWolf (bio) At a 1937 congressional hearing on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Elsie Hill, a veteran member of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), declared: “We do not want to be discriminated against and we want to be regarded as ‘persons’ under the Constitution of the United States.” She went on to observe, “There is a great sympathy with the subject. . . . People declare for equal opportunity.” Hill was not alone in her optimistic assessment of the ERA campaign. As early as 1934, for instance, Democratic Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana proclaimed that it was the “psychological time to press the amendment.” And in 1936 Betty Gram Swing, head of the NWP’s ERA congressional effort, announced, “We have the best chance of winning Equal Rights now that we have ever had since the Amendment was first introduced.”1 For amendment proponents, the Depression Era had marked an encouraging turning point in the ERA conflict. Support for the ERA dramatically increased among congressional members, interest groups, and the general public from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. First, the economic turmoil of the Great Depression eventually encouraged more women’s groups to oppose sex-specific labor policies and back the ERA. In addition, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and World War II strengthened the growing energy behind the ERA, because these developments further dislocated conventional sex boundaries. By the end of war the ERA momentum had intensified as a range of cultural and political luminaries endorsed the amendment and both political parties backed the amendment in their party platforms. Furthermore, the rising support for the ERA incited significant congressional action on the amendment in the mid-1940s. Above all, the destabilizing nature of the Depression and World War II helped ERA supporters open a door to complete constitutional equality for men and women citizens. [End Page 47] ideological contours of the equal rights amendment The Nineteenth Amendment profoundly changed women’s relationship to the state since it displaced the traditional understanding of American citizenship that had given men authority over women in law and in custom. This development ignited a debate about the constitutional effects of federal woman suffrage. Eventually this debate evolved into a more than forty-year-long battle over the nature of American citizenship, which was the original ERA conflict. There has been little scholarly exploration, however, of the conflicting concepts of citizenship rooted in the ERA struggle. Many works detail the ERA’s impact on the women’s movement, but few have explored the gendered ideas that influenced how the participants understood the notion of civic rights.2 Most of the extant literature on the ERA examines the ratification struggle of the 1970s and early 1980s as well as the amendment’s impact on the women’s movement after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. For example, the primary concern for several works is why the ERA failed to secure enough state approvals during the later ratification battle.3 Yet this emphasis on the later struggle overlooks the earlier dynamic history of the ERA conflict. As the rise in support for the amendment during the Depression and World War II indicates, the ERA was not a dormant issue until the 1970s; rather, it involved a spirited battle that was anything but static. Other works explore the earliest years of the ERA conflict by looking at the struggle in the 1920s; these works predominantly understand the controversy as a dispute among women, about women, and only concerning women. Most important, they frame the early conflict as a fight between feminist groups over the trajectory of the women’s movement in the aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment. According to this analysis, one group worked to expand women’s involvement in social reform programs, while the other group single-mindedly focused on the effort to secure complete sexual equality. In all, this second body of work primarily employs a female-centric narrative that emphasizes how the early ERA campaign affected the women’s movement.4 While the previous writing on the ERA offers important insights, this study maintains that the original ERA conflict is best...

The Patchwork Quilt of Gender Equality: How State Equal Rights Amendments Can Impact the Federal Equal Rights Amendment

“In the Beginning Was the Word”Evangelical Christian Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Competing Definitions of Womanhood Chelsea Griffis (bio) During the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification period from 1972 to 1982, evangelical Christian women’s organizations played an important role in the debate and discussion over the amendment. Though these organizations were all grouped under the same title of evangelical, they did not all argue for the same side of the ERA debate. Evangelical Christian female leaders and women’s organizations supported or rejected the Equal Rights Amendment based on how they defined womanhood. While they all used the Bible as the main source of evidence in their arguments about proper roles for women, and therefore whether to support the Equal Rights Amendment, they came to very different conclusions. Concerned Women for America and its leader Beverly LaHaye used what they perceived as a literal interpretation of the Bible to support their view that God made the two sexes different, and therefore inherently politically unequal, though not inferior or socially unequal. In their view men were made to rule, and subsequently the ERA had no place within the United States’ rule of law. The Evangelical Women’s Caucus argued that the Equal Rights Amendment was necessary as God wished for the sexes to be equal in all ways, including politically. In their view human fallibility led to biblical interpretation, deemed by some as literal, which supported female oppression and did not resonate with the word of God. In this way differing biblical interpretations led evangelical Christian women’s organizations to opposite definitions of womanhood, though all of them held that their biblical interpretations were literal. Their definitions of womanhood in turn informed their varying opinions on the Equal Rights Amendment and complicated the idea that all evangelical women held the same religious and political beliefs. Due to this historical context of discussion about proper gender roles for evangelical communities, the ERA ratification campaign fanned the flames of a growing separation among evangelical women, between those who supported [End Page 148] new liberalized definitions of womanhood and those who wanted to stick to old, traditional standards. Historical analysis of evangelical women’s roles throughout the twentieth century is riddled with attempts at psychological explanation, especially when it was connected to perceived fundamental or literal biblical interpretation. As American Studies scholar Axel R. Schafer has pointed out, “rather than being understood on its own terms, orthodox religion was defined as a reaction against, a deviation from, or an adjustment to the given modern setting.” Scholars continue to describe traditionally religious people, particularly evangelical Christians, in this light. Historian Randall Balmer claims fundamentalist Christians and those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible “have felt beleaguered and besieged by forces beyond their control” during much of the twentieth century and sees their insistence on voicing their beliefs as “a desperate attempt to reclaim” a culture that has abandoned them. Religious scholar Karen McCarthy Brown emphasized this point and states that “fundamentalism, in my view, is the religion of the stressed and the disoriented, of those for whom the world is overwhelming.” Her belief is that they were not rational actors but, instead, psychologically disturbed and unwilling or unable to participate fully in the modern world. Evangelical Christian women receive the same treatment, sometimes even more harshly than that given to their male peers. Betty DeBerg, religious studies scholar, argues that “any hint of androgyny—a world without gender limits—seemed very frightening.” Linda Kintz supports this point by arguing that antifeminism offered a “solace to women who feel exhausted and desperate because they cannot keep up with the competitive world supposedly introduced by feminism, a world in which women who have felt humiliated by the more general historical contempt for women now feel even less secure because they are unable to keep up.”1 This essay seeks to add nuance to this historiography through discussion and analysis of evangelical Christian women’s theological and political ideologies, as well as their definitions of womanhood, and how these ideologies helped inform their stances on the ERA. Before this discussion can begin, though, it is important to define evangelical Christianity. As with...

Keeping Hope AliveA Case Study of the Continuing Argument for Ratification of the ERA Lindsley Armstrong Smith (bio) and Stephen A. Smith (bio) The call for this special issue asserted that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) “ultimately failed to receive enough state ratifications before its deadline in 1982. Despite its repeated failure the ERA has served as a symbolic torch carried by generations of feminists fighting for women’s rights.” However, not everyone has conceded defeat in the effort to ratify the ERA, and we argue that a prognosis is more appropriate than a postmortem. At the federal level, there seems to be some interest but little chance of success in reviving the prospects for the Equal Rights Amendment by extending the time to secure ratification by three more states. At the state level, however, there are continuing attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the presumed 1982 deadline notwithstanding. In more than half of the states that have yet to ratify the ERA, it is a clear and continuing point of stasis in legislative battles that have persisted for more than a decade. Explicating the ways people continue to engage with the Equal Rights Amendment in academia, legal and political practice, and grassroots advocacy, we present a case study of the ongoing twenty-first-century effort to ratify the ERA in Arkansas. The literature addressing the political and rhetorical dimensions of the unsuccessful ratification campaigns of the past is voluminous and insightful, although most of it is now three decades old and focuses on the broad national dialogue before 1982.1 Among these are several studies that looked specifically at the efforts in Arkansas.2 Valuable case studies exist of individual state efforts during the original ratification period, such as that of Illinois, by Jane Mansbridge.3 Another addresses North Carolina, by Donald Mathews and Jane Dehart, but there is scant scholarly attention to any state ratification efforts after the extended 1982 statutory deadline.4 Attempts to ratify the ERA in Arkansas in the 1970s, well covered in previous studies, were vigorously contested but ultimately unsuccessful. We focus upon and examine the revived efforts to secure ratification between 2005 and [End Page 173] 2013. We confirm much of the earlier research about the failure to ratify in the first period of 1973–81; however, the main contribution here is our analysis of the renewed and continuing effort to persuade Arkansas to ratify after the expiration of the purported deadline, embracing the “three-state strategy.”5 The 1997 publication of an article in the William and Mary Law School Journal on Women and the Law made the argument that the ERA was still viable—the rationale being that Congress could legislatively adjust or repeal the existing ratification deadline, determine whether or not state ratifications after the expiration of a time limit in a proposing clause are valid, and promulgate the ERA after the thirty-eighth state ratifies.6 Supporters of this three-state strategy also argued that the ratification deadline was only in a resolving clause and not in the amendment itself and that Congress, having already extended the ERA deadline once, had the power to do so again. The Congressional Research Service analyzed this legal argument in 1996 and 2014, concluding that acceptance of the Madison Amendment does have implications for the premise that approval of the ERA by three more states could allow Congress to declare ratification accomplished.7 While this is a plausible argument, not all legal scholars agree. Yet no court has directly addressed the issue. Arkansas, of course, is not the only state in which ratification continues to be pursued. Missouri led the way with introduction of a resolution to ratify in 2000.8 Eight of the fifteen non-ratifying states have seen efforts in the last few years. Resolutions were recently introduced in Florida (2015), Nevada (2015), North Carolina (2015), Arizona (2016), Illinois (2016), Missouri (2016), and Virginia (2016). The Virginia Senate approved ratification resolutions in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016. The Illinois Senate approved a ratification resolution in 2014, but the Illinois House has not approved ratification since 2003.9 Closely examining the ratification efforts in Arkansas during the last decade...

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963, by Rebecca DeWolf Rebecca DeWolf. Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 350 pp. Paperback $30.00. Glenna Matthews Glenna Matthews GLENNA MATTHEWS, an independent scholar in Laguna Beach, has a PhD in American history from Stanford University. She has published six books (one coauthored) and twenty articles, dealing with both California history and women’s history. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (4): 115–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.115 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Glenna Matthews; Review: Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963, by Rebecca DeWolf. California History 1 November 2022; 99 (4): 115–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.115 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search We already have a number of excellent works on the so-far-unsuccessful fight to secure ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Some books focus on the spark plug of the movement, National Woman’s Party founder Alice Paul, some on the events leading up to the creation of the pathbreaking Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, and some on the failure to ratify the ERA in the late twentieth century. The great contribution made by Rebecca DeWolf in Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963 lies in the granular detail she provides about the way the amendment evolved in the early 1920s and why it took the shape it did. With an impressive array of sources, she teases out the constitutional and real-world implications of the earlier Nineteenth Amendment and delineates how the dawning realization that it was only part of the solution to women’s... You do not currently have access to this content.

Previous articleNext article No AccessRevisions/ReportsEqual Rights Amendment Activists in North CarolinaTheodore S. Arrington and Patricia A. KyleTheodore S. Arrington Search for more articles by this author and Patricia A. Kyle Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 3, Number 3Spring, 1978 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493509 Views: 28Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jeffrey Ling, Tom W. Rice Voting in Iowa's 1980 and 1992 ERA Referendums, Women & Politics 20, no.11 (Jun 1999): 59–72.https://doi.org/10.1300/J014v20n01_03Jane Sherron de Hart Equality Challenged: Equal Rights and Sexual Difference, Journal of Policy History 6, no.11 (Oct 2011): 40–72.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030600003626Donald G. Mathews "Spiritual Warfare": Cultural Fundamentalism and the Equal Rights Amendment, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no.22 (Jul 1993): 129–154.https://doi.org/10.2307/1123985Elliott White Self-selection and sexual politics: locals, cosmopolitans and the end of ERA, Social Science Information 30, no.33 (Jun 2016): 381–428.https://doi.org/10.1177/053901891030003002SUSAN E. MARSHALL Who Speaks for American Women? The Future of Antifeminism, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 515, no.11 (Sep 2016): 50–62.https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716291515001005DAFNA N. IZRAELI, EPHRAIM TABORY THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF FEMINIST ATTITUDES IN ISRAEL, Gender & Society 2, no.44 (Jun 2016): 463–481.https://doi.org/10.1177/089124388002004004JANET SALTZMAN CHAFETZ, ANTHONY GARY DWORKIN IN THE FACE OF THREAT:, Gender & Society 1, no.11 (Mar 1987): 33–60.https://doi.org/10.1177/089124387001001003D. L. Hughes, Charles W. Peek Ladies against women: Explaining the political participation of traditional- and modern-role females, Political Behavior 8, no.22 (Jan 1986): 158–174.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00987181Sandra K. Gill Attitudes toward the Equal Rights Amendment, Sociological Perspectives 28, no.44 (Oct 1985): 441–462.https://doi.org/10.2307/1389228Mariam Darce Frenier American anti-feminist women: Comparing the rhetoric of opponents of the equal rights amendment with that of opponents of women's suffrage, Women's Studies International Forum 7, no.66 (Jan 1984): 455–465.https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(84)90017-7John Unger Zussman, Shauna M. Adix Content and conjecture in the equal rights amendment controversy in Utah, Women's Studies International Forum 5, no.55 (Jan 1982): 475–486.https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(82)90009-7

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed by suffragist and life-long feminist Alice Paul in 1923 and it intended to create equality of the sexes under the law. It was passed by Congress in 1972, but ultimately was not ratified by enough states. During that time was second-wave feminism, a movement that claimed to seek out equality but had a divisive nature. This thesis looks at how the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in New York during the 1970s and 80s helped shape the definition of equality for each side of the newly polarized political spectrum. The bulk of my sources consisted of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women’s papers on the ERA, the Conservative party of New York’s papers on the ERA and Barbara Keating’s 1974 senatorial campaign, and articles from New York newspapers. By focusing on case studies in New York and how they represent a larger picture, I will show how the women fighting for and against the ERA redefined the way equality was understood. Equality to the people fighting for the ERA looked for not only the erasure of disadvantages, but for the awarding of privileges to both sexes. Equality to the people fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment was starkly designed by the privileges each sex experienced – men experienced privileges like higher pay and women experienced privileges like exclusion from the draft. Equality was the privilege that Barbara Keating described women as having, like being able to stay home and rule the domestic sphere, and men on the flip side had the privilege of things like higher pay. Equality to the conservatives meant not equal but a balance of privileges, whereas the liberal definition of equality was an unending fight for equity that exemplified by the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in New York during the 1970s and 80s.

A basic status politics explanation of orientation toward the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is assessed in this paper. Conflicting orientations toward ERA are shown to stem from perceptions that broader personal values, and those concerning gender and parental roles, are in undesirable competition with alternative values in contemporary society. The data, drawn from a metropolitan sampling of adults, confirm the utility of the status politics perspective in accounting for who supports and who opposes the amendment.

ERA Roundtable Mary Frances Berry (bio), Melinda Chateauvert (bio), Katherine Cross (bio), Jan Erickson (bio), Roberta W. Francis (bio), Bonnie Grabenhofer (bio), Bettina Hager (bio), Amy Richards (bio), and Laura Mattoon D’Amore This roundtable draws from the voices of activists and academics and aims to explore some of the challenges of renewing and sustaining interest in the continued advocacy of the Equal Rights Amendment. To narrow their focus, I asked the roundtable participants to consider their essays as a general response to these questions: 1. Is the ERA relevant to the twenty-first century? 2. How does/Does the ERA represent the issues of importance to various populations of women, including young women; women of color; trans women; LGBTQIA; etc? 3. In the past the ERA served as a beacon connecting generations of feminists. Do you believe the ERA maintains that generational connection today? How do you envision feminists working together to make change in the future? In their response to the roundtable questions, Mary Frances Berry and Melinda Chateauvert wrote “Reform and Symbolism Are Not Enough: Equal Rights Means Gender Justice and Sexual Equality.” The authors focus on the social and political barriers and challenges that an ERA faces now and caution that ERA activism will not succeed if it does not speak directly to relevance and inclusion. A twenty-first-century ERA must address gender justice, identify and speak to various constituencies who have a stake in the ERA, and reposition itself as fundamentally intersectional. Similarly, Katherine Cross, in “Self-Determination: The ERA as a Human Rights Frontier,” imagines the potential of a gender inclusive movement transforming the ERA into a renewed frontier for human rights. With just a simple change to the amendment’s phrasing, Cross articulates the possibility of a “sacred right to use our human potential to the fullest,” by allowing people to self-determine their own gender. [End Page 1] And Amy Richards, in “ERA: Earning Our Right to Be Activists—Young Women and Their Struggle to Find a Place and Voice in the Feminist Movement,” reminds us that without these conditions of inclusion, immediacy, and relevance, the ERA does not feel crucial to young activists. The younger generation of feminists seek activist causes that offer instant gratification and clear reward, and they have been turned off by condescension from veteran activists whose message can appear to be that only certain messengers are allowed to talk about the ERA. Bettina Hager, in “Vestiges of the Past,” defines the United States Constitution as the “most fundamental governing document for women today.” As a young feminist, Hager has focused on the development of an inclusive, informed coalition of activists who can benefit from the knowledge of experienced veteran feminist activists while fighting against the elusive task of conquering oppression. Working alongside Hager, Roberta W. Francis, in “Changed Forever by the Equal Rights Amendment,” finds that an ERA is powerful enough to be helpful in the advancement of all women’s issues, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other category of diversity. She calls for an inclusive feminism to fight patriarchy. And in “Is the Equal Rights Amendment Relevant in the Twenty-first Century?” Bonnie Grabenhofer and Jan Erickson argue that a “constitutional guarantee of equality of rights of women and men, prohibiting governments from discriminating on the basis of sex, is still crucially important.” In support of the case, they explore the ERA’s relevance for equal pay, Title IX, LGBTQIA equal rights, reproductive rights, discrimination in insurance, pregnancy discrimination, military policy, violence against women, and reproductive justice. Reform and Symbolism Are Not Enough: Equal Rights Means Gender Justice and Sexual Equality Mary Frances Berry and Melinda Chateauvert The Equal Rights Amendment, like every other issue in the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, generated hundreds if not thousands of position papers, resolutions, and critiques from feminist and nonfeminist groups in those decades.1 In deference to the topic and those times, this comment takes the form of a position strategy paper, though of course we use current rather than historical data. Here we outline the political process required under the US Constitution to achieve the policy (the ERA) and...

Working Mothers and the Postponement of Women's Rights from the Nineteenth Amendment to the Equal Rights Amendment

In 1972 it appeared that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would be ratified quickly. Support was forthcoming from a vast array of political leaders, such as President Nixon, past presidents, governors and legislators. Both major parties made the amendment part of their platforms and did so again in 1976. An impressive list of private organizations, including the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women and many labor organizations, supported the amendment. Opposition was confined to groups of limited political effectiveness, such as the John Birch Society, George Wallace's American Independent Party and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).During the years immediately following congressional approval of the ERA in 1972, the American public strongly favored the amendment (see Table 1). In 1974, three Americans favored the ERA for every one who opposed it. Support for the ERA continued at a ratio of about two to one throughout the early ratification years. Support was widespread among all demographic groups. In 1975-76, the Gallup Poll found that even within groups where opposition to the ERA was strongest a majority supported ratification. Specifically, persons with low incomes favored it 53 percent to 31 percent and those living in small towns supported it 54 percent to 29 percent.Only in 1980—eight years after the ERA was submitted to the states for ratification—did support dip down to its lowest level. This represented a second phase for the ERA—the 1980 presidential campaign-during which the amendment was transformed by candidate Ronald Reagan into a partisan issue and removed from the Republican platform.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to enshrine in the Constitution of the United States a guarantee of equal rights to women and men, has had a long and volatile history. When first introduced in Congress in 1923, three years after ratification of the woman suffrage amendment to the US Constitution, the ERA faced fierce opposition from the majority of former suffragists. These progressive women activists opposed the ERA because it threatened hard-won protective labor legislation for wage-earning women. A half century later, however, the amendment enjoyed such broad support that it was passed by the requisite two-thirds of Congress and, in 1972, sent to the states for ratification. Unexpectedly, virulent opposition emerged during the ratification process, not among progressive women this time but among conservatives, whose savvy organizing prevented ratification by a 1982 deadline. Many scholars contend that despite the failure of ratification, equal rights thinking so triumphed in the courts and legislatures by the 1990s that a “de facto ERA” was in place. Some feminists, distrustful of reversible court decisions and repealable legislation, continued to agitate for the ERA; others voiced doubt that ERA would achieve substantive equality for women. Because support for an ERA noticeably revived in the 2010s, this history remains very much in progress.

A politicized culture and century-long debate over women’s nature and role may turn out to be the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)’s principal contribution to American feminism. Despite perceptions that an equal rights amendment was the next logical step following the Nineteenth Amendment, arguments broke out among feminist activists over whether an equal rights amendment would menace important legal victories, such as protective legislation for women’s employment. Yet even after other federal legislation quieted labor advocates’ concerns, virulent disagreement over an equal rights amendment among politicized women continued for years. Only in the late 1960s did politically active women come to embrace the ERA as a strategic goal. Even then the question of women’s differences from men—whether physical, psychological, or social—did not evaporate. Instead, new battle lines between progressive and newly organized conservative women were drawn in ways that doomed the amendment’s ratification chances.

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

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticlesThe Equal Rights Amendment & the Limits of Liberal Legal Reform Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution. By Mary Francis Berry A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America. By Sylvia Ann Hewlett Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA. By Joan Hoff-Wilson Gender Justice. By David L. Kirp , Mark G. Yudof , and Marlene Strong Franks Why We Lost the ERA. By Jane J. Mansbridge Constitutional Inequality: The Political Fortunes of the Equal Rights Amendment. By Gilbert Y. Steiner Laura R. WoliverLaura R. Woliver Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 21, Number 1Autumn 1988 The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3234930 Views: 4Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.