The Return of the Women’s Libbers
I’m now in Phyllis Schlafly mode: Yesterday, a group of 120 Democrats sent a letter to President Joe Biden, who is apparently still kickin’, asking him “to take immediate action to recognize the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The ERA is a zombie that won’t die. First introduced 101 years ago, in the wake of suffragettes winning themselves and their peers the right to vote, the amendment was meant to eliminate laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. At the time, critics feared that this would winnow away certain protections available to women; The Washington Post notes, for example, that organized labor folks were worried that workplace protections which “capped the number of hours women could work, excluded them from certain occupations and imposed limits on heavy lifting” would be barred.
The amendment became a major issue in the 1970s, and the fault lines formed around many similar questions: Prominent hater Phyllis Schlafly, for example, led a campaign against the amendment, arguing it would make women subject to the draft, or bring an end to “dependent wife” Social Security benefits, or have judges no longer broadly favor the mother when adjudicating custody battles. “ERA was defeated when Schlafly turned it into a war among women over gender roles,” wrote the legal scholar Joan Williams in the ’90s. (“The women’s liberation movement really resents homemakers,” said one representative anti-ERA activist, per Williams. “They caused resentment to grow between homemakers and working women.”)
“There wasn’t momentum for it until the modern women’s rights movement, when both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of a slightly reworded Equal Rights Amendment in 1971 and 1972,” says the Post. “It then came up just short of the ratification threshold of passage by three-fourths of the states by the deadline set by Congress….The Texas legislature approved the amendment the same month it sailed through the Senate, and within a year, 30 states had ratified it.” But it needed to garner that high threshold of support by the deadline—38 states by 1982—and it ended up three states short, with five states even rescinding their approval in the end.
In the early years of Donald Trump’s adminstration, the ERA reemerged as an issue, with three states choosing to go ahead and ratify it, fearing what a Trump term might do for the rights of women.
Now it’s back again.
Article from Reason.com
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