Equal Rights Amendment was introduced 100 years ago — and still waits

By Frederic J. Frommer

On December 12, 2023

America’s feminists were feeling confident. Three years earlier, they’d won passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. And now, 100 years ago this week, they watched as the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in Congress for the first time.

They had plenty of reason for optimism. They couldn’t have anticipated that, a century later, the ERA would still be languishing.

Alice Paul, co-founder of the National Woman’s Party, which helped win ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, drafted the version of the ERA that came before Congress. Rep. Daniel Anthony (R-Kan.), the nephew of women’s suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony, offered the House version on Dec. 13, 1923 — 100 years ago Wednesday — three days after his fellow Kansas Republican, Charles Curtis, introduced it in the Senate.

The previous month, members of the National Woman’s Party had met with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House, where they made their case for the amendment.

“In asking your support, Mr. President, we are not without precedent,” said Maud Younger, who led the group’s lobbying efforts. “We recall, when it was a discrimination on account of race, how Abraham Lincoln took the lead in this fight. We recall more recently, when the question was of discrimination on the account of sex, how Woodrow Wilson went personally to the Senate to urge the passage of the suffrage amendment.”

Coolidge, a Republican who had just taken office a few months earlier following the death of President Warren G. Harding, was encouraging.

“I am personally certain that if you will present to Congress as you have done to me your reasons why you want this constitutional amendment that you will find them very responsive to your request,” he told the delegation.

But that didn’t turn out to be the case. The amendment went nowhere in Congress for a half-century. There wasn’t momentum for it 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.

The amendment faced headwinds from organized labor, including some female leaders, citing concerns that it would undermine workplace protections for women. But the National Woman’s Party thought those “protections” were themselves the problem. So-called protective state laws capped the number of hours women could work, excluded them from certain occupations and imposed limits on heavy lifting, among other restrictions. A delegation of 300 members of the party marched to the White House in 1926 to present a petition to Coolidge, arguing the amendment was necessary to undo these laws.

“We appeal to you as the responsible head of our country to give your backing to this amendment which will guarantee to women the right to equality with men in the struggle to support themselves and their families,” the petition read.

Two years before the ERA was introduced, it was already on the radar of labor leaders such as National Consumers League head Florence Kelley, who referred to “Alice Paul’s terrifying draft for a federal amendment.”

Although the amendment didn’t make headway in Congress, the Republican Party became the first major party to endorse it, in its 1940 party platform.

In 1943, backers changed the language slightly to read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and dubbed it the Alice Paul Amendment. As Americans won important civil rights gains in the 1960s, a second wave of feminism built support for this revised amendment.

The House approved it in 1971 by a vote of 354-24, and the Senate followed suit the next year by a vote of 84-8 — both easily clearing the two-thirds threshold — before it went to the states for their ratification. The Texas legislature approved the amendment the same month it sailed through the Senate, and within a year, 30 states had ratified it. The ERA seemed well on its way to winning the 38 states needed to be added to the Constitution.

But opponents organized a campaign against it amid a conservative backlash in the mid-1970s, and by the 1982 deadline set by Congress, the amendment was three states short. Subsequently, three more states — Nevada, Illinois and Virginia — have voted to ratify it. ERA proponents now argue those states should count, which would be sufficient for it to be adopted. That hasn’t happened. (Complicating matters, five states rescinded their approval ahead of the ’82 deadline, though backers of the ERA say the Constitution doesn’t have a provision for rescissions.)

Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, in 2020.

“For the women of Virginia and the women of America, the resolution has finally passed,” said Del. Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax), the state’s first female House speaker, after her chamber approved the amendment. But a hundred years after it was first introduced, ERA champions are still waiting.

This piece was republished from The Washington Post.