February 10, 2020 • 40 mins
The first version of the equal right amendment was first proposed almost 100 years ago. This amendment has been through cycles of support and opposition, but one thing that’s held true is that the loudest voices on both sides have been women.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
In January of this year, which is if you're listening
to old back episodes at some point in the future,
(00:23):
Virginia became the thirty eight state to ratify the Equal
Rights Amendment, and that's the number of states that are
needed to add that amendment to the US Constitution. So
as of when we're recording this, that's really recent news.
But the effort to add this amendment or one like
it to the Constitution has been going on for a
really long time. A different version of it was first
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proposed almost a hundred years ago, and it was reintroduced
in every congressional session between n and nineteen seventy two.
I found this amazing statistic that about ten percent of
the Constitution amendments that have been proposed in Congress have
been the Equal Rights Amendment or something related, and the
(01:07):
effort to get it ratified has gone on for almost
fifty years. Virginia became the thirty eight state to ratify
just a few weeks ago, but the deadline to do
that passed decades ago. This has just been lingering for
so long. This amendment has been through cycles of support
and opposition. But one thing that has held true is
that the loudest voices on both sides have been women.
(01:29):
So that's the story we're gonna tell today. The U.
S Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.
It sets up the framework for the nation's government, and
it also establishes a set of fundamental rights. The Constitution
also includes a process for how to make changes to it,
which is in Article five, unless two thirds of the
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states call for a constitutional convention. This starts in Congress
with proposed amendments, requiring two thirds of both the Senate
and the House of Representatives to vote in favor. After
getting that approval, amendments have to be ratified by three
quarters of the states. Most of the time, this also
happens through voting in the state legislatures, and it's only
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been not through voting one time, and that's when prohibition
was repealed. So getting two thirds of Congress and then
the legislatures of three quarters of the states to all
agree on something is pretty challenging, and that is on
purpose The framers of the Constitution recognized that it was
a work in progress and that the world changes, so
there needed to be a way to change the Constitution.
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But it had also taken a lot of work to
get the Constitution written and ratified in the first place,
and a lot of that negotiation was really built on
the idea that the next wave of legislators wouldn't be
able to just come in and rewrite the whole thing
on a whim. The framers also thought that if changes
to the Constitution were too frequent or too massive, it
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would lead to all kinds of social and economic and
political instability, and possibly just threatened the entire thing. As
of when we are recording this, the Constitution has twenty
seven amendments, and neither the main body of the Constitution
nor any of the amendments specify that U s citizens
have equal rights regardless of their sex. The Fourteenth Amendment,
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which was added after the Civil War, does include an
equal protection clause, which says that no state can quote
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws. But when the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted,
it rested on the assumption that there were two classes,
black and white, who should have equal protection into the laws.
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It has only been in relatively recent years that the
Supreme Court has interpreted the fourteenth Amendment as applying to
other races or ethnicities, or to sex or gender. The
effort to add an equal rights amendment to the Constitution
started just after the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment. That
amendment reads, quote, the right of citizens of the United
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States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation. The National Women's Party had been established in
the nineteen teens to fight for women's suffrage, including fighting
for this amendment, and then after the nineteenth Amendment was
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ratified on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty, the NWP turned
its attention toward a new amendment, and that was one
that would guarantee equal rights between the sexes in general,
not just for voting. Members of the n w P
proposed various wording and the version that was presented to
Congress in nineteen three was written primarily by Alice Paul
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and Crystal Eastman. They called it the Mott Amendment in
honor of Lucretia Mott. It was introduced by Senator Charles
Curtis and Representative Daniel Anthony Jr. Who was Susan B.
Anthony's nephew. A joint resolution on this was introduced on
December twenty three, and it read quote resolved by the
Senate and House of represent Senatives of the United States
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of America in Congress assembled two thirds of each House,
concurring therein that the following article is proposed as an
amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall
be valid to all intents and purposes as part of
the Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths
of the several States. Men and women shall have equal
rights throughout the United States and every place subject to
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its jurisdiction. Congress shall have the power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation. Introducing a joint resolution is just
the first step in the process of amending the Constitution.
A joint resolution is a bill, and before a bill
gets voted on, it goes to a committee which can
research the matter, discuss and make changes. The committee can
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then send the revised bill to the House or the
Senate for further debate and discussion, or they can send
it to a subcommittee for yet more research. It's only
after both the House and the Senate that have actually
debated and voted on the joint resolution and passed it
by a two thirds majority that it goes to the
states for ratification. So when Senator Curtis and Representative Anthony
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introduced the Joint Resolution on the Equal Rights Amendment in
it was not voted on or sent to the states
for ratification at that time. It went to the House
and Senate judiciary committees, and it stayed there. It's easy
to imagine that what happened next was almost fifty years
of bogged down bureaucracy or legislative foot dragging over what
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seems like a pretty basic question of whether citizens of
the United States have equal rights regardless of their sex.
But really, the women's movement was divided over this amendment.
Legislators were hearing from constituents who opposed this amendment before
it was even introduced, and a lot of that opposition
came from women. We're gonna talk about this more after
we pause for a sponsor break. It's a little early
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in the show for a break. We now we want
to keep all this part together. Throughout the history of
the Equal Rights Amendment, some of its support and opposition
has been connected to the idea of what a woman
is supposed to be and really broad strokes. People who
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have believed that a woman's places at the home being
a wife and a mother, they've been more likely to
oppose the amendment, while people who believe that a woman
should be able to pursue any vocation that she chooses,
they've been more likely to support the amendment. But regardless
of whether those opinions have been rooted in religion or biology,
or in some other factor, it has never been only
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about this kind of ideology. In the beginning, a lot
of women's opposition to the amendment was because of labor
rights and specific rights that women were afraid they were
going to lose if the amendment passed. Between about eighteen
nine and ninety, working women had lobbied for and one
a number of workplace protections in many states. This included
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minimum age laws, maximum our laws, and laws prohibiting women
from being assigned to overnight shifts or dangerous work. These
laws applied to women only. Men were not perceived as
needing this kind of protection, and the US Supreme Court
had issued decisions supporting the idea that these kind of
laws were constitutional. For example, there was its nineteen o
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eight ruling in Mueller versus Oregon, and Oregon at the time,
it was illegal for women working in factories to have
a work day that was longer than ten hours. Kurt Muller,
who owned a laundry business, was fined when he violated
that law, and he took them out of court. The
question before the Supreme Court was whether Oregon's law violated
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the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection claws, and the court's opinion
was that no, it did not. Because women could bear
children and were socially expected to raise and care for
those children, it was within the state's interest to limit
their hours at work. I do to point out that
not every woman can or does want to bear children
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and raise them, but like that was the court's argument.
Labor reformers thought correctly that if the mom Amendment were
added to the Constitution, these types of laws would be abolished,
stripping women of protections that they had worked to secure.
And the women most likely to be affected didn't feel
like the national Women's Party was listening to or understanding
their concerns about that. In the words of Melinda Scott
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of United Textile Workers, the nw P quote does not
know what it is to work ten or twelve hours
a day in a factory, so they do not know
what it means to lose an eight hour day or
a nine hour day. Law the working women do know. Conversely,
a lot of members of the NWP were pretty affluent,
highly educated women, most of them were white. Many either
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worked in more prestigious fields or didn't need to work
at all. Alice Paul was the daughter of a wealthy
businessman who had a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College. She
had a man master's degree from what's now Columbia University
and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Crystal Eastman
was the daughter of two ministers, and she'd gotten degrees
from Bassar and Columbia before getting a law degree from
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the New York University Law School. In the view of
the n WP and other supporters of the mot Amendment,
these protectionary laws were not really protecting women. They were
forcing women to stay in roles where they had to
have a man's support to survive. Women were kept out
of more lucrative work if it was perceived as dangerous.
They couldn't advance in the workplace because of the restrictions
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on their shifts and hours, and the very idea that
women needed protection through These kinds of laws reinforced the
idea that women were not as capable as men. Although
labor organizations were a big part of the opposition to
the mot amendment, women's legal protections also went beyond the workplace.
Most states had laws on the books that required a
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husband and father specifically to provide for his wife and children. Women,
not men, were entitled to alimony after a divorce, and
there were also concerns about what this amendment could mean
for men, that if employers couldn't pay women less, they
would have to pay men less in order to make
things equal. Here's how in nine pamphlet outlining arguments for
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and against the amendment summed all of this up. Arguments
for the amendment were written by Alice Paul, who wrote
that the amendment would be more inclusive, more permanent, and
more dignified than individual state legislation on the subject. She wrote, quote,
the amendment will win for all women equal control of
their children, equal control of their property, equal control of
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their earnings, equal right to make contracts, equal citizenship rights,
equal inheritance rights, equal control of national, state, and local government.
Equal opportunities in schools and universities, equal opportunities in government service,
equal opportunities in professions and industries, equal pay for equal work.
(12:00):
Arguments against the amendment in this brochure came from Benjamin
Loring Young of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He noted
that there were states that did need work in the
area of women's rights, but he objected to the Equal
Rights Amendment becoming the supreme law of the land. Quote.
Under the law in Massachusetts, women here have many rights
not accorded to men. The amendment would destroy these rights.
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It would level down as well as level up. The
legal obligation of the husband to support the wife would
be nullified. In the criminal statutes and divorce laws based
upon this right to support would no longer be enforced.
Our law does not contain any reciprocal provision compelling the
wife to support the husband. Such rights and obligations must
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be made identical under the theory of equal rights, or
they ceased to exist. Young went on to detail many
of the other protections that we have already mentioned before,
continuing quote, each woman as a potential mother must be
safeguarded against overstrain and not regard it merely as an
economic unit. More generally, he argued that the amendment would
raise quote thousands of difficult legal questions in every state,
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which would completely overwhelm the legal system. I like how
his statement objects to the idea of regarding women merely
as an economic unit, but really doesn't have a problem
regarding women as potential mothers and having that be like
the definition of the status. Well, that's because they he
was making the case that motherhood was more valuable, which
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is a choice that a dude is making. Um their problems. Yeah, So, anyway,
Aside from this debate about whether the amendment would really
make things better for women, there was also another thread
to this discussion among people who oppose the amendment, and
that was that the fight for women's suffrage was not
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really over yet. Although the nineteenth Amendment had not made
any distinctions based on race and practice, many states had
implement into discriminatory voting laws that made it far more
difficult for people of color to register to vote and
to exercise their right to vote, especially in the South,
Black women were still largely disenfranchised, and the same was
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true of Hispanic women in the West and Southwest. Asian
immigrants were not permitted to become citizens and consequently could
not vote. The connections between indigenous citizenship and tribal sovereignty
are complicated, but when the nineteenth Amendment was ratified, many
Indigenous women were not considered US citizens and didn't have
the right to vote either. So many women of color
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felt like it wasn't yet time for the women's movement
to turn its attention to another issue rather than making
sure all women could access their right to vote. After
that first introduction in nine the My Amendment was reintroduced
that every legislative session. For the most part, it did
not make it out of committee, and it was not
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actually voted on for the next two decades. In general,
trade unions, including the United Automobile Workers and the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union opposed or refused to endorse the bill.
So did the National Consumers League, the National Council of
Jewish Women, and the National Council of Negro Women, among others. Meanwhile,
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professional associations of women dentists, lawyers, business professionals, and others
endorsed the amendment. Then in President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
the Fair Labor Standards Act into law. This legislation grew
out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. It
was much smaller in scope than it is today, but
it established a minimum wage and overtime pay, as well
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as banning child labor in industries that practiced interstate commerce.
At this point, opposition to the mot Amendment in organized
labor started to wane, as the types of workplace protections
that had been applied only to women were now at
least starting to be applied to everyone. Yeah, the first
version of the Fair Labor Standards Act only applied to
thing like a fifth of all workers, but it was
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still like a starting point. In nineteen forty the Republican
Party's platform included this quote, we favor submission by Congress
to the States of an amendment to the Constitution providing
for equal rights for men and women. The Democratic Party
followed suit in nineteen forty four with the addition of quote,
we recommend to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment
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on equal rights for women. Both parties had some kind
of statements supporting an amendment for equal rights regardless of
sex or specifically equal rights for women in their platforms
for the next few decades. Also in the forties, President
Harry Truman became the first of seven consecutive presidents to
endorse the idea of an equal rights amendment. In nineteen
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forty three, the Mott Amendment was revised to reflect language
of other existing constitutional amendments. Now known as the Alice
Paul Amendment, it read quote equality of rights under the
Law shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of sex. For
the first time, that Alice Pauliamenment came to a vote,
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but failed in nineteen forty six. There was another attempt
to pass it in nineteen fifty with various writers being
added on that we're supposed to exempt the protective laws
that we talked about that protected women in the workplace,
and we're still on the books. But that effort also failed.
But the amendment kept being introduced year after year. Things
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shifted once again in the nineteen sixties, and we're going
to get into that after we pause for a sponsor
break between the first introduction of the amendment and the
nineteen sixties, the United States had been through two World
wars and the Great Depression. Throughout that there had been
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ongoing shifts and what was considered acceptable for women. Then
in nineteen sixty three, President John F. Kennedy signed the
Equal Pay Act of nineteen sixty three. That was an
amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it made
it illegal to pay men and women different wages if
their jobs had quote equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and
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which are performed under similar working conditions. In nineteen sixty four,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
It outlawed racial segregation in businesses like restaurants and movie theaters,
and it also outlawed employment discrimination due to race, color, religion, sex,
or national origin. Ironically, opponents to the Act had added
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sex to that list with the hopes that it would
cause it to fail. Combined with the Fair Labor Standards Act,
these two pieces of legislation largely removed labor organizers objections
to the Equal Rights Amendment. It either gave everybody the
same protections, or it already made the protections they were
trying to keep illegal like that was done now. At
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about the same time, the women's liberation movement was growing
in the United States. In nineteen sixty three, Betty Freed
Dan published her best selling book, The Feminine Mystique, and
in nineteen sixty six she became one of the co
founders of the National Organization for Women or Now Now,
and others in the women's liberation movement started advocating for
the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was still
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being introduced in Congress every session. Then Representative Martha Griffiths,
a Democrat from Michigan, finally broke the ongoing cycle of
the Equal Rights Amendments introduction and getting stuck in committee.
She filed a discharge petition, which is a way of
forcing installed bill out of committee and onto the House
floor for debate and voting. It's not used very often
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because it requires someone together signatures from two hundred and
eighteen of the four hundred thirty five members of the
House of Representatives. Griffiths did this in nineteen seventy. The
House debated and passed the Equal Rights Amendment on August nine, seventy,
but this time the amendment did not make it out
of the Senate. Senators wanted to add some kind of
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a clause would exempt women from the military draft, and
the scot bogged down in committee again, so Griffiths reintroduced
the amendment again in the next session. It passed the
House on October twelfth, nine seventy one, with a vote
of three hundred fifty four to twenty three, and the
Senate on March twenty two, nineteen seventy two, with a
vote of eighty four to eight. It read Section one,
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Equality of rights under the Law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State
on account of sex. Section two, the Congress shall have
the power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of
this article. In Section three, this Amendment shall take effect
two years after the date of ratification. Congress gave the
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states seven years to ratify the bill. Hawaii was the
first to do it on March twenty two of nineteen
seventy two. Within nine months, twenty two of the required
thirty eight states had ratified the amendment. In nineteen seventy three,
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations or
a f l c i O endorsed it. By the
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end of nineteen seventy four, thirty three states had ratified
the amendment, with only five left to go. According to
Gallup polls, about three quarters of Americans supported the amendment,
so with just five states and five years left, it
seemed like a short thing. However, a vocal backlash against
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the amendment had been developing, which was tied in to
an overall conservative movement in the United States. Some of
the opposition to the amendment was connected to abortion rights.
In nineteen seventy three, the Supreme Court had issued its
decision in Row versus Wade, saying that the Fourteenth Amendments
Due Process clause included a fundamental right to privacy and
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that the right to privacy extended to the decision to
terminate a pregnancy. Opponents worried that the Equal Rights Amendment
could expand access to abortion and make it impossible for
the Court to overturn Roe versus Wade in the future.
Opponents to the e r A also worried that it
would force women to register for the draft and serve
in combat, something that was very high on people's minds
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given the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. Much,
but not all, of the opposition to the Equal Rights
Amendment came from religious groups. Members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints were incredibly active and
campaigning against the amendment. At the time, roughly half of
church members lived in just three states. Those were Utah, Nevada,
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and Idaho. Idaho had already ratified the amendment by the
time the church took a public stance on the amendment,
but voted to repeal its ratification afterward. Utah and Nevada
did not ratify the amendment. There were also about twenty
six thousand church members living in Virginia, mostly in the
suburbs of Washington, d C. And they heavily lobbied their legislators.
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Virginia also did not ratify the amendment of or the deadline,
As had been the case in the earlier life of
the Equal Rights Amendment, the most visible faces on both
sides were relatively affluent white women. In terms of the opposition,
that face was Philish Lafley, a conservative Roman Catholic from
Illinois who started a campaign called stop e r A
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in nine two that stood for stop taking Our Privileges
Equal Rights amendment. She later founded the conservative interest group
Eagle Forum. Schlafly described that the r A as anti
family and as something that would force women into co
ed situations when they didn't want to be. She described
it this way, quote, what I am defending is the
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real rights of women. A woman should have the right
to be in the home as a wife and mother.
The stop e r A campaign was incredibly strategic. Slowly
understood that she didn't really need to sway the entirety
of public opinion against the r A, and she didn't.
Gallop polls showed that more than half of respondents were
in favor of the ear A throughout the ratification period
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in the mid to late seventies. This included people who
described themselves as housewives and conservatives. Instead, slowfully focused on
getting just enough legislators to either vote against ratification or
to stall the vote until after the deadline in states
that had not yet ratified. To do this, she and
other activists lobbied legislators directly. They went to state capitals,
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wearing dresses and aprons and giving legislators homemade bread with
slogans like preserve us from a Congressional jam. Vote against
the e r A sham or from the breadmaker to
the bread winner. They also stoked fears of what could
happen if the e r A was passed. In addition
to the idea of unrestricted abortions and women being drafted,
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there was same sex marriage and the idea that the
government would force the Catholic Church to allow women to
be priests. And there was a lot of talk about
how the e r A was going to lead to
unisex bathroom which was summed up as the potty problem.
In nineteen seventy six, realizing that Schlafley's campaign was very effective,
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Republican Ella macmillan and Democrat Liz Carpenter formed e R
America that's e r A and then America minus the
initial A to try to counteract it. Now was still
fighting for ratification as well, including organizing a boycott of
the non ratifying states. In nineteen seventy seven, the National
Women's Conference was held in Houston, Texas. This was a
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congressionally funded conference that was attended by more than one
thirty thousand people, including two thousand state delegates, with a
goal of formulating a plan to move the nation towards
gender equality. That plan would then be presented to Congress
and the President. Delegates created a plan of action that
had twenty six planks. Some of them were child abuse prevention,
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low cost childcare, enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act,
support for roverse Is Wade legislation to end discrimination based
on sexual preference to use the language of the plank.
At the time, and ratification of the e r A,
Sloftly held a counter rally in Houston that she described
as pro family. At the same time, that rally issued
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its own resolution against lesbian rights, abortion rights, and the
e r A. At this point, the ratification process had
completely stalled. On March ninth, ninety eight, Congress passed a
three year extension of the deadline for ratification. On March
twenty two, nineteen seventy nine, Philish Sloftly through a gala
to celebrate the expiration of the original deadline. In nineteen eighty,
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the Republican Party dropped support for ratification of the Equal
Rights Amendment from its party platform. Ronald Reagan included his
opposition to the r A as part of his presidential
campaign and became the first president since Truman to oppose it.
Support for the e r A among the general public
reached its lowest point during that election year, dropping down
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to fifty two percent in favor, opposed and almost I
don't know. Support among conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and housewives dropped
below fifty for the first time during that nineteen presidential
campaign as well. Among states that had not ratified the amendment,
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support dropped down to forty eight point one percent in
favor thirty nine point five percent opposed, with the rest
I don't know. When the second deadline approached, the Equal
Rights Amendment was three states short of ratification. In addition, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky,
and South Dakota had all voted to rescind or otherwise
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canceled their ratifications in response to the stop e r
A campaign. The second deadline to ratify the Equal Rights
Amendment passed on June two. Phillis Schlaftley through another celebratory
gala with the band Ding Dong The Witches Dead, among
other selections. Republicans. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, who was
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in attendance, said quote, we have overcome one of the
most powerful propaganda campaigns in the history of politics. Legislators
started once again, reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment at every
congressional session. As all this was going on, the Supreme
Court had continued to issue rulings that interpreted the equal
protection and do process clauses that are in the Constitution
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and its amendments as relevant. One was Frontierro versus Richardson
in nineteen seventy three. Sharon Frontierro was a lieutenant in
the U. S. Air Force. Wives of military members were
automatically granted a housing allowance and medical care, but husbands
were not unless they were dependent on their wives. Frontierro
challenged this, and the Supreme Court found that the policy
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was unconstitutional. Three years later, the Court issued a decision
in Craig versus Born, Oklahoma. A law at the time
prohibited the sale of not intoxicating beer that is under
three point to alcohol to males under twenty one and
females under eighteen. Curtis Craig, who was male and between
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the ages of eighteen and twenty one, challenged this law
as unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court agreed. The Court issued
a ruling that also called for intermediate scrutiny and questions
of whether sex based discrimination was unconstitutional. This meant that
laws that treated the sexes differently had to be substantially
related to an important government interest, and that's been the
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standards since they made that ruling back in the seventies.
This is a lower standard of scrutiny than is required
for race based discrimination, but a higher standard than is
required for some other things, including discrimination based on age.
Some of these court cases had the exact same outcomes
that the opponents of the e r A said the
amendment would bring about. For example, in nineteen seventy nine,
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court heard the case of Or versus Or, in which
Lillian Or had sued her ex husband, William for non
payment of alimony. William Or had challenged this as unconstitutional
because Alabama, where they lived, required husbands to pay alimony
but not wives. The court agreed, ruling that quote classifications
by gender must serve important governmental objectives. In the court
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found Virginia Military Institute's male only admissions policy unconstitutional in
United States versus Virginia, and of course, in Obergefell versus Hodges,
in the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendments Equal
Protection Clause requires states to license marriages between people of
the same sex. The federal government was also continuing to
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pass laws that were related to equality regardless of sex
during the ratification period for the e r A. This
included Title nine, which is one of the Educational Amendments
of nineteen seventy two, which reads quote, no person in
the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be
excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or
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be subjected to discrimination, under any education program or activity
receiving federal financial assistance. In the nine nineties, NOW and
other organizations formulated the Three States Strategy, which combined an
effort to get three more states to ratify the Equal
Rights Amendment with proposed legislation to remove the earlier deadline.
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Since then, Nevada ratified the e r A on March in,
Illinois ratified it on mayen, and as we said at
the top of the show, Virginia did so earlier this year.
So that leaves some not entirely answered questions as of
when we are recording this, although a number of people
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will stridently insist that the questions are actually answered. There's
nothing in the Constitution about whether a state can rescind
its ratification of a constitutional Amendment as five states voted
to do with the e r A, and it's not
really totally clear whether it works if they vote to
do that. Ohio and New Jersey tried to rescind their
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ratification of the fourteenth Amendment, but they are still listed
as ratifiers in the amendment's official documentation. The Supreme Court
decided that this was a political question for Congress and
not a matter for the courts back in ninety nine.
There are also arguments about whether the deadline is really relevant.
The Supreme Court has previously ruled that it's not unconstitutional
(32:35):
for Congress to set such a deadline, but it's also
been noted that this deadline wasn't part of the amendment itself,
and it wouldn't be the first time that an old
constitutional amendment has been ratified and added to the Constitution.
Amendment adopted in nine reads quote, no law varying the
compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall
(32:58):
take effect until an election representatives shall have intervened. It
was part of the original Bill of Rights approved by
Congress in nine, but it was not ratified until. Like
the Equal Rights Amendment, it didn't have a deadline as
part of the text itself. Congress has tried to avoid
this problem with some other amendments by like having actually
(33:21):
in there in the text that there are seven years
or however many years to ratify the thing. So as
of this moment, we are kind of in limbo, with
one side considering the matter closed because the deadline passed,
and the other side arguing that the deadline does not
matter or proposing various legislation to change the deadline. The
(33:43):
Department of Justice issued a memo on this matter on
January six, which began, quote, Congress has constitutional authority to
impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment. It
exercised this authority when proposing the Equal Rights Amendment, and
because three four with the state legislatures did not ratify
before the deadline that Congress imposed, the Equal Rights Amendment
(34:06):
has failed adoption and is no longer pending before the states. Accordingly,
if one or more state legislatures were to ratify the
proposed amendment, it would not become part of the Constitution
and the archivists could not certify its adoption. But on
the other hand, the attorneys general of Virginia, Illinois, and Nevada,
(34:27):
the last three states to ratify the amendment, also filed
suit to have it added to the constitution on January.
We're recording this on February four, so it's not very new.
There are also still a lot of unanswered questions about
what the e r A would mean in practice if
it were to become the next constitutional amendment, including things
(34:51):
like whether it would apply to laws around things like
physiology like breastfeeding or menstruation, whether it would make government
program like Special Supplemental Nutrition program for women, infants and children,
which is wick whether it would make those kinds of
programs unconstitutional, or whether the language on account of sex
would mean that the amendment applies to intersex, non binary,
(35:13):
and transgender people. That's where we are on the on
the Equal Rights Amendment. It's one of those things that
really fascinates me because as this has dragged out for
a hundred years, the world has changed so much, and
it has changed some to reflect that. But as you
said right there at the conclusion, there's a whole other
(35:34):
raft of elements that need to be addressed and considered,
and it's it's like the slowness has made this trickier
than it would have been safe fifty years ago, right,
I think, um, if it had been ratified back in
the seventies, it would have gone through a similar trajectory
(35:54):
to the Fourteenth Amendment, where probably the Supreme Court back
in the seventies would have heard cases that were about
uh discrimination that was not specifically against women or men,
but was against us like an intersex person or a
trans person. I'm not saying that trans person are neither
(36:15):
men nor women, but like the courts I think would
have moved from like a binary this is about men
and women reading of the law, are reading of the
amendment like into a more broad reading of amendment the
amendment similarly to how the fourteenth Amendment went from being
two classes black and white to applying to all this
other stuff. But like now that it has been fifty
(36:37):
something years almost since it was sent to the States
for ratification, and it was not ratified during that time,
Like now those questions are surrounding it even though like
it hasn't actually been added to the Constitution at this point. Yeah. Also,
it it's a story that frustrates me of it because
(36:58):
like the a bit is an understatement because it passed
Congress with overwhelming majorities, and then it was clearly on
track to pass among the states and had among the
general population the majority or at least a plurality in
favor of it through all that time, UM, and then
(37:19):
got derailed by what was clearly like a very vocal
minority opposition to it. Anyway, we'll probably talk more about
that behind the scenes. Uh, do you have a listener
mail for us in the meantime? This is from Megan
and Megan wrote after hour behind the scenes episode on
Lord Elgin in the Parthenon Marble's in which I expressed
(37:43):
the number of opinions and was UM just a little
worried about whether those opinions were going to garner me
a lot of angry email. Uh, and Megan did not
send angry email. Just to be totally upfront about that,
Megan says, I do have a lot of opinions and
certainly share yours, But the thing that struck me was
the comment about museums not taking into consideration the cultures
(38:04):
whose items are being displayed. I work in the arts
for an orchestra, and we've started learning and adopting the
practices of of by for all. To boil it down,
very simply. It's a movement whose focus is to help
organizations work within the communities they are trying to attract.
The founder worked in a museum that had for years
held a Day of the Dead event in a community
(38:26):
with a strong Latino presence, but only white people attended
the event in question. Now it is something driven and
involving the Latino community because the museum started talking to
people instead of throwing the event for them and expecting
them to show up. If you have a chance, watch
one founder Nina Simon's talks. Megan then sent a link
to a video. I have a feeling you will agree
(38:48):
with your point of view. We have a lot of
discussions in the orchestral world about appropriation and how whitewashed
classical music history is. The orchestra I work with is
focusing on working with different communities to find out how
we can best collaborate and feel ownership in their local orchestra.
Music is for everyone, not just old white people. I
could go on forever, but I will stop myself now.
(39:09):
I very much enjoy your podcast. Thank you for all
your hard work putting these excellent episodes together. I didn't
realize how much I enjoyed learning about history until I
started listening to you all the best. Megan. UM, I've
said Megan this whole time. Megan may say it. Megan,
I apologize if I got it wrong. UM. Megan also
let us know that our Facebook page had our old
email address on it, so I want to fix that. UH.
(39:30):
So thank you so much, Megan for this email. The
video that this email included the link to I only
have had the chance to watch about the first twenty
minutes of UM. We don't have a great way on
our website right now to share links for things, but
if you google Nina Simon of Buy for All, UH,
it will take you to it really quickly. And it
(39:50):
is very interesting because she she starts off talking about
coming into a museum that was really really struggling, UM
and having to turn that around and having to figure
out how to actually connect with the community that they
were located in, which is really super interesting. So thank
you so much for this email. If you would like
to write to us about this, there any other podcast
or history podcasts at I heart radio dot com. And
(40:12):
then we're all over social media as miss in History.
That's where you'll find off Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
You can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, i
Heeart Radio app, anywhere else you want to get your podcasts,
and thanks for listening. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(40:32):
is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
In January of this year, which is if you're listening
to old back episodes at some point in the future,
(00:23):
Virginia became the thirty eight state to ratify the Equal
Rights Amendment, and that's the number of states that are
needed to add that amendment to the US Constitution. So
as of when we're recording this, that's really recent news.
But the effort to add this amendment or one like
it to the Constitution has been going on for a
really long time. A different version of it was first
(00:46):
proposed almost a hundred years ago, and it was reintroduced
in every congressional session between n and nineteen seventy two.
I found this amazing statistic that about ten percent of
the Constitution amendments that have been proposed in Congress have
been the Equal Rights Amendment or something related, and the
(01:07):
effort to get it ratified has gone on for almost
fifty years. Virginia became the thirty eight state to ratify
just a few weeks ago, but the deadline to do
that passed decades ago. This has just been lingering for
so long. This amendment has been through cycles of support
and opposition. But one thing that has held true is
that the loudest voices on both sides have been women.
(01:29):
So that's the story we're gonna tell today. The U.
S Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.
It sets up the framework for the nation's government, and
it also establishes a set of fundamental rights. The Constitution
also includes a process for how to make changes to it,
which is in Article five, unless two thirds of the
(01:49):
states call for a constitutional convention. This starts in Congress
with proposed amendments, requiring two thirds of both the Senate
and the House of Representatives to vote in favor. After
getting that approval, amendments have to be ratified by three
quarters of the states. Most of the time, this also
happens through voting in the state legislatures, and it's only
(02:10):
been not through voting one time, and that's when prohibition
was repealed. So getting two thirds of Congress and then
the legislatures of three quarters of the states to all
agree on something is pretty challenging, and that is on
purpose The framers of the Constitution recognized that it was
a work in progress and that the world changes, so
there needed to be a way to change the Constitution.
(02:33):
But it had also taken a lot of work to
get the Constitution written and ratified in the first place,
and a lot of that negotiation was really built on
the idea that the next wave of legislators wouldn't be
able to just come in and rewrite the whole thing
on a whim. The framers also thought that if changes
to the Constitution were too frequent or too massive, it
(02:56):
would lead to all kinds of social and economic and
political instability, and possibly just threatened the entire thing. As
of when we are recording this, the Constitution has twenty
seven amendments, and neither the main body of the Constitution
nor any of the amendments specify that U s citizens
have equal rights regardless of their sex. The Fourteenth Amendment,
(03:18):
which was added after the Civil War, does include an
equal protection clause, which says that no state can quote
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws. But when the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted,
it rested on the assumption that there were two classes,
black and white, who should have equal protection into the laws.
(03:38):
It has only been in relatively recent years that the
Supreme Court has interpreted the fourteenth Amendment as applying to
other races or ethnicities, or to sex or gender. The
effort to add an equal rights amendment to the Constitution
started just after the ratification of the nineteenth Amendment. That
amendment reads, quote, the right of citizens of the United
(03:58):
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation. The National Women's Party had been established in
the nineteen teens to fight for women's suffrage, including fighting
for this amendment, and then after the nineteenth Amendment was
(04:19):
ratified on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty, the NWP turned
its attention toward a new amendment, and that was one
that would guarantee equal rights between the sexes in general,
not just for voting. Members of the n w P
proposed various wording and the version that was presented to
Congress in nineteen three was written primarily by Alice Paul
(04:39):
and Crystal Eastman. They called it the Mott Amendment in
honor of Lucretia Mott. It was introduced by Senator Charles
Curtis and Representative Daniel Anthony Jr. Who was Susan B.
Anthony's nephew. A joint resolution on this was introduced on
December twenty three, and it read quote resolved by the
Senate and House of represent Senatives of the United States
(05:01):
of America in Congress assembled two thirds of each House,
concurring therein that the following article is proposed as an
amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall
be valid to all intents and purposes as part of
the Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths
of the several States. Men and women shall have equal
rights throughout the United States and every place subject to
(05:24):
its jurisdiction. Congress shall have the power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation. Introducing a joint resolution is just
the first step in the process of amending the Constitution.
A joint resolution is a bill, and before a bill
gets voted on, it goes to a committee which can
research the matter, discuss and make changes. The committee can
(05:46):
then send the revised bill to the House or the
Senate for further debate and discussion, or they can send
it to a subcommittee for yet more research. It's only
after both the House and the Senate that have actually
debated and voted on the joint resolution and passed it
by a two thirds majority that it goes to the
states for ratification. So when Senator Curtis and Representative Anthony
(06:09):
introduced the Joint Resolution on the Equal Rights Amendment in
it was not voted on or sent to the states
for ratification at that time. It went to the House
and Senate judiciary committees, and it stayed there. It's easy
to imagine that what happened next was almost fifty years
of bogged down bureaucracy or legislative foot dragging over what
(06:30):
seems like a pretty basic question of whether citizens of
the United States have equal rights regardless of their sex.
But really, the women's movement was divided over this amendment.
Legislators were hearing from constituents who opposed this amendment before
it was even introduced, and a lot of that opposition
came from women. We're gonna talk about this more after
we pause for a sponsor break. It's a little early
(06:52):
in the show for a break. We now we want
to keep all this part together. Throughout the history of
the Equal Rights Amendment, some of its support and opposition
has been connected to the idea of what a woman
is supposed to be and really broad strokes. People who
(07:15):
have believed that a woman's places at the home being
a wife and a mother, they've been more likely to
oppose the amendment, while people who believe that a woman
should be able to pursue any vocation that she chooses,
they've been more likely to support the amendment. But regardless
of whether those opinions have been rooted in religion or biology,
or in some other factor, it has never been only
(07:38):
about this kind of ideology. In the beginning, a lot
of women's opposition to the amendment was because of labor
rights and specific rights that women were afraid they were
going to lose if the amendment passed. Between about eighteen
nine and ninety, working women had lobbied for and one
a number of workplace protections in many states. This included
(07:59):
minimum age laws, maximum our laws, and laws prohibiting women
from being assigned to overnight shifts or dangerous work. These
laws applied to women only. Men were not perceived as
needing this kind of protection, and the US Supreme Court
had issued decisions supporting the idea that these kind of
laws were constitutional. For example, there was its nineteen o
(08:23):
eight ruling in Mueller versus Oregon, and Oregon at the time,
it was illegal for women working in factories to have
a work day that was longer than ten hours. Kurt Muller,
who owned a laundry business, was fined when he violated
that law, and he took them out of court. The
question before the Supreme Court was whether Oregon's law violated
(08:44):
the Fourteenth Amendments equal protection claws, and the court's opinion
was that no, it did not. Because women could bear
children and were socially expected to raise and care for
those children, it was within the state's interest to limit
their hours at work. I do to point out that
not every woman can or does want to bear children
(09:04):
and raise them, but like that was the court's argument.
Labor reformers thought correctly that if the mom Amendment were
added to the Constitution, these types of laws would be abolished,
stripping women of protections that they had worked to secure.
And the women most likely to be affected didn't feel
like the national Women's Party was listening to or understanding
their concerns about that. In the words of Melinda Scott
(09:27):
of United Textile Workers, the nw P quote does not
know what it is to work ten or twelve hours
a day in a factory, so they do not know
what it means to lose an eight hour day or
a nine hour day. Law the working women do know. Conversely,
a lot of members of the NWP were pretty affluent,
highly educated women, most of them were white. Many either
(09:49):
worked in more prestigious fields or didn't need to work
at all. Alice Paul was the daughter of a wealthy
businessman who had a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College. She
had a man master's degree from what's now Columbia University
and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Crystal Eastman
was the daughter of two ministers, and she'd gotten degrees
from Bassar and Columbia before getting a law degree from
(10:12):
the New York University Law School. In the view of
the n WP and other supporters of the mot Amendment,
these protectionary laws were not really protecting women. They were
forcing women to stay in roles where they had to
have a man's support to survive. Women were kept out
of more lucrative work if it was perceived as dangerous.
They couldn't advance in the workplace because of the restrictions
(10:34):
on their shifts and hours, and the very idea that
women needed protection through These kinds of laws reinforced the
idea that women were not as capable as men. Although
labor organizations were a big part of the opposition to
the mot amendment, women's legal protections also went beyond the workplace.
Most states had laws on the books that required a
(10:54):
husband and father specifically to provide for his wife and children. Women,
not men, were entitled to alimony after a divorce, and
there were also concerns about what this amendment could mean
for men, that if employers couldn't pay women less, they
would have to pay men less in order to make
things equal. Here's how in nine pamphlet outlining arguments for
(11:16):
and against the amendment summed all of this up. Arguments
for the amendment were written by Alice Paul, who wrote
that the amendment would be more inclusive, more permanent, and
more dignified than individual state legislation on the subject. She wrote, quote,
the amendment will win for all women equal control of
their children, equal control of their property, equal control of
(11:38):
their earnings, equal right to make contracts, equal citizenship rights,
equal inheritance rights, equal control of national, state, and local government.
Equal opportunities in schools and universities, equal opportunities in government service,
equal opportunities in professions and industries, equal pay for equal work.
(12:00):
Arguments against the amendment in this brochure came from Benjamin
Loring Young of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He noted
that there were states that did need work in the
area of women's rights, but he objected to the Equal
Rights Amendment becoming the supreme law of the land. Quote.
Under the law in Massachusetts, women here have many rights
not accorded to men. The amendment would destroy these rights.
(12:23):
It would level down as well as level up. The
legal obligation of the husband to support the wife would
be nullified. In the criminal statutes and divorce laws based
upon this right to support would no longer be enforced.
Our law does not contain any reciprocal provision compelling the
wife to support the husband. Such rights and obligations must
(12:44):
be made identical under the theory of equal rights, or
they ceased to exist. Young went on to detail many
of the other protections that we have already mentioned before,
continuing quote, each woman as a potential mother must be
safeguarded against overstrain and not regard it merely as an
economic unit. More generally, he argued that the amendment would
raise quote thousands of difficult legal questions in every state,
(13:08):
which would completely overwhelm the legal system. I like how
his statement objects to the idea of regarding women merely
as an economic unit, but really doesn't have a problem
regarding women as potential mothers and having that be like
the definition of the status. Well, that's because they he
was making the case that motherhood was more valuable, which
(13:31):
is a choice that a dude is making. Um their problems. Yeah, So, anyway,
Aside from this debate about whether the amendment would really
make things better for women, there was also another thread
to this discussion among people who oppose the amendment, and
that was that the fight for women's suffrage was not
(13:52):
really over yet. Although the nineteenth Amendment had not made
any distinctions based on race and practice, many states had
implement into discriminatory voting laws that made it far more
difficult for people of color to register to vote and
to exercise their right to vote, especially in the South,
Black women were still largely disenfranchised, and the same was
(14:13):
true of Hispanic women in the West and Southwest. Asian
immigrants were not permitted to become citizens and consequently could
not vote. The connections between indigenous citizenship and tribal sovereignty
are complicated, but when the nineteenth Amendment was ratified, many
Indigenous women were not considered US citizens and didn't have
the right to vote either. So many women of color
(14:35):
felt like it wasn't yet time for the women's movement
to turn its attention to another issue rather than making
sure all women could access their right to vote. After
that first introduction in nine the My Amendment was reintroduced
that every legislative session. For the most part, it did
not make it out of committee, and it was not
(14:55):
actually voted on for the next two decades. In general,
trade unions, including the United Automobile Workers and the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union opposed or refused to endorse the bill.
So did the National Consumers League, the National Council of
Jewish Women, and the National Council of Negro Women, among others. Meanwhile,
(15:16):
professional associations of women dentists, lawyers, business professionals, and others
endorsed the amendment. Then in President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
the Fair Labor Standards Act into law. This legislation grew
out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. It
was much smaller in scope than it is today, but
it established a minimum wage and overtime pay, as well
(15:40):
as banning child labor in industries that practiced interstate commerce.
At this point, opposition to the mot Amendment in organized
labor started to wane, as the types of workplace protections
that had been applied only to women were now at
least starting to be applied to everyone. Yeah, the first
version of the Fair Labor Standards Act only applied to
thing like a fifth of all workers, but it was
(16:02):
still like a starting point. In nineteen forty the Republican
Party's platform included this quote, we favor submission by Congress
to the States of an amendment to the Constitution providing
for equal rights for men and women. The Democratic Party
followed suit in nineteen forty four with the addition of quote,
we recommend to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment
(16:25):
on equal rights for women. Both parties had some kind
of statements supporting an amendment for equal rights regardless of
sex or specifically equal rights for women in their platforms
for the next few decades. Also in the forties, President
Harry Truman became the first of seven consecutive presidents to
endorse the idea of an equal rights amendment. In nineteen
(16:45):
forty three, the Mott Amendment was revised to reflect language
of other existing constitutional amendments. Now known as the Alice
Paul Amendment, it read quote equality of rights under the
Law shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of sex. For
the first time, that Alice Pauliamenment came to a vote,
(17:06):
but failed in nineteen forty six. There was another attempt
to pass it in nineteen fifty with various writers being
added on that we're supposed to exempt the protective laws
that we talked about that protected women in the workplace,
and we're still on the books. But that effort also failed.
But the amendment kept being introduced year after year. Things
(17:27):
shifted once again in the nineteen sixties, and we're going
to get into that after we pause for a sponsor
break between the first introduction of the amendment and the
nineteen sixties, the United States had been through two World
wars and the Great Depression. Throughout that there had been
(17:50):
ongoing shifts and what was considered acceptable for women. Then
in nineteen sixty three, President John F. Kennedy signed the
Equal Pay Act of nineteen sixty three. That was an
amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it made
it illegal to pay men and women different wages if
their jobs had quote equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and
(18:11):
which are performed under similar working conditions. In nineteen sixty four,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
It outlawed racial segregation in businesses like restaurants and movie theaters,
and it also outlawed employment discrimination due to race, color, religion, sex,
or national origin. Ironically, opponents to the Act had added
(18:33):
sex to that list with the hopes that it would
cause it to fail. Combined with the Fair Labor Standards Act,
these two pieces of legislation largely removed labor organizers objections
to the Equal Rights Amendment. It either gave everybody the
same protections, or it already made the protections they were
trying to keep illegal like that was done now. At
(18:54):
about the same time, the women's liberation movement was growing
in the United States. In nineteen sixty three, Betty Freed
Dan published her best selling book, The Feminine Mystique, and
in nineteen sixty six she became one of the co
founders of the National Organization for Women or Now Now,
and others in the women's liberation movement started advocating for
the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was still
(19:16):
being introduced in Congress every session. Then Representative Martha Griffiths,
a Democrat from Michigan, finally broke the ongoing cycle of
the Equal Rights Amendments introduction and getting stuck in committee.
She filed a discharge petition, which is a way of
forcing installed bill out of committee and onto the House
floor for debate and voting. It's not used very often
(19:39):
because it requires someone together signatures from two hundred and
eighteen of the four hundred thirty five members of the
House of Representatives. Griffiths did this in nineteen seventy. The
House debated and passed the Equal Rights Amendment on August nine, seventy,
but this time the amendment did not make it out
of the Senate. Senators wanted to add some kind of
(19:59):
a clause would exempt women from the military draft, and
the scot bogged down in committee again, so Griffiths reintroduced
the amendment again in the next session. It passed the
House on October twelfth, nine seventy one, with a vote
of three hundred fifty four to twenty three, and the
Senate on March twenty two, nineteen seventy two, with a
vote of eighty four to eight. It read Section one,
(20:22):
Equality of rights under the Law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State
on account of sex. Section two, the Congress shall have
the power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of
this article. In Section three, this Amendment shall take effect
two years after the date of ratification. Congress gave the
(20:44):
states seven years to ratify the bill. Hawaii was the
first to do it on March twenty two of nineteen
seventy two. Within nine months, twenty two of the required
thirty eight states had ratified the amendment. In nineteen seventy three,
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations or
a f l c i O endorsed it. By the
(21:07):
end of nineteen seventy four, thirty three states had ratified
the amendment, with only five left to go. According to
Gallup polls, about three quarters of Americans supported the amendment,
so with just five states and five years left, it
seemed like a short thing. However, a vocal backlash against
(21:28):
the amendment had been developing, which was tied in to
an overall conservative movement in the United States. Some of
the opposition to the amendment was connected to abortion rights.
In nineteen seventy three, the Supreme Court had issued its
decision in Row versus Wade, saying that the Fourteenth Amendments
Due Process clause included a fundamental right to privacy and
(21:49):
that the right to privacy extended to the decision to
terminate a pregnancy. Opponents worried that the Equal Rights Amendment
could expand access to abortion and make it impossible for
the Court to overturn Roe versus Wade in the future.
Opponents to the e r A also worried that it
would force women to register for the draft and serve
in combat, something that was very high on people's minds
(22:11):
given the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. Much,
but not all, of the opposition to the Equal Rights
Amendment came from religious groups. Members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints were incredibly active and
campaigning against the amendment. At the time, roughly half of
church members lived in just three states. Those were Utah, Nevada,
(22:33):
and Idaho. Idaho had already ratified the amendment by the
time the church took a public stance on the amendment,
but voted to repeal its ratification afterward. Utah and Nevada
did not ratify the amendment. There were also about twenty
six thousand church members living in Virginia, mostly in the
suburbs of Washington, d C. And they heavily lobbied their legislators.
(22:57):
Virginia also did not ratify the amendment of or the deadline,
As had been the case in the earlier life of
the Equal Rights Amendment, the most visible faces on both
sides were relatively affluent white women. In terms of the opposition,
that face was Philish Lafley, a conservative Roman Catholic from
Illinois who started a campaign called stop e r A
(23:18):
in nine two that stood for stop taking Our Privileges
Equal Rights amendment. She later founded the conservative interest group
Eagle Forum. Schlafly described that the r A as anti
family and as something that would force women into co
ed situations when they didn't want to be. She described
it this way, quote, what I am defending is the
(23:40):
real rights of women. A woman should have the right
to be in the home as a wife and mother.
The stop e r A campaign was incredibly strategic. Slowly
understood that she didn't really need to sway the entirety
of public opinion against the r A, and she didn't.
Gallop polls showed that more than half of respondents were
in favor of the ear A throughout the ratification period
(24:03):
in the mid to late seventies. This included people who
described themselves as housewives and conservatives. Instead, slowfully focused on
getting just enough legislators to either vote against ratification or
to stall the vote until after the deadline in states
that had not yet ratified. To do this, she and
other activists lobbied legislators directly. They went to state capitals,
(24:26):
wearing dresses and aprons and giving legislators homemade bread with
slogans like preserve us from a Congressional jam. Vote against
the e r A sham or from the breadmaker to
the bread winner. They also stoked fears of what could
happen if the e r A was passed. In addition
to the idea of unrestricted abortions and women being drafted,
(24:48):
there was same sex marriage and the idea that the
government would force the Catholic Church to allow women to
be priests. And there was a lot of talk about
how the e r A was going to lead to
unisex bathroom which was summed up as the potty problem.
In nineteen seventy six, realizing that Schlafley's campaign was very effective,
(25:08):
Republican Ella macmillan and Democrat Liz Carpenter formed e R
America that's e r A and then America minus the
initial A to try to counteract it. Now was still
fighting for ratification as well, including organizing a boycott of
the non ratifying states. In nineteen seventy seven, the National
Women's Conference was held in Houston, Texas. This was a
(25:31):
congressionally funded conference that was attended by more than one
thirty thousand people, including two thousand state delegates, with a
goal of formulating a plan to move the nation towards
gender equality. That plan would then be presented to Congress
and the President. Delegates created a plan of action that
had twenty six planks. Some of them were child abuse prevention,
(25:54):
low cost childcare, enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act,
support for roverse Is Wade legislation to end discrimination based
on sexual preference to use the language of the plank.
At the time, and ratification of the e r A,
Sloftly held a counter rally in Houston that she described
as pro family. At the same time, that rally issued
(26:17):
its own resolution against lesbian rights, abortion rights, and the
e r A. At this point, the ratification process had
completely stalled. On March ninth, ninety eight, Congress passed a
three year extension of the deadline for ratification. On March
twenty two, nineteen seventy nine, Philish Sloftly through a gala
to celebrate the expiration of the original deadline. In nineteen eighty,
(26:41):
the Republican Party dropped support for ratification of the Equal
Rights Amendment from its party platform. Ronald Reagan included his
opposition to the r A as part of his presidential
campaign and became the first president since Truman to oppose it.
Support for the e r A among the general public
reached its lowest point during that election year, dropping down
(27:03):
to fifty two percent in favor, opposed and almost I
don't know. Support among conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and housewives dropped
below fifty for the first time during that nineteen presidential
campaign as well. Among states that had not ratified the amendment,
(27:24):
support dropped down to forty eight point one percent in
favor thirty nine point five percent opposed, with the rest
I don't know. When the second deadline approached, the Equal
Rights Amendment was three states short of ratification. In addition, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky,
and South Dakota had all voted to rescind or otherwise
(27:45):
canceled their ratifications in response to the stop e r
A campaign. The second deadline to ratify the Equal Rights
Amendment passed on June two. Phillis Schlaftley through another celebratory
gala with the band Ding Dong The Witches Dead, among
other selections. Republicans. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, who was
(28:07):
in attendance, said quote, we have overcome one of the
most powerful propaganda campaigns in the history of politics. Legislators
started once again, reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment at every
congressional session. As all this was going on, the Supreme
Court had continued to issue rulings that interpreted the equal
protection and do process clauses that are in the Constitution
(28:30):
and its amendments as relevant. One was Frontierro versus Richardson
in nineteen seventy three. Sharon Frontierro was a lieutenant in
the U. S. Air Force. Wives of military members were
automatically granted a housing allowance and medical care, but husbands
were not unless they were dependent on their wives. Frontierro
challenged this, and the Supreme Court found that the policy
(28:53):
was unconstitutional. Three years later, the Court issued a decision
in Craig versus Born, Oklahoma. A law at the time
prohibited the sale of not intoxicating beer that is under
three point to alcohol to males under twenty one and
females under eighteen. Curtis Craig, who was male and between
(29:13):
the ages of eighteen and twenty one, challenged this law
as unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court agreed. The Court issued
a ruling that also called for intermediate scrutiny and questions
of whether sex based discrimination was unconstitutional. This meant that
laws that treated the sexes differently had to be substantially
related to an important government interest, and that's been the
(29:36):
standards since they made that ruling back in the seventies.
This is a lower standard of scrutiny than is required
for race based discrimination, but a higher standard than is
required for some other things, including discrimination based on age.
Some of these court cases had the exact same outcomes
that the opponents of the e r A said the
amendment would bring about. For example, in nineteen seventy nine,
(30:00):
court heard the case of Or versus Or, in which
Lillian Or had sued her ex husband, William for non
payment of alimony. William Or had challenged this as unconstitutional
because Alabama, where they lived, required husbands to pay alimony
but not wives. The court agreed, ruling that quote classifications
by gender must serve important governmental objectives. In the court
(30:25):
found Virginia Military Institute's male only admissions policy unconstitutional in
United States versus Virginia, and of course, in Obergefell versus Hodges,
in the Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendments Equal
Protection Clause requires states to license marriages between people of
the same sex. The federal government was also continuing to
(30:47):
pass laws that were related to equality regardless of sex
during the ratification period for the e r A. This
included Title nine, which is one of the Educational Amendments
of nineteen seventy two, which reads quote, no person in
the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be
excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or
(31:08):
be subjected to discrimination, under any education program or activity
receiving federal financial assistance. In the nine nineties, NOW and
other organizations formulated the Three States Strategy, which combined an
effort to get three more states to ratify the Equal
Rights Amendment with proposed legislation to remove the earlier deadline.
(31:29):
Since then, Nevada ratified the e r A on March in,
Illinois ratified it on mayen, and as we said at
the top of the show, Virginia did so earlier this year.
So that leaves some not entirely answered questions as of
when we are recording this, although a number of people
(31:49):
will stridently insist that the questions are actually answered. There's
nothing in the Constitution about whether a state can rescind
its ratification of a constitutional Amendment as five states voted
to do with the e r A, and it's not
really totally clear whether it works if they vote to
do that. Ohio and New Jersey tried to rescind their
(32:12):
ratification of the fourteenth Amendment, but they are still listed
as ratifiers in the amendment's official documentation. The Supreme Court
decided that this was a political question for Congress and
not a matter for the courts back in ninety nine.
There are also arguments about whether the deadline is really relevant.
The Supreme Court has previously ruled that it's not unconstitutional
(32:35):
for Congress to set such a deadline, but it's also
been noted that this deadline wasn't part of the amendment itself,
and it wouldn't be the first time that an old
constitutional amendment has been ratified and added to the Constitution.
Amendment adopted in nine reads quote, no law varying the
compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall
(32:58):
take effect until an election representatives shall have intervened. It
was part of the original Bill of Rights approved by
Congress in nine, but it was not ratified until. Like
the Equal Rights Amendment, it didn't have a deadline as
part of the text itself. Congress has tried to avoid
this problem with some other amendments by like having actually
(33:21):
in there in the text that there are seven years
or however many years to ratify the thing. So as
of this moment, we are kind of in limbo, with
one side considering the matter closed because the deadline passed,
and the other side arguing that the deadline does not
matter or proposing various legislation to change the deadline. The
(33:43):
Department of Justice issued a memo on this matter on
January six, which began, quote, Congress has constitutional authority to
impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment. It
exercised this authority when proposing the Equal Rights Amendment, and
because three four with the state legislatures did not ratify
before the deadline that Congress imposed, the Equal Rights Amendment
(34:06):
has failed adoption and is no longer pending before the states. Accordingly,
if one or more state legislatures were to ratify the
proposed amendment, it would not become part of the Constitution
and the archivists could not certify its adoption. But on
the other hand, the attorneys general of Virginia, Illinois, and Nevada,
(34:27):
the last three states to ratify the amendment, also filed
suit to have it added to the constitution on January.
We're recording this on February four, so it's not very new.
There are also still a lot of unanswered questions about
what the e r A would mean in practice if
it were to become the next constitutional amendment, including things
(34:51):
like whether it would apply to laws around things like
physiology like breastfeeding or menstruation, whether it would make government
program like Special Supplemental Nutrition program for women, infants and children,
which is wick whether it would make those kinds of
programs unconstitutional, or whether the language on account of sex
would mean that the amendment applies to intersex, non binary,
(35:13):
and transgender people. That's where we are on the on
the Equal Rights Amendment. It's one of those things that
really fascinates me because as this has dragged out for
a hundred years, the world has changed so much, and
it has changed some to reflect that. But as you
said right there at the conclusion, there's a whole other
(35:34):
raft of elements that need to be addressed and considered,
and it's it's like the slowness has made this trickier
than it would have been safe fifty years ago, right,
I think, um, if it had been ratified back in
the seventies, it would have gone through a similar trajectory
(35:54):
to the Fourteenth Amendment, where probably the Supreme Court back
in the seventies would have heard cases that were about
uh discrimination that was not specifically against women or men,
but was against us like an intersex person or a
trans person. I'm not saying that trans person are neither
(36:15):
men nor women, but like the courts I think would
have moved from like a binary this is about men
and women reading of the law, are reading of the
amendment like into a more broad reading of amendment the
amendment similarly to how the fourteenth Amendment went from being
two classes black and white to applying to all this
other stuff. But like now that it has been fifty
(36:37):
something years almost since it was sent to the States
for ratification, and it was not ratified during that time,
Like now those questions are surrounding it even though like
it hasn't actually been added to the Constitution at this point. Yeah. Also,
it it's a story that frustrates me of it because
(36:58):
like the a bit is an understatement because it passed
Congress with overwhelming majorities, and then it was clearly on
track to pass among the states and had among the
general population the majority or at least a plurality in
favor of it through all that time, UM, and then
(37:19):
got derailed by what was clearly like a very vocal
minority opposition to it. Anyway, we'll probably talk more about
that behind the scenes. Uh, do you have a listener
mail for us in the meantime? This is from Megan
and Megan wrote after hour behind the scenes episode on
Lord Elgin in the Parthenon Marble's in which I expressed
(37:43):
the number of opinions and was UM just a little
worried about whether those opinions were going to garner me
a lot of angry email. Uh, and Megan did not
send angry email. Just to be totally upfront about that,
Megan says, I do have a lot of opinions and
certainly share yours, But the thing that struck me was
the comment about museums not taking into consideration the cultures
(38:04):
whose items are being displayed. I work in the arts
for an orchestra, and we've started learning and adopting the
practices of of by for all. To boil it down,
very simply. It's a movement whose focus is to help
organizations work within the communities they are trying to attract.
The founder worked in a museum that had for years
held a Day of the Dead event in a community
(38:26):
with a strong Latino presence, but only white people attended
the event in question. Now it is something driven and
involving the Latino community because the museum started talking to
people instead of throwing the event for them and expecting
them to show up. If you have a chance, watch
one founder Nina Simon's talks. Megan then sent a link
to a video. I have a feeling you will agree
(38:48):
with your point of view. We have a lot of
discussions in the orchestral world about appropriation and how whitewashed
classical music history is. The orchestra I work with is
focusing on working with different communities to find out how
we can best collaborate and feel ownership in their local orchestra.
Music is for everyone, not just old white people. I
could go on forever, but I will stop myself now.
(39:09):
I very much enjoy your podcast. Thank you for all
your hard work putting these excellent episodes together. I didn't
realize how much I enjoyed learning about history until I
started listening to you all the best. Megan. UM, I've
said Megan this whole time. Megan may say it. Megan,
I apologize if I got it wrong. UM. Megan also
let us know that our Facebook page had our old
email address on it, so I want to fix that. UH.
(39:30):
So thank you so much, Megan for this email. The
video that this email included the link to I only
have had the chance to watch about the first twenty
minutes of UM. We don't have a great way on
our website right now to share links for things, but
if you google Nina Simon of Buy for All, UH,
it will take you to it really quickly. And it
(39:50):
is very interesting because she she starts off talking about
coming into a museum that was really really struggling, UM
and having to turn that around and having to figure
out how to actually connect with the community that they
were located in, which is really super interesting. So thank
you so much for this email. If you would like
to write to us about this, there any other podcast
or history podcasts at I heart radio dot com. And
(40:12):
then we're all over social media as miss in History.
That's where you'll find off Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
You can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, i
Heeart Radio app, anywhere else you want to get your podcasts,
and thanks for listening. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(40:32):
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For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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