Justice / Comment

Equal Rights Amendment Was Introduced 100 Years Ago — and Still Waits

America’s feminists felt confident when the Equal Rights Amendment was put before Congress 100 years ago this week. For a century, it’s failed to be enacted.

by Frederic J. Frommer via Retropolis on December 12, 2023

...until the modern women’s rights movement, when both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of a slightly reworded Equal Rights Amendment in 1971 and 1972. It then came up just short of the ratification threshold of passage by three-fourths of the states by the deadline set by Congress.

In the early ’70s, there was a near-consensus among politicians for the ERA: President Richard M. Nixon backed it, and only eight senators voted against it. By contrast, the early backers a century ago were ahead of their time — and of much of American society.

The text of the original ERA read, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

A July 1925 Chicago Tribune editorial, headlined “Strident Sex in Politics,” mocked champions of the amendment as “a class of women who stress their sex stridently while demanding that there be no distinctions of sex. Although they have equal suffrage, they form a party on sex lines instead of working as men do through the other parties. We are female, they announce, and demand that we be considered as male.”

The newspaper added, “The equal rights crusade seems to us to be hysterical or neurasthenic … It is the product, we suspect, of thwarted sex, and its vociferousness is not a sign of political importance.”

Earlier that year, the House Judiciary Committee had held its first hearing on the amendment over two days in February.

Mabel Vernon, executive secretary of the National Woman’s Party, told the committee that granting women the right to vote was just a “very important step” toward full equality between the sexes. After passage of the 19th Amendment, Vernon said, her organization decided “to remain banded together until all other discriminations against women had also been removed. We determined then that the first thing for us to do was to concentrate upon the inequalities which existed in the laws of this country.”

But several women’s groups testified against the ERA, including the National League of Women Voters, the National Council of Jewish Women, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Council of Women.

Agnes Regan, executive secretary of the National Council of Catholic Women, said ERA proponents were wrong to see “equal rights” as “identical rights.”

“To demand identical rights for men and women is absolutely unreasonable — just as unreasonable as it would be to argue that physiological, social and economic functions of women are identical,” Regan said.