Jane J. Mansbridge - Why We Lost the ERA

Most of Chapters 7 and 8 appeared in Whos in Charge Here? Decision by Accretion and Gatekeeping in the Struggle for the ERA. Politics and Society 13 (1984): 34382.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1986 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1986

Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 9 10 11 12 13

ISBN: 978-0-226-18644-3 (e-book)

Mansbridge, Jane J.

Why we lost the ERA

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Womens rightsUnited States. 2. Equal rights amendmentsUnited States. 3. FeminismUnited States. I. Title.

HQ1236.5.U6M37 1986 305.420973 86-6954

ISBN: 0-226-50358-5 (pbk.)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London

More than a decade ago Pauline Bart and Linda Frankel advised social scientists not to study their own organizations, since social science usually involves showing that appearances are deceptive. Because what appears on the surface is, in part, what weindividually or organizationallyhave decided to let appear, investigations that go deeper often hurt the organization or cause we love.

I thought Bart and Frankel were right when I first read their advice. For this, among other reasons, I put aside the file drawers full of data that I had collected from a Womens Center to which I belonged, and which I had planned to include in my book Beyond Adversary Democracy. I did not think, however, that their argument applied to a phenomenon as public as the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), so I later began to study the ERA movement despite the fact that I was also a participant.

As the work progressed, I discovered that my optimism had been unfounded. I began with a deep conviction that the Equal Rights Amendment should be ratified, and I still have this conviction. Yet if I had published this manuscript earlier, the political result might well have been to weaken support for that Amendment. If I had studied the STOP ERA movement as closely as I studied the pro-ERA movement, my revelations might have weakened the opposition instead. These thoughts did not buoy me as I wrote.

Today, the federal Equal Rights Amendment isat least for the near futurepolitically dead. The ERA failed to win ratification in 1982, and an effort to start the process anew in 1983 failed to win a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. The ERA is unlikely to accumulate such a majority in Congress in the near future, and even if it does, its chances of ratification at the state level are almost nil. I knew defeat was likely from the time I started to work on this book, but it still depressed my spirits as I worked. The solidity of that defeat means, however, that what I write about the ERA is not likely to do the cause serious harm. It is beyond harm now. At this point, I believe, the story of the ERA is important mainly because of the lessons it provides for any political effort, feminist or otherwise, in the future. It is to these lessons that this book is directed, in the hope that we learn from defeat.

My participation in the struggle to ratify the ERA poses interpretative as well as personal and political problems. Several readers have been unsettled by the way what I have written tries to combine both scholarly disengagement and political advocacy. After outlining what I see as possible options for the pro-ERA movement, for example, I pause to say what I personally would have done (e.g., p. 89). Unsettling as this mixture may be, I believe that clarifying my own position makes the book more useful. The interjections will, I hope, encourage the reader to reflect, at that point, on what he or she might have done. They also make more obvious than is usual in works like this the stance from which I have chosen the events I report.

Who, then, is the we of the title? First of all, it designates those who supported the ERAboth the 5060 percent of the population who reported on surveys (whose limits I will come to shortly) that they favored the ERA, and the more committed minority who told interviewers that they favored it strongly. But the we also represents the entire American citizenry, including those who opposed the ERA and those who did not care. Almost everyone involved in the ERA struggle was primarily concerned with the good of the country rather than with personal self-interest. Thus, since I believe both that the principle involved in the ERA was a good one and that the justices of the United States Supreme Court, working with a good principle, would have done more good than harm for the nation as a whole over the long run, I cannot escape the conclusion that even the opponents were really among the losers when the ERA went down to defeat.

This book several times gives instances in which the ERA activists positions in the larger social and economic structure heavily influenced the way they saw issues affecting the ERA and the way they acted on their perceptions. The analysis applies equally to myself. As a political scientist, I have adopted ways of looking at the world and ways of accruing professional credit that differ from those of, say, a legal scholar, an activist with her eye on a potential political career, or a nurse trying to eke out some time for political work from a life already crowded with the demands of a paying job and work in the home. We must view the universe from particular vantage points. While multiple perspectives are helpful for organizations, no individual can see the world from more than two or three vantage points without suffering from blurred vision. We can try to note the ways in which our perspectives and the incentives built into our positions color what we see. We can be relatively humble about the amount of the elephant we have got hold of when our perspective clashes with someone elses. But on an issue like the ERA, analysis from any perspective is a political act, and one must, as a political being as well as a scholar, take responsibility for it.

I could not have written this book without the consistent moral and monetary support of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University. An interdisciplinary haven from the pressures of departmental life, the Center encourages academic work that might have a practical impact. The intelligence, interest, and integrity of my colleagues at the Center sustained me at many points. I am also grateful to Northwestern University for a series of small grants that enabled me to conduct many of my interviews in person and to have the transcripts typed. I would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding a years leave that allowed me to bring the book almost to the point of completion, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the half of my year at the Institute that I spent on this book. Finally, I would like to thank the many people who read and commented on various draftsJudith Areen, Stephen Bendich, Pauline Bart, Janet Boles, Arnold Feldman, Leslie Friedman Goldstein, Susan Goodman, Edwin Haefele, Susan Horn-Moo, David Lyon, Ronald Mansbridge, Donald Mathews, Pamela Rothenberg, Leonard Rubinowitz, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Gilbert Steiner, Arthur Stinchcombe, the anonymous referees from the University of Chicago Press, and several of the people I interviewed for this book, who must also remain anonymousas well as Martha Field, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sylvia Law, Leon Friedman, Steven Smith, and Cass Sunstein, who all read specific chapters. It is particularly important in this book to point out that their reading implies neither agreement nor the claim to having checked my facts. I alone have to take responsibility for ideological orneriness, conceptual blindness, and empirical error. It is impossible to thank adequately Christopher Jencks, who edited the manuscript more than once, puzzled with me through many of the problems, took a fully equal share of the maintenance of our daily lives, and continued to contend, in my moments of depression, that the work deserved to be done.