Equal Rights Amendment Experiencing Renewed Urgency

Some advocates, such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, suggest that supporters start all over, in part because missing the deadline by nearly 40 years poses complications, as does counting those five states that later backed out.

The Washington-based ERA Coalition/Fund for Women's Equality seems to think there is enough momentum to overcome those hurdles. It has more than 100 groups as members working in concert with dozens of lead organizations.

"There is a healthy combination of national coordination and local grassroots activism,” says Jessica Neuwirth, an international women's rights lawyer at Hunter College's Public Policy Institute in New York City and the coalition's co-president.

Support is almost universal, she says, referencing a 2015 coalition survey.

"ERA Coalition polling shows that 94 percent of Americans — and 99 percent of millennials — support a constitutional sex equality amendment,” she says. Millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996, are ages 24 to 39 today.

Social issues intertwined with ERA

Existing laws such as the 14th Amendment; Title IX, a 1972 law that protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs that receive federal money; and the Equal Pay Act, passed in 1963 and revised in 2009, have created some protections for women. But many perceive them as a patchwork of legislation with vulnerable cracks.

"These laws have been helpful, but they are not comprehensive and they can be rolled back anytime,” Neuwirth says.

Some look to the ERA to ease the effect of childbearing on women's careers and how it widens the income gap between men and women.

"If you control for motherhood, women who are not mothers make close to what men make, whether they father or not,” Suk says.

Jennifer Carroll Foy, a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Woodbridge, Virginia, who this year helped make her state the 38th to ratify the ERA, gave birth to twin sons during her successful campaign for Virginia's House of Delegates. When she was a student, a Supreme Court decision enabled her to attend the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, a public college that had refused to admit women.

"I know the struggles of simultaneously being a mother and working a full-time job,” she says. “That's why I am fighting to institute paid family medical leave policies, fair scheduling laws and equal pay for equal work policies. I also believe that we must ensure all women have access to affordable birth control and cancer screenings."

Low wages and violence toward women tend to go hand in hand, ERA supporters say. Working in low-paid service industry jobs, women are particularly susceptible to sexual harassment and may not be able to afford to quit.

"Tarana Burke in the #MeToo movement brought attention to the issues of working-class women and women of color,” Suk says.

Not all women want the ERA

Pro-ERA activists of the ‘70s hoped the issues would all be sorted out by now. When Congress sent the ERA out to the states, dozens signed on right away, but opposition mobilized, stoking fear that the Equal Rights Amendment would upend societal norms.

Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative leader and popular author of that era, suggested the ERA would set women back. She organized the Stop Taking Our Privileges (STOP) ERA campaign.

In the late 1970s, Schlafly, who died in 2016 at age 92, became a constitutional lawyer, sometimes opening remarks with “I'd like to thank my husband for letting me be here tonight.” STOP ERA advocates baked apple pies for the Illinois General Assembly as legislators debated the amendment.

The organization claimed the proposed amendment would take away sexual assault laws, alimony and the tendency for courts to award custody to mothers in a divorce. They balked at a military that could draft women and warned that single-sex restrooms would be eliminated.

Some of the privileges Schlafly fought to preserve have evolved naturally without the ERA in place:

• Alimony. Women of means may be the ones paying support in a divorce, and shared parental custody is considered ideal.

• Lavatories. Single-stall restrooms increasingly are gender neutral.

• Military. As of January, women account for more than 1 in 6 service members in the four military branches under the Department of Defense. Women constitute 21 percent of Air Force ranks, 20 percent of the Navy, 15 percent of the Army and 9 percent of the Marine Corps.

Schlafly's daughter Ann Schlafly Cori has continued her mother's work as chairwoman of the Alton, Illinois-based Eagle Forum, and she expresses concerns similar to her mother's. She is opposed to the ERA because she says government financing of abortion would be required and any kind of sex segregation would no longer be acceptable, including in prisons or shelters.

But activists say the U.S. needs to play catch-up.

"Sex equality is guaranteed in most constitutions in the world, including every constitution written since World War II,” Neuwirth says.

Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, has said the ERA's passage is important to her because she wants to be able to pull out her pocket Constitution to show her granddaughter that the foundational laws of this country ensure all women are equal to men.

Pamela K. Johnson is a writer and filmmaker in Southern California who is completing a historical novel.

Hollywood's take on the ERA

Mrs. America, 9 episodes

(FX on Hulu, streaming starts April 15)

Cate Blanchett plays anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly with Rose Byrne as ERA supporter Gloria Steinem along with a cast of strong Hollywood women in this dramatized story of the 1970s movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and the awakening of opposition led by conservative Schlafly to prevent that from happening.