When it was first introduced into Congress in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution read: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." The wording of the ERA when passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification almost fifty years later in 1972 was similar: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Thus for more than fifty years the key concept behind the ERA was the notion that women were individuals whose rights should be equal to those of men and who should be treated equally by public agencies.
The group most responsible for the development of the ERA in 1921 and for its steady advance during the half century before 1972 was the National Woman's Party (NWP). Formed by Alice Paul and a small coterie of her supporters as a vehicle for advancing women's rights beyond the achievement of suffrage, the NWP developed the ERA to draw attention to and eliminate the many inequalities that deprived women of equal citizenship, such as the exclusion of women from juries and from political office.
The ERA came close to being adopted as a constitutional amendment. In 1972 Congress sent it to the states for ratification and it received an overwhelmingly positive vote: 354 to 23 in the House and 84 to 8 in the Senate. Ratification required the endorsement of at least thirty-eight states by June 30, 1982. Within one year thirty states had approved the ERA; by 1977 supporting states numbered thirty-five. Opposing states lay primarily in the South and the Rocky Mountain regions. The only non-ERA state outside these regions, Illinois, became the seat of a titanic struggle in 1981-82; but even if Illinois had ratified the ERA, passage in another state seemed unlikely at the time. By 1980 the tide had turned against the amendment.
Why did such a seemingly innocuous constitutional amendment fail? One answer may lie with the nature of U.S. political culture itself and the implications of gender-and class-related issues. It took fifty years from 1921 to 1972 for the ERA to be accepted by most politically active women—those who, one might think, would have been its most likely supporters. Their opposition, which ranged from fervent to ferocious during the 1920s and 1930s, arose from many political women's commitment to gender-specific strategies to achieve social justice. Between 1923 and the mid-1960s, women activists on the left of the political spectrum viewed the ERA as antilabor because it benefited professional women at the expense of wage-earning women, and because it called into question three decades of hard-won social and labor legislation for women. By 1972 opponents of the ERA, on the right of the spectrum, viewed the ERA as pro-labor because it would benefit wage-earning women and because it conflicted with the New Right's strategy of limiting governmental intervention regarding issues of social justice. Thus, when women activists on the left unified behind the amendment, activists on the right organized against it.
Wage-earning women were central to this contextual shift in the history of the ERA. The campaign for its passage lasted long enough to reflect the profound changes that occurred in women's labor-force participation in the twentieth century. In 1921 the ERA was overwhelmingly opposed by trade union women, but by 1972 most trade union women supported it. During that half century, the conditions of women's work, public-policy needs related to women's work, and the population of women wage-earners themselves changed dramatically. For example, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided new forms of protection against labor-force discrimination and supplanted older protective laws. In the context of women's wage earning, then, the ERA became the friend rather than the enemy of working women.
In 1921 the great majority of wage-earning women were young and poorly paid. Between 1890 and 1920, politically active middle-class women became deeply committed to the passage of statutes designed to aid young and poorly paid women workers, such as state-imposed maximum hours and minimum wage laws. These laws were female-specific because laissez-faire attitudes on the part of U.S. courts opposed such legislation for men. However, laws for women were part of a general strategy by Progressive women reformers to extend such legislation to men—a strategy that finally succeeded with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. By 1970 the average age of women workers was similar to that of the female population as a whole, and the average wages of year-round full-time employed women could for the first time support a woman and two children. Women workers no longer needed protective legislation; they needed equal opportunity.
This shift helps to explain why the ERA's chief opponents changed from women on the political left to women on the political right. Both in 1921 and in 1981, opponents of the ERA were better organized than its proponents.
Kept alive between 1921 and 1972 by organizations of professional women, especially the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, as well as by the National Woman's Party, the campaign for the ERA was revitalized by the women's movement in the late 1960s. With the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, the campaign torch was passed on. Opposition to the ERA by left-leaning women activists was swept away by the renewed wave of feminism. Yet by 1980 the New Right had targeted the ERA. Phyllis Schlafly, author of books about the communist conspiracy and the Russian threat in the 1960s, led the assault. She and others raised new questions about the potentially negative effects of the ERA and successfully misrepresented issues surrounding the ERA's purpose. Would women be subject to the draft? Would they lose child care or alimony support upon divorce? Would husbands no longer be required to support their families? Leaders of NOW and other pro-ERA organizations were too loosely organized to respond effectively to these fears. Moreover, the extension of the Fourteenth Amendment to women by the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1970s obscured the amendment's positive potential.
Ultimately, however, the ERA's passage was blocked by a coalition of right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Although white, middle-class Protestants dominated the pro-ERA leadership, polls in the early 1980s showed substantial grassroots support for the ERA among Catholics, African Americans and working-class people. Schlafly's forces mobilized Christian fundamentalists to counter this extensive support.
Hindsight shows that the ERA would not have been the panacea that its advocates often envisioned, but it might have served as a helpful focal point for legal and social discussions about how best to promote women's full and equal citizenship.
Joan Hoff-Wilson, ed., Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Donald G. Mathews and Jane S. De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Kathryn Kish Sklar
See also
Legal Status;
National Woman's Party.
