Julie C. Suk - We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment

Copyright 2020 by Julie C. Suk

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5591-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5592-5

Printed in the United States of America

For my mother and my sisters, who seem to know exactly when to be unstoppable.

Contents

Introduction

The Forgotten Mothers of the Constitution

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.

2. Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article.

3. This Amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution

T HE YEAR 2020 MARKS THE 100th anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing womens constitutional right to vote. But how far have we really come?

After the adoption and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, a bold group of women proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Women have been fighting for the ERA for almost a century, believing that the Constitution should recognize their equal rights, not only as voters, but as full persons and citizens. It took Congress almost forty-nine years to adopt it in 1972. The fight for ratification in the states took another forty-eight years, culminating in Virginias historic ratification in January 2020. Virginia was the crucial thirty-eighth state needed to add sex equality to the US Constitution.

Why have women persisted to ratify the ERA? Why did it take so long? Is it too late to add the ERA to the Constitution? And what could it do for women?

We the Women answers these questions. It tells the stories of the women who made the ERAits founding mothersand the women who would benefit most from the ERAthe mothers of the next generation of Americans who have long navigated womens changing roles in American society. Their efforts to establish womens constitutional right to equality have been disrupted and delayed along the way. Their ordeals are largely forgotten. But women have not given up on constitutional change.

Most constitutions around the world declare equality between women and men. But the US Constitution has struggled with its commitment to sex equality. Efforts to add sex equality to the US Constitution, beginning with womens right to vote, have been fraught with controversy and resistance. After a battle that lasted decades, American women achieved the constitutional right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Newly armed with votes, a suffragist vanguard introduced an idea that seemed revolutionary in 1923that women should have rights fully equal to those enjoyed by men. But the revolution became an evolution, persisting across generations, still unfinished.

Even with all the ratifications completed, a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the ERA because Congress set up time limits on ratification that expired in 1982. With only thirty-five states having ratified it by that deadline, three states short of the thirty-eight needed, the ERA was declared a failure and forgotten for a generation. But it made a surprising comeback in 2017, as the Womens March gave Nevada the momentum to ratify the amendment. The #MeToo movement moved Illinois legislators to ratify the ERA in May 2018. Then the Pink Wave got a record number of women elected to Congress later that year, resulting in 23.7 percent of Congress being female. That wave spread to Virginia, as more women were elected to the Virginia legislature in November 2019 than ever before. Women, now occupying leadership positions in the Virginia General Assembly, led their state to finally deliver the thirty-eighth ratification, after decades of failed attempts. But opponentsincluding the Trump Administrationhave tried to stop the ERA by saying that its just too late.

We the Women journeys across a century of women marching, protesting, testifying, resisting, arguing, litigating, and persisting to establish their constitutional rights. It gives voice to their constitutional claims. If and when the ERA is added to the Constitution, our Constitution will officially have founding mothers as well as founding fathers. The ERA will be the only piece of our nations fundamental law that was written by women after suffrage, adopted by women leading the way in Congress, given meaning by women lawyers and judges, and ratified by women lawmakers in state legislatures of the twenty-first century. Opponents and onlookers have tried to stop these women at every turn. They made the ERA controversial by saying that it would be bad for mothers.

It is time to bury that myth as the ERA comes back to life.

Women are marching forward with a stronger, better vision of a twenty-first century ERA. The ERA matters, not only because of what it will do as law, but because of who is making it matter, and how they seek to improve democracy by making it law. American women have been challenging male abuses of power and changing the Constitution to make it respond to womens needs. They are overcoming the barriers built by legal precedents and political machines. The ERA is paving new legislative paths to womens empowermentespecially for mothers and mothers-to-be, whose needs have been left behind by the progress of gender equality.

The ongoing struggle for constitutional change seeks to address the gender inequalities that remain in the twenty-first century despite the major gains of the twentieth. The ERA returned to the political hopper on the heels of the Womens March and continued to gain support because of the #MeToo movement. From unequal pay to unequal power, women remain unequal because of their traditional role in childbearing and childrearing. Women are paid less than men, are more likely to lose their jobs when they have children, are targets of sexual abuse, and are less likely to hold positions of power because they areor might becomemothers. We the Women shows how women made and remade the ERA over the generations as a response to the disadvantaging effects of motherhood. The next frontier of equal rights must remember its heroic mothersthe mothers of the Constitution and the mothers of the kids next doorwho are often forgotten.

Virginias ratification gave rise to an unprecedented situation in American constitutional history. For the first time, a constitutional amendment that has cleared both hurdles required by Article V of the Constitutionadoption by two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the stateswas not officially added to the Constitution because of a congressionally imposed deadline. Congress has the power to lift this deadline. After the multigenerational struggle of the women who wrote, adopted, and ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, opponents reliance on a deadline to abort these efforts is part of the problem that the ERA seeks to solve: the failure to respect womens work equally to that of men.