Why Big Business Is Trying to Defeat the ERA: The Economic Implications of Equality (May 1976)

Behind the ERA battle: Big Business feared equality would cost billions in wages and workplace protections.

To honor five-plus decades of feminist reporting, rebelling and truth-telling, From the Vault features some of our favorite classics from the pages of Ms. Now, for the first time ever, readers can explore the complete Ms. Magazine Archive—every issue since 1972—digitally through ProQuest, free to students, educators and activists via their libraries. (Feminists everywhere are encouraged to ask their local or campus librarians about subscriptions or free trial access; find more information here.) And for an essential collection you can hold in your hands, don’t miss 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION (Alfred A. Knopf)—a stunning anthology of the most audacious, norm-breaking stories Ms. has published.

As we mark Labor Day—a holiday meant to honor workers and their fight for dignity—Elinor Langer’s classic Ms. investigation from 1976 feels startlingly current. “Why Big Business Is Trying to Defeat the ERA” reveals how corporate interests, not just culture wars, have long been at the heart of opposition to women’s equality. At stake then, as now, were not only symbolic victories, but billions in wages and workplace protections. On this Labor Day, as debates over pay equity, reproductive rights, and workplace justice dominate headlines, Langer’s analysis reminds us: The fight for equality has always been a fight for labor.

To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign … During that time they were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to urge Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to induce State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into State constitutions; 277 campaigns to persuade State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. Millions of dollars were raised, mainly in small sums, and expended with economic care. Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime; thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity.

— Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, from Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923), quoted in Babcock, Freedman, Norton, and Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law: Causes and Remedies (1975), page 54

Part I

On Nov. 7, 1975—more than half a year ago as you read this—the voters of New York and New Jersey defeated amendments to their state constitutions which said that men and women should be treated equally before the law. It was one of those old-fashioned political events that the rise of the pollster is supposed to have leeched from our body politic—namely, a surprise. It set off a period both of private introspection on the part of individual women who had previously taken ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment for granted, and public reconsideration on the part of the organizations and politicians to whom stewardship of the ratification movement had fallen. For perhaps two months, from the election until approximately the New Year, the atmosphere felt like a locker room after a prizefight in which the favorite has unexpectedly been defeated. Paparazzi hovered around the doorways of famous feminists inquiring solicitously, “Is the Equal Rights Amendment dead?” Editors contributed headlines like REQUIEM FOR ERA and FEMINIST FIZZLE. If the Women’s Movement had been in a championship match, and on one of those dark winter days, you had asked the advice of a friendly bookie, the word would undoubtedly have been: Switch.

Don’t. The votes in New York and New Jersey marked a contradictory set of successes and failures, but they marked them equally. On the one hand, the Women’s Movement is a thriving, complex network which reaches into the very center of American life. On the other: it is a clumsy amorphous organism with no central consciousness of where all of its spores have set themselves down. No political force of the size, scope, and implications of the Women’s Movement could fail to have opponents; and the very breadth and inclusiveness of the Movement helped create the illusion of security at precisely the moment when sophisticated understanding was needed to consolidate its gains.

The votes against the states’ ERAs measured success by measuring presence felt; our surprise measured failure by measuring innocence. lose? Us? When our cause is just? It is time to abandon that pedestal of naïveté. Against the struggle for suffrage summarized above, how small were the breezes which sent us reeling.

To explore some of the elements which have to be understood if the continuing fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment is to succeed is not a simple task. We must attempt not only to uncover the precise sources of external opposition to the amendment and the mechanics of its operation, but to understand what attributes of the Women’s Movement itself contribute to our opponents’ ability to undermine the ERA’s chances for passage. Not all the evidence is in and not all the news is pleasant. The 19th century feminist movement is a fountain of analogies, but not of guidance. Long, complicated, and internally divided, it offers not just one historical example to draw upon but hundreds. And yet it is essential to begin.

The importance of the Equal Rights Amendment has rarely been stated more clearly than this:

Although the arguments pro and con have become lost in the morass of political rhetoric and the specifics of the myriad laws potentially affected—marriage and divorce laws, property rights, draft laws, jury service laws, etc.—through it all, there is only one question to be considered: is it valid for legal distinctions to be made on the basis of sex; and if they are made on that basis, is the principle of equality under the law being subverted.

Women are the legal equals of men—or else, they are not. While the immediate positive effect of the Equal Rights Amendment would be limited to the rewriting of state laws which now contain sex-discriminatory language, its rejection would be a blow from which the Women’s Movement would be long in recovering, because it had not only a technical implication, but a symbolic one. Constitutional affirmation of equality between the sexes is the indispensable political condition for the next phase off the long struggle for female personhood, just as suffrage was the indispensable political condition for the degree of emancipation and political organization we have now. Though the ERA will not affect women of all economic classes, or all individuals, identically, it is nonetheless the foundation on which all of us, and all our children, will have to stand. We need not provide collective demonstration of the Horner thesis that women draw back from success. The Equal Rights amendment is well within our grasp. To begin with, a review of some facts.

Background

The Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced into Congress in 1923 at the urging of former suffrage activists constituted as the National Woman’s Part. Ignored for nearly 50 years except for brief periods following World War II when it was debated as a possible reward to women for their varied contributions to the war effort, it was brought out of the Judiciary Committee in the summer of 1970 by former Representative Martha Griffiths (D-Mich.) and passed by the the House of Representatives by a vote of 350-15 after approximately an hour’s debate. It was met with hostile newspaper reaction criticizing the representatives for precipitousness and implying that the gentlemen were playing to the ladies in the gallery. Hearings had in fact already been held in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Constitutional Amendments in May 1970, chaired by Senator Birch Bay (D-Ind, a supporter of the amendment, and the full committee held hearings in September, chaired by former Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), an opponent. In the House, the Judiciary Committee covered its tracks with a set of hearings held in March and April 1971, and the amendment was passed again that October.

Of the more than 40 major witnesses in the several sessions, fewer than a dozen criticized the proposed change in the Constitution. The few who did for the most part represented organized labor, or were otherwise claiming to speak on behalf od women workers.

Their position was that the constitutional amendment, by requiring sex-neutrality in the formulation and enforcement of laws, would annul protective legislation regulating women’s working conditions hard-won in the past—laws setting limits, for example, on maximum hours, on the number of pounds women can be required to life, or on their employment on night shifts or in certain occupations such as mining and bartending.

Labor’s dissent form the simple egalitarianism embodied in the ERA reflected a long-standing controversy between the feminist and the social reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and was in fact the principal point over which they had divided after the victory of the suffrage amendment. In the late 20th century their differences were being eroded by the obvious changes in social and economic life which made it easier to reveal that laws which were protective in theory were restrictive in fact. The old case of Mollie Maloney, a bookbinder forced to switch to the lower-paying day shift when New York passed its night-work statute and to give up her job altogether when another law prevented her from filing rush orders—and thousands like it, past and present—were disinterred, and they seemed covered with the dust of Victorianism. In the 1970s solicitude appeared hypocritical. Who was protecting whom, and from what?

New laws, stemming from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, were already being used to challenge sexual, as well as racial, discrimination. Outside the legal structure a new wave of feminism was making itself felt on the streets, in the universities, in shops, factories, and homes, in every organization from the Yippies to the Republican Party. Nearly every significant women’s organization, including some which had previously taken the labor position, now supported the ERA. Already, at the time of the Congressional hearings, certain key unions, including the United Auto Workers, responsive to the changing attitudes and composition of their membership, had endorsed the amendment. Gradually they were joined by others and eventually, in 1973, by the AFL-CIO itself. The atmosphere was that of routine registration of an existing social fact, not of radical change. The business cycle was in an expansive phase. Why not throw the girls a bone? The unification of previously conflicting ideas and the consolidation of previously conflicting ideas and the consolidation of previously opposed lobbies behind the ERA was reflected in its passage by the Senate by a vote of 84-8 on March 22, 1972, and by its rapid and dramatic ratification by the legislatures of 22 states the same calendar year. In January 1973, only 16 more states were required to complete the incorporation of the ERA into the Constitution, and they had six more years in which to do so. In 1976 with half the time having passed, not only is the work not completed, but recession movements threaten the amendment’s status even in states which have ratified it. What has been happening?

It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment of the development of the opposition. In a sense it has always been present. Nebraska and Tennessee, the two states which voted to rescind, did so in 1973 and 1974 respectively. Perhaps it ought to have been more clearly anticipated, both because it should have been obvious that the states where public enthusiasm was greatest would ratify first, leaving the more divided ones for last. Opposition may also have received a boost from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, announced on Jan. 22, 1973.

What we can say, however, is that its external manifestation, if not its internal gathering up, was dramatic. Suddenly, at a moment of great tension, such as we have all internalized from a thousand melodramas, when the economic balloon had popped and uneasiness was spreading across society like oil from a stricken tanker, at just that moment there appeared on the horizon—is it a Knight? No, it is a Lady on a white charger raising her banner shaped like a street sign: STOP ERA. Is she alone? no, hundreds are with her, and suddenly there are hordes of women and men, we can see them, racing toward us, holding aloft their banners, the vital acronyms of their mother organizations flapping in the winds: HOT DOG (Humanitarians Opposed to Degrading Our Girls); HOME (Happiness of Woman Eternal); AWARE (American Women Are Richly Endowed, alternatively, American Women Against Ratification of WRA); FOE (Females Opposed to Equality); Ha! (Home Administrators, Inc.); and HAM (Housewives and Motherhood Anti-Lib Movement). Not to mention W.W.W.W. (Women Who Want To Be Women), the Right To Be a Woman Organization, Women for Maintaining the Difference Between the Sexes and Against the Equal Rights Amendment, the Committee for the Retention and Protection of Women’s Rights, and, neither last not least though possibly best, the Vive La Difference Committee. If this is a grassroots movement, the grasses have been well fertilized—and in this case, since the John Birch Society has publicly taken credit for anti-ERA developments in several states, it is no secret who is doing some of the gardening.

Corporate Interests

It is at just this point, however, at which most of the analyses of the defeats of the New York and New Jersey amendments end, and it is at just this point that they ought to begin. The mere fact that the Birch Society opposes the amendment tells us little worth knowing. Nor do snide profiles or oh-wow revelations about the right-wing connections and principles of the anti-ERA movement’s principal strategist, Phyllis Schlafly. These, after all, are the basis of her political success. They are not exactly secret. Shocked indignation about the opposition’s tactics is similarly useless. If you comb through the files of both sides you quickly discover that we have as many notes taken by our people infiltrating their meetings as they have taken by their people infiltrating ours. For every pro-ERA organization attempting to establish who is financing the amendment’s opponents, there is a Schlafly newsletter itemizing who it is that is supporting us. The point is not that these tactics are base—indeed, they are routine—but that all our labors merely demonstrate the obvious: Feminism is in the literal orbit, and antifeminism is in the orbit of the right.

And while we are both engaged in making these elementary proofs, what else is going on? Who benefits from our mutual self-absorption? Is it the corporate center. The beneficiaries of this old-fashioned diversion are the major business interests, splayed within both political parties, which have concluded that equality for women, coming on top of the decreasing flexibility in the hiring and firing of black people that has followed the civil rights movement, would introduce an inelasticity into the labor force that their profit margins cannot bear.

There are hundreds of thousands of individual women and men in communities everywhere across the country who are genuinely confused by the sexual, personal and economic implications of the ERA. In the boardroom, they are not confused. The higher up you go from the grass roots in pursuing the ERA controversy, the less you hear about homosexual marriage, women in combat and unisex toilets. What you hear about is dollars and cents. The relationship between the overt objections voiced in the anti-ERA propaganda distributed by the right, and the covert objections of the business interests—between the ideological rhetoric circling about the amendment and what is actually at stake—is approximately what was illustrated in the 1915 cartoon about the voting amendment reproduced by Eleanor Flexner in her groundbreaking history of the suffrage movement, Century of Struggle. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, revised edition, 1975; page 308.)

The cartoon shows four fat-bellied men sprawled about the proverbial back room, cigars and pipes in their mouths, glasses of beer in their hands. Spread out across the table is a newspaper with the headline WOMANS SUFFRAGE DEFEATED. “Well, boys,” says one groggily to the others, “we saved the home.”

I want to state plainly that the argument I am about to make is difficult if not impossible to prove now. I take my sanction form Flexner, who, in a chapter titled, “Who Opposed Woman Suffrage?” wrote:

Most difficult of all to link with the opposition to woman suffrage were the business interests. The proceedings of the annual conventions of the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or the pages of the Wall Street Journal, do not contain a word of protest against granting women the vote. There was no nationwide mobilization of Big Business against woman suffrage. Yet some business groups fought suffrage tenaciously and bitterly, albeit with the greatest circumspection. One suffrage organizer after another reported the presence and activity of railroad, oil, and general manufacturing lobbies, whenever suffrage was up for legislative action or referendum. (Flexner, page 309)

Reasoning from history in the absence of concrete evidence has obvious risks. The case is circumstantial. We have no cameras hidden on the walls of the rooms where secret donations are changing hands. Yet virtually the same statement could be made today. Just as every suffrage worker, as Flexner says elsewhere, caught the scent of the liquor interests, so everywhere across the country ERA workers are hearing the shuffling papers of insurance.

Insurance

Why the insurance interests should be in the vanguard of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment is a complicated question. The feminist case against the industry as stated in material developed and circulated by such groups as Common Cause, the National Organization for Women, and a Chicago-based organization of downtown office workers called Women Employed, rests primarily on rate and coverage discrimination in three forms of insurance—life, medical and disability.

In life insurance, women pay less than men but more than mortality data indicate they should. In both medical and disability insurance, pregnancy and gynecological ailments may be excluded while specifically male disorders, such as prostate conditions, are provided for, and wives of male employees are frequently offered more thorough coverage than the employed woman. Because of the prevailing assumption that women are only supplementing the family income and therefore likely to linger at home when possible—the “pin-money theory” of why women work—disability policies are sometimes difficult to obtain, and, when they are available, may be inferior to those offered men in similar occupations. The Women Employed study, for example, found that several major companies classified waitresses as “generally unacceptable risks” for disability, but delivered no similar verdict against waiters.

Neither the profitability of apparent discrimination, however, which can be justified by industry officials in references to the iron dictates of the actuarial tables difficult for a non expert to understand, nor the sexism implicit in the pin-money theory, is unique to insurance. What is unique to insurance, and what might begin to explain its role in the movement against the Equal Rights Amendment, is its structure. The political geography of the industry makes it particularly well situated to hold the line against a constitutional amendment because it is one of the few major industries that is still regulated by state governments and not by Washington. That insurance fought for state regulation in the 1940s, and that it has made good use of it to protect its interests, is well known. In June 1974, for example, a case study by the Wall Street Journal of the influence of the insurance industry in the Illinois legislature reports that “21 of the 58 members of the current Illinois state senate are licensed insurance brokers, agents, or both, as are 40 of the 174 members of the house. An estimated two dozen more legislators have other direct ties to the industry, serving as officers or directors of insurance companies or representing them as lawyers.” A recent head count by Illinois NOW workers turned up the news that as a high proportion of anti-ERA votes in the state Senate, where the amendment is currently stalled, were cast by people with insurance ties. Report from other states are pointing in the same direction.

The fact that the insurance industry is state-regulated suggests not only that it might be more directly and quickly affected than other industries by the overhaul of state laws that the ERA will provoke—closer review of discriminatory practices is occurring in any case as a result of feminist lobbying. It suggests also that because the industry is set up to exercise its influence on the state level it would be an ideal mechanism through which other industries whose lobbying habits and operations are national in scope could contribute to forestalling the ERA.

Costs of Equality

Why would they want to? What is the motive? The answer is simple enough. The economic consequences to industry as a whole of the genuine equality for women implied by the Equal Rights Amendment are enormous. More people who bill themselves as “knowledgeable” about the ERA will disagree with this proposition than agree with it. They argue that it is not so, that the ERA will have no effect on employment whatsoever, that it will not increase the impact of existing legislation such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. This view is technically correct. The ERA will regulate state action; existing legislation applies to corporate behavior.

In my opinion, however, it is far too literal in interpretation. Existing legislation encourages women with ambitions or grievances to seek redress for discrimination in pay scales or job classifications; the ERA presages a change in the character of the work force. The first involves direct discrimination by companies and its redress the second, a change in the sexual division of labor in the economy as a whole. The ERA is by far the more fundamental because, by undermining the present allocation of social and sexual roles, it would begin to eliminate the discrepancies between male and female work patterns (e.g., number of hours worked per week, number of years at the same job) which now contribute substantially to the lower incomes and generally inferior economic position of women. Compensation for simple discrimination has been costly enough to industry. The total financial package engineered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its case against AT&T was approximately $100 million. The settlement anticipated in a little-publicized but highly significant case against Sears brought at the instigation of NOW is in the neighborhood of $75 million. Yet these settlements and others, massive enough from the point of view of even the giant corporations involved to leave them conniving in Washington for the destruction of the EEOC, are small compared to the costs of equality.

The following figures, for which I spent days searching, are not available from government or industry sources. They were finally calculated for this article by a private economist. If in 1970 women who worked had earned the same amount per hour as men who worked, it would have cost employers an additional $96 billion in payroll alone. That figure assumes that women and men are working at comparable jobs and receiving equal pay, but it does not include equalizing their hours. If women had earned the same number of hours, the addition to the payroll would have been $303 billion. In the second case, presumably, the product would have been increased substantially as well, so the $303 billion does not represent sheer loss to employers, but the significance of the figures, I think, is plain enough. The Equal Rights Amendment and the traditional role of women in the capitalist economy are incompatible.

It was not until after the passage of suffrage, in the course of Congressional investigations into a number of industries for other reasons, that the facts concerning business contributions to the anti suffrage forces came to light. Swift & Company, the meat packers, “were shown to have made secret contributions to the ‘antis,’” Flexner says, secret because they realized that eventually woman suffrage would sweep the country. And not only the meat packers. Also, among others, banks, municipal transit authorities, the Gulf Refining Company, the Santa Fé and other railroads, American Express, the Southeastern States Portland Cement Company, and a spurious “National Famers Union,” part of whose funds, it developed, came from some of the above.

Why? Business can have the densest, most general reasons, mere preference for predictability over uncertainty. Sometimes corporations act simply to hedge their bets. To prove the connection between business and anti-ERA activity, the only document I have on my desk is a petition from the Illinois Small Business Men’s Association to the state legislature attacking the antifamily, anti children, pro-abortion, lesbian and socialistic forces behind the amendment. But I submit that larger interests are also at work. Given what they have to lose or gain from the outcome, if large corporations are not trying to undermine the Equal Rights Amendment by financing its opposition, I should think their stockholders might be wondering why.

Part II

The funding of the opposition is important for what it reveals about some of the ramifications of sexual equality that are often obscured, but concentrating on it can be misleading. It tells us only who is paying for the placards, not who is carrying them. It des not explain the embarrassing facts that it is the anti-ERA groups who are seeking popular referenda, the pro-ERA forces who oppose them. How could the proposition that women are the legal equals of men come to be so unpopular that our strategy must involved keeping it from the people?

It is true, as others have noted, that the distortions of the meaning of ERA by its opponents, the economic depression, the ethical collapse of the American government at home, and its insecure position abroad, all contribute to personal conservatism if not downright timidity on the intimate questions of sexual and family life which the ERA appears to raise. But it is also a fact that the Women’s Movement has failed to persuade the majority of non activist women that the Equal Rights Amendment is in their interest. Nearly every woman with whom I spoke in preparing this article mentioned unasked that she was for equal pay and equal rights. These spontaneous affirmations accord with the evidence of polls showing, for example, that 63 percent of Americans favor “most of the efforts to strengthen and change women’s status in society” as opposed to 42 percent five years ago. To say, in 1976, that one if not for equal rights is evidently like having said in 1776 that one preferred George III to George Washington. Nonetheless, many women identify the ERA with a feminist movement from which, taken as a whole, they are anxious to dissociate.

By far the most important reason for this, I should guess—and it is only a guess—lies in simple female demography. We are at approximately mid-point in a historic transition in the situation of American women. Roughly half work outside the home, but roughly half do not. Feminism outside the home may be a source of insight, inspiration and even opportunity. Inside the home it is likely to bring conflict. Feeling for and against the ERA is not precisely correlated with outside employment and there are, of course, housewives who support it; but the correlation is probably closer there than with any other single factor such as religion, party affiliation or class.

If housewives want to dissociate themselves from the ERA, the reasons should be obvious. For women who do not hold outside jobs, the family is the primary unit of experience. Their perception that the Equal Rights Amendment will function primarily to support individual advancement and in that way undermine present family relationships is likely to prove accurate. The fact that the effect will be subtle, long in developing, and only one of many social factors contributing to the same result will not persuade anyone with a stake in present arrangements not to help slow the process a bit if she can. At a time when so much is changing, the opportunity offered by the anti-ERA movement simply to say “No” appears to be satisfying. A peculiar historical evolution has left “conservatives” supporting protective units, the “radicals,” in effect, advocating the free market. Classical economists would smile more sweetly on the supporters of the ERA than on its opponents. But it is not useful to argue as if the ERA is primarily a matter either of political philosophy or of elementary justice, when it is so plainly linked with the changing material status of women which is also the source of feminism. When people support or oppose something as strongly as they do the Equal Rights Amendment, it is generally for what seems to them an immediate and practical reason.

Though the link in the public mind between the ERA and feminism is both inescapable and appropriate, attitudes toward the ERA are also affected by the question of “image” which clings to every issue in American politics today like a shadow to the figure which casts it. Lesbianism is perhaps only the most apparent sensitive association. Stereotypes about professional women and countercultural freaks are equally common. The Women’s Movement is seen as being composed on the one hand of well-bred, well-educated gray-flannel pant-suiters seeking to aggrandize themselves in banks, advertising agencies, magazines and universities, and on the other of braless bisexual Amazons who would rathe drive taxicabs (polishing off difficult fares with a well-placed karate chop) that nurture their illegitimate babies. Although many feminist groups, and individuals, have contributed to, as well as been hurt by, these perceptions, the organization around which the antagonism has settled is, of course, NOW.

National Organization for Women

The internal dissension over political direction which has afflicted NOW in recent years had too many facets for an outsider (and, no doubt, many insiders) to unravel accurately. At this writing the indications are that despite the intensity of some of the disputes, the organization itself has suffered no lasting damage. Its position as the leading national feminist organization appears to be in no jeopardy. Whether the impact of its internal transformations on the campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment is equally slight, however, is another question.

The fact of the matter is that NOW is not what it used to be. The age of its members has dropped considerably since its founding in 1966, in part because of the collapse of feminist organizations further to the left. The average member is now in her early twenties. How much age differences within the organization may account for the intensity of some of its recent conflicts is impossible to say. What is significant from the point of view of the ERA is that as NOW has gone in effect from professional woman to street fighter, a change personified, however crudely, in the difference between the presidency of Betty Friedan and that of Karen DeCrow, the respectability it used to confer on reforms it supported is no longer emanating. In fact, the reverse is true.

From the perspective of many more-or-less “mainstream” individuals and groups supporting the ERA, NOW has become part of the left. This is apparent both from the private conversations of individual ERA activitsts and from public acts. A pro-ERA rally scheduled for the state capitol of Springfield, Illinois, of last Oct. 29, for example, had to be postponed until the following week when the October date was also targeted by NOW for its strike day, “Alice Doesn’t,” because of the fear of pro-ERA legislators that the organization and the amendment would never subsequently be able to be pried apart. Since NOW was not only one of the chief forces behind the resurrection of the Equal Rights Amendment in the first place, but has been one of the most active national networks behind it, and since NOW chapters have been at the heart of pro-ERA work in many locations, to suggest that it is damaging the ERA has some of the heartbreaking quality of declaring it an unfit mother. Nonetheless, there is no getting around the fact that NOW’s very visibility as a supporter of the amendment has had negative as well as positive effects.

The Equal Rights Amendment has been affected as much by the relative indifference of some of its alleged supporters as by the active hostility of its opponents. This is particularly true of organized labor, which, despite its official endorsement, has not much used its influence either with state legislatures or with the electorate on the amendment’s behalf. There is not only residual doubt in many unions about the wisdom of undermining protective laws, there is also both old-fashioned and more subtle chauvinism, the first obvious, the second the fear that, as the economic situation worsens, competition between woman and men for scarce jobs will no longer automatically be resolved in favor of men. An organization of trade union workers called the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), formed in 1974, and an informal committee of female staff members of the major international unions have been attempting to persuade the AFL-CIO and the state labor councils to put muscle, and not just rhetoric, behind the ERA ratification movements. The results have varied from union to union and from state to state. But in almost no case has labor given the ERA the priority it would five to an issue of its own. The same is true of many individual politicians and of political bosses such as Chicago’s Mayor Daley. What they have given is nominal support; what they have withheld is the wink, blink or nod by which they signal their followers that they are actually serious.

What Is to Be Done?

What is to be done to prevent the Equal Rights Amendment from slipping back into another half-century in some Congressional file carton? Part of the answer lies in practical political organization. ERA activity up until now had been a miracle of self-education and spontaneity, but there have been so many groups and individuals at work in each state that the results have often been more confusing than effective and between states very little systematic effort at coordination has even been attempted. Numerous occasions have been reported in which people seeking pro-ERA material have been unable to locate a good source. ERA veterans in states where the opposition has been prolonged have been unable to share their experiences with workers in states which ratified quickly and which now are not well prepared to fight rescission. Had convenient forms of interstate consultation been available, the debacles in New York and New Jersey might have been less likely to occur.

An increasing awareness of the need for a unified national organization to carry the ratification drive to its conclusion has led a wide spectrum of organizations which have benefited from active on behalf of the ERA (including the League of Women Voters, the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Common Cause, NOW, the American Association of University Women and church and labor groups) to join in creation of a new single purpose organization to lead the fight in the remaining years. Since ERAmerica, as it is called, is barely under way and, as I write, its precise structure and goals have not been announced, it is difficult to say much about it other than that it is envisaged as a high-powered, professional run, bipartisan political campaign organization at an altogether different managerial level from the local, especially voluntary, groups and individuals which have done most of the work so far.

On the question of how to proceed, the backers of the new organization appear to have almost no differences of opinion. Summarized briefly: The target yet is 1977, the method is electoral and the key states are Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma (with both Nevada and Virginia thought to have a good chance at possibly earlier passage), four of which, at least, must ratify before March 1979 when the time limit provided by Congress runs out. The prevailing opinion is that rescission is unconstitutional and that the states which have voted to rescind will be counted as having ratified, unless unfavorably political conditions result in a successful challenge to the standing legal precedent. In several states, passage or rejection depends on a small number of votes in one or the other house. The word is: secure the vote of change the occupant of the seat. What the effect of ERAmerica on existing precinct-by precinct operations will be, and to what extend the new organization will actually supplant old ones are questions it is not possible to answer now. But everyone who has been involved appears to agree that without a more deliberate effort to bring national resources to bear on the remaining local struggles, the ratification movement will surely founder.

The role of the organization, however, can be exaggerated. The spirit in which we approach the remaining work is also important. Where there have been conflicts in the past, supporters of the amendment might try to remember that it is possible to get behind it for a number of different reasons. The new organization, because of its centralization and professionalization, may well provoke either cynicism or a sense of loss. But working together does not require obliterating the differences between points of view. On the contrary it requires articulating them even more sharply while explaining why they each lead to the ERA’s endorsement.

With regard to women who are opposed to the ERA, it will help to remember that everything is more complicated than we realize. Neither side can predict its consequences with the certainty it pretends. None of us sees our position in society as clearly as we think we do. We do not have to spend out time answering the petty charges of the opposition, but the serious issues thy raise deserve to be met and explored, not attributed to conspiracies or belittled. Neither the pro- nor the anti-ERA forces have yet had enough to say about the underlying factors which affect the female population. It is rather that we have struck different attitudes toward them, “we” seeking our security in equality, “they” in protection. The limited legislative gains the anti-ERA forces insist they are not for safe. Nothing had changed the fact that women are pushed around the economy like children on a  swing, having babies when those who hire and fire want us to have babies, back at work when they need us on the job, Rosie the Riveter one moment, Betty Crocker the next. Contrary to the impression generated by the national news media for whom the struggle over the ERA is little more than an updated version of two broads in a brawl, opinion about it has not altogether solidified. There is room for conversation, study, persuasion.

Finally, we should try to remember that, vital as it is, the Equal Rights Amendment is not an end in itself, only a means, only an additional rung in a climb up a long ladder. Our knowledge of the fluctuation in women’s situation since the end of World War II should make us understand its necessity. The effects of an amendment are not fully knowable, nor is the Constitution inviolable, but it has more durability than either legislation or fads. Before it became a fight, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment would have been merely a gift. It if is achieved now, acknowledging what we are beginning to understand about the opposition, about ourselves and about some of the ambiguities of history, it will be a mature victory.