In the fifth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, advocates and experts reflect on 40 years of activism to ratify the ERA—and the power that would come from women’s constitutional equality to redefine our democracy, protect our fundamental rights and change the stories of women’s lives.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Those are the 24 words that make up the Equal Rights Amendment—and they’ve been a rallying cry for feminists for over a century.
The Equal Rights Amendment was sent to the states for ratification the same year Ms. made its newsstand debut. It took nearly 50 years to bring the ERA to a successful vote in the Senate and House; and today, more than 50 years since, the fight to enshrine it in the Constitution goes on.
“As soon as we get this in the Constitution,” former Nevada state Sen. Pat Spearman says, “people are going to look at this the same way my generation looks at, ‘You couldn’t sit where on the bus?’ ‘What do you mean you couldn’t go in through the front door in Dairy Queen? What do you mean that you had to have a court order to integrate schools?’”
Spearman was the sponsor of legislation to ratify the ERA in Nevada in 2016—nearly 40 years after a deadline imposed by Congress on ratification of the Amendment expired. Nevada’s action to ratify inspired feminist leaders and lawmakers in two more states, Illinois and Virginia, to make history—and push the ERA over the threshold to be added to the Constitution.
Once Spearman had successfully passed the federal ERA ratification legislation, she picked up a new mantle in the fight for constitutional equality, leading the push for the most inclusive Equal Rights Amendment to be added to a state constitution.
“You’re either going to be on the right side of history, or you’re going to be on the sidelines watching us make history,” Spearman adds. “We are not going to stop.”
The fifth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward explores the promise of the Equal Rights Amendment—and what feminists have learned in 50-plus years of activism for constitutional equality. You can listen to the episode in full now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts, or on msmagazine.com.
Featuring legal experts, movement architects and feminist lawmakers, this final installment in the Ms. Studios series tracing the intertwined history of Ms. and the feminist movement makes clear why the fight for the ERA remains as critical as ever.
The ERA earned the approval of the necessary three-fourths of states when Virginia became the 38th to ratify in 2020. But President Trump, then in his first term, claimed that the arbitrary deadline added to the ERA by Congress made it impossible to add the Amendment to our founding document. Experts disagree: Constitutional law scholars and the American Bar Association agree that the ERA has satisfied congressional requirements to be added to the U.S. Constitution.
Feminists now are working to remove the deadline with Congressional legislation that affirms the ERA as the 28th amendment—an effort led by ERA caucus chair and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
You’re either going to be on the right side of history, or you’re going to be on the sidelines watching us make history.
Former Nevada state Senator Pat Spearman
“The right wing has got a drumbeat going that the ratification period ended,” Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar, who became involved in feminist organizing after the ERA deadline expired that June, explains in the episode. “They keep wanting to say it’s dead, you have to start over. That’s disinformation, and they know it, but they keep that out there because that gives Republican members of Congress a cover on their failure to support the resolutions that have come before Congress to eliminate the timeline—to say that, notwithstanding the deadline, the Equal Rights Amendment has met the requirements laid out in the Constitution to be the 28th Amendment.”
“People think it’s either won, or we can’t ever do it. They’re both wrong,” Feminist Majority Foundation president and publisher of Ms. Ellie Smeal adds. “We’re gonna do it, and it will have a very positive effect.”
Smeal, who was a three-time president of national NOW and helped architect the movement of that time to ratify the ERA, offers up stories in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward that are critical reminders of the role feminist activism and movement-building has played in the fight for women’s constitutional equality.
It was feminist activists who staged demonstrations, interrupted Congressional hearings and demanded the ERA make it to the floor of both chambers to be voted on by Congress. It was feminist lawmakers who filed discharge petitions and got the ERA to a vote. And it was feminists like Smeal, in 1978, who staged what was then the largest feminist protest in history to demand the deadline be extended from 1979 to 1982.
“We knew that we had to get an extension of time, Smeal recalls. “We asked people if they would bank some messages that we could send out right at the right time from Western Union. We had over 800 teams doing this nationwide. Our goal was that they would know, nationwide, with a lot of depth, people wanted full equality for women.”
NOW banked the phone messages for legislators and released them while the march took shape in the streets of D.C. “We’d give them a sign that we’re in every district, we’re in every grassroots and we’re also at the national level,” Smeal adds. “When we were marching down that street, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands were being sent through. I think it was about 500,000 Western Union telegrams went in. Someone ran back to me and said, ‘Ellie, Ellie, good Lord, they’ve collapsed! They crashed the Western Union!”
People think it’s either won, or we can’t ever do it. They’re both wrong. We’re gonna do it, and it will have a very positive effect.
Ellie Smeal, Feminist Majority Foundation president and publisher of Ms.
“How’d I get involved with the Equal Rights Amendment?” the Hon. Carol Moseley Braun reflects. “The fact is, it was hard not to, at that stage in time. If you were breathing, and you read any newspaper anywhere, you knew there was a big battle around ERA across the country.”
Moseley Braun—who went on to become the first Black woman elected to the Senate, the first Black democratic senator, the first woman elected to represent Illinois in the Senate, the first woman on the Senate Finance Committee and, then, the first woman and African American person ever appointed to serve as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa—was an Illinois state legislator in the countdown to the ERA deadline in 1982. She worked closely with Smeal to build a strategy to ratify before time was up—but it would take them both nearly 40 years to see their hard-won victory take shape.
“Lesson number one is, don’t give up,” Moseley Braun asserts in Looking Back, Moving Forward. Continue fighting, because without raising the issues, they will get lost in the noise, and I just hope that women are not discouraged, particularly in these times. That we continue to recognize the importance of our voices and how important it is that we continue to press for equality and the law. I mean, that’s all the ERA ever was.”
We are obliged to continue this battle, continue this fight, because it’s our future that’s in the balance.
Hon. Carol Moseley Braun
The urgent importance of our persistence has never been more clear. In a moment of rapid backsliding and attacks women and marginalized communities at the national level, enshrining the ERA has become about more than a simple statement of equality. This is a fight for our fundamental freedoms.
“Things are pretty dire right now,” explains Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project, a law and policy think tank founded at Columbia Law School in 2021 and now a part of NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center. “The reality is that the erosion of sex equality is not going to stop until women and gender minorities and anyone who refuses to conform to traditional views on gender is, legally, a second-class citizen.” Cheng argues that “this is where the ERA becomes essential.”
“We need a long-term vision to achieve systemic equality in the face of Dobbs, in the face of Skrmetti, in the face of Trump’s executive orders on gender ideology—and we need that vision to be inclusive, intersectional and embrace Democratic principles, rather than reduce them,” Cheng adds. “The ERA represents both a response to the crisis moment that we’re in right now, and a longer-term roadmap for a more just future.”
The forces that have restricted women’s rights and attempted to obstruct the ratification of the ERA have not changed in 50 or 100 years: male lawmakers intent on upholding their power, economic interests opposed to laws that infringe on their discriminatory practices, and patriarchs of all stripes who seek to diminish women’s rights in order to uphold male supremacy. But the feminist fight hasn’t changed, either.
The ERA represents both a response to the crisis moment that we’re in right now, and a longer-term roadmap for a more just future.
Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project
The ERA remains a lightning rod in the feminist community because it unites us—across experiences, across lines of difference and across issues. Looking Back, Moving Forward focuses on the ERA in its fifth and final episode because the ERA brings together the conversations we’ve had throughout the series, about diversity in politics, reproductive freedom, economic justice and a future without violence.
We need the ERA because we need real progress—a victory that isn’t at the whim of a sexist lawmaker or judge to decide or roll back, a protection from misogyny that supersedes every elected official’s political predilections, an affirmation that our democracy includes women and that their citizenship includes their full rights and freedoms.
“Social behavior, relationships between women and men, power dynamics within the workplace and within families—without those legal changes, frequently, those power relationships don’t budge,” Spillar explains. “A good example of that is coverture laws. Used to be everywhere in this country where, if a woman gets married to a man, her identity, under the law, disappears, and it’s his identity that matters—and there are religious interests, to this day, that are literally preaching a return to those laws and relationships, but the Equal Rights Amendment not only can strike down those laws, which are sex discriminatory, but it gives a whole framework for how even these kinds of social relations can change and shift.”
The right wing has got a drumbeat going that the ratification period ended. They keep wanting to say it’s dead, you have to start over. That’s disinformation.
Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar
“The expectation of equality is the most important cultural thing that we can achieve, and we have to keep holding up that light,” Moseley Braun adds. “We are obliged to continue this battle, continue this fight, because it’s our future that’s in the balance.”
“I don’t think we’re going to go backwards,” Smeal affirms, “but I know one thing. They try to push us back, the people who will go to move to the front will be overwhelmingly women.”
“We’re coming in waves,” Spearman warns. “The first wave, they may get tired, and they may have to stop for a rest, but there’s another wave coming. The people who don’t want to see equality, they must know this. They must know that there ain’t no quit in us, and there ain’t enough bad in them.”
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
