The simple answer is that the founding fathers, in creating and interpreting the Constitution, chose to apply citizens’ rights only to property-owning white males. Over the years, constitutional amendments and interpretations gradually extended citizens' rights to others, including, after the Civil War, to formerly enslaved people–but still only to the male half of the population. All women continued to be assumed “taken care of” by their fathers and then by their husbands, and not suited, by their very nature, for independent decision-making and participation as citizens. The 14th Amendment (1868) states: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” However, the term “person” was clearly not intended to equally include women, since the allocation of elected representatives was specified to be based on the number of the state’s voting males. This, together with the 15th Amendment (1870) outlawing the denial of the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” – with the fully intentional omission of “sex”-- was the “justification” given when in 1873 Susan B. Anthony was tried, declared guilty, and fined, for the “illegal” act of a woman casting a vote in a national election.
After the enactment of the 14th and 15th Amendments, it took 50 more years of frustrating hard work before women finally, in 1920, won the right to vote – a great and long overdue victory. But that far from enough: Women were still treated, under the law, as second-class citizens in numerous and vital ways in education, in employment, business and professions, in marriage, divorce and child custody, in government and politics. In just about every facet of society, women, solely because of their sex, continued to be severely limited in their rights and opportunities as citizens. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, in 1923, therefore proposed The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which by 1943 was worded as follows: Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. Thanks to strong women's rights efforts, the "Alice Paul" ERA was finally passed by Congress in 1972, and sent to the states for ratification. Powerful opposition soon arose, from economic and other interests that profited mightily from discriminating against women and treating them as second-class citizens, and from people convinced that male domination of women was justified and should remain embedded in society and its laws. In spite of a 3-year extension to the original 7-year ratification time limit), the ERA was ratified by only 35 states – three short of the required 38. Thus it appeared that women's struggle for constitutionally guaranteed equal rights would have to start all over again, getting the ERA or something similar passed by two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress (preferably without the handicap of a ratification time limit), and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. Women and their male supporters continued – and still continue today – to be forced to toil issue by issue, law by law, often state by state, to persuade legislators and courts to affirm that women’s rights should be equal to those of men. Even when the efforts are successful (as many have been), all such gains remain vulnerable and reversible. Women have to struggle merely to maintain their patchwork of hard-won gains, let alone to make further progress toward what should be their birthright – fully equal rights with men. The ERA would make that birthright explicit. Since the 1982 expiration of the congressionally imposed and later extended ratification time limit, the ERA has been reintroduced in every session of Congress in the form of House and Senate resolutions to start the amending process over from the beginning. Each time thus far, they have been stalled without action.
In the 1990's, a promising new strategy for achieving the ERA began to arise. The "Madison" Amendment, concerning congressional pay raises, became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution on May 7, 1992, after a ratification period of 203 years. This established a precedent such that there should be no constitutional objection to an ERA ratification period longer than the current few decades. Also, Congress, when it first passed the ERA in 1972, chose to impose a time limit – but not in the legally and constitutionally binding text of the amendment itself. Later, a different session of Congress extended that time limit, thus establishing the precedent that it has the power to do so. A strong argument can therefore be made that any session of Congress could, by a simple majority in both houses, extend (or eliminate) the currently expired ratification time limit on the ERA, such that just three more state ratifications would add the ERA to the Constitution. Note: The 35 existing state ratifications should stand, because under Article V of the Constitution and confirmed by precedent, states that have once ratified an amendment do not have the power to rescind that ratification. (The 15 not-yet-ratified states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.) Thus the "3-state strategy" was launched, recognizing the likelihood of opposition from those who still oppose equal rights for women, but buoyed by authoritative analyses supporting its legal validity. Today, the 3-state strategy is gaining more and more attention, and a major new activist push for the ERA is growing rapidly. Why now? A great many of the "reasons" motivating anti-ERA forces in the 1970s, and the arguments they used, have now lost much or even all of their "punch:" The formerly very high degree to which corporations and other institutions based their profits and economic survival on vastly underpaid female employees, arbitrarily restricted to low level jobs, has been greatly reduced. The old trumpeted fears of having women fighting in wars, “unisex” bathrooms, women “bosses” over men, women in the pulpit, women acting and making major decisions in high level business, political, and judicial positions, have lost almost all their sting. After all, women are already there, and succeeding, in numbers far too great to ignore. And arguments about “the death of the family” and “destruction of morality” if women were to be – horrors! – permitted equal rights with men, now sound absurd. The changes since the 1970’s are underscored by a professionally conducted nationwide survey, commissioned in July 2001 by the ERA Campaign Network. It shows that 96% of American adults believe that men and women should have equal rights, and 88% believe that those rights should be guaranteed to them by the US Constitution. These views are so widely held by both men and women and across all segments of our society, that most Americans (72%) mistakenly think the Constitution already specifies that male and female citizens are entitled to equal rights. [For details on the survey, click HERE] Thus it is clear that the time has definitely come, now, to achieve the addition of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. And just one more timely point: With the growing attention to the worldwide importance of equal rights and opportunities for women, it is increasingly embarrassing (and an invitation to accusations of United States hypocrisy) that unlike the constitutions of almost all other democratically inclined nations, The US Constitution still fails to guarantee its female citizens equal rights with its male citizens. So, re the ERA: If not now, when? And if WE don't make it happen, who will?
The current nationwide campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment has growing numbers of women’s rights activists all around the nation, in ratified as well as not-yet-ratified states, working to achieve this vitally needed constitutional guarantee for women. Over 200 women’s organizations, with a collective membership of more than twelve million, belong to the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO), which strongly supports completing the ratification of the ERA. Vigorous ratification drives are ongoing in Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, Missouri and Arizona, and many other not-yet-ratified states are building toward their own ratification drives. In addition, growing numbers of ERA proponents in Congress are taking action. On March 27, 2007, Sen. Edward Kennedy reintroduced the ERA in the Senate (S.J.RES.10) with 20 initial cosponsors, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney reintroduced the ERA in the House of Representatives (H.J.RES.40) with 193 initial cosponsors, both with no time limit for completion of ratification. Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has announced that House hearings on the ERA will be scheduled soon. In addition, of special interest to proponents of the 3-state strategy, Rep. Robert Andrews plans to soon reintroduce his resolution requiring the House to take any legislative action necessary to verify that the addition of three more state ratifications will fulfill the requirement to add the ERA to the U.S. Constitution. For additional historical and analytic information on the ERA and the 3-state strategy, see the ERA website of the Alice Paul Institute: www.equalrightsamendment.org.
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