Thi-i-s close: Advocates keep pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment
Nearly 80% of Americans favor adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, according to a 2020 Pew Research survey.
According to Executive Director Rachael Glashan Rupisan of the Alice Paul Institute, an organization that works for gender equality, if there were an Equal Rights Amendment, policies like recent abortion bans wouldn’t have happened.
“We just saw specific acts and bills that have been in place in the law of land for decades taken away very easily,” Rupisan said in an interview with Capital News Service. “That's the difference: It's a lot harder to take away a constitutional amendment.”
The ERA would explicitly place sex-based discrimination protections for women into the Constitution.
ERA advocates point out that the only place where women are mentioned in the Constitution is in the 19th Amendment.
“So women can vote but they can't really have anything else,” Gonzalez said. “The ERA is such an important issue, so many different generations and cross sections of people can really get behind it because we all have something to gain from it.”
Despite more than a century-long push, the fate of the Equal Rights Amendment still sits in the hands of a deeply divided Congress, as well as various state legislatures, while debate continues over a controversial ratification deadline.
Origins of the ERA
In the 1920’s, fresh off the success of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote, National Women’s Party members began to look at how to stop other methods of sex-based discrimination in the United States.
Alice Paul, a member of the party, wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. For nearly half a century, a version of the amendment was introduced in every session of Congress.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” the current version of the amendment, rewritten in 1943, states.
Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification in 1972, with a seven-year ratification deadline. Activists later cited that deadline as the reason for the amendment’s travails, arguing that the deadline would encourage states to delay their ratification.
There have been opponents of the amendment since its inception, one of its most famous being the late anti-feminist attorney Phyllis Schlafly, who said the amendment would take away policies that benefit women, would institute a draft for women, enshrine same-sex marriage rights, and protect the right to abortion in the Constitution.
Since the expiration of the 1982 deadline, three states — Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia — have ratified the ERA. Virginia, the last state needed, ratified the amendment in 2020.
Recent push in Congress
With the threshold now met, politicians and advocates are rallying around the amendment once again — hoping to finally add the ERA to the Constitution.
Multiple members of Congress introduced legislation to move the amendment forward in 2023, for the 100th anniversary of the amendment’s first introduction.
Current legislation follows two strategies: removing the 1982 deadline and then directing the archivist of the United States to add the amendment to the Constitution.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–MA) said the House Equal Rights Amendment Caucus is leveraging every tool available to pass the legislation. Pressley founded the caucus in 2023 with Rep. Cory Bush (D-MO).
“The ratification threshold has been met,” Pressley said during a March 18 press conference. “The women of this country have done their job, states have done their job, and now Congress must do its (job).”
Bush and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–NY) both introduced resolutions that would recognize the ERA as ratified and enforceable. Both bills are sitting in each chamber’s judiciary committees.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D–MD) also introduced now-failed legislation to remove the deadline in 2023 in the Senate. In 2012, he argued against the deadline because such a restriction isn’t included in the Constitution and another amendment, the 27th Amendment, took over two centuries to ratify.
“The women of this country are exhausted and it’s been 101 years too long,” Pressley said.
Some states take initiative
As activists wait on updates to the constitutional amendment, state-level Equal Rights Amendments have been passed.
As of 2022, 22 states have state-level Equal Rights Amendments and 28 states have forms of gender equality provisions in their constitutions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Molly Gonzales, the advocacy manager at the Alice Paul Institute, said the state amendments give advocates a window into what the ERA could do nationwide.
For example, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court used the state’s ERA in January to argue that abortion restrictions can be challenged as sex discrimination.
“We're kind of just starting to see the untapped potential of what that means,” Gonzales said about the state amendments.
Capital News Service is a student-powered news organization run by the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. For 26 years, they have provided deeply reported, award-winning coverage of issues of import to Marylanders.
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