EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was the most highly publicized and debated constitutional amendment before the United States for
most of the 1970s and early 1980s. First submitted by Congress to the states for ratification on March 22, 1972, it failed to be ratified by its final deadline of June 30, 1982. If ratified, the ERA
would have become the TWENTY-SEVENTH AMENDMENT to the Constitution. The proposed
addition would have 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.”
The ERA was written by ALICE PAUL, of the
National Woman’s Party, and was first introduced
in Congress in 1923. No action on the
amendment was taken until the NATIONAL
ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN, which was
founded in 1966, revived interest in it.
When the amendment was first submitted to
the states in 1972, Congress prescribed a deadline
of seven years for ratification. Because an
amendment must be ratified by the legislatures
or conventions of three-fourths of the states, the
ERA required approval by thirty-eight states.
Advocates of the ERA intended it to give
women constitutional protection beyond the
EQUAL PROTECTION Clauses of the Fifth and
Fourteenth Amendments. They believed that the
ERA would compensate for inadequate statutory
protections for women and sluggish judicial
enforcement of existing laws. According to a
report that accompanied passage of the ERA resolution
in the House, the ERA was necessary
because “our legal system currently contains the
vestiges of a variety of ancient COMMON LAW
principles which discriminate unfairly against
women” (H.R. Rep. No. 92-359, 92d Cong.
[1971]). These vestigial principles, the report
argued, gave preferential treatment to husbands
over wives, created a double standard by giving
men greater freedom than women to depart
from moral standards, and used “obsolete and
irrational notions of chivalry” that “regard
women in a patronizing or condescending light.”
The ERA encountered significant opposition,
particularly in southern states. Opponents
of the amendment held that certain inequalities
between men and women are the result of biology
and that some legislation and state policies
must necessarily take this fact into account.
Some also contended that the ERA would
undermine the social institutions of marriage
and family. Others argued that women already
had sufficient constitutional protections and
that the ERA was made unnecessary by recent
liberal Supreme Court decisions, including
FRONTIERO V. RICHARDSON, 411 U.S. 677, 93 S.
Ct. 1764, 36 L. Ed. 2d 583 (1973), which struck down a federal law that gave preferential treatment
to married males over married females in
securing salary supplements while in the ARMED
SERVICES.
Frontiero also serves as an example of the
way in which the ERA influenced the Supreme
Court. In a concurring opinion, Justice LEWIS F.
POWELL JR. cited the pending ERA ratification
as a reason to delay gender-related constitutional
interpretation. He favored waiting for the
results of the ERA’s ratification process so that
the political process might guide the Court’s
constitutional interpretation.
By 1973, less than two years after its submission
to the states, thirty states had ratified the
ERA, and the success of the measure seemed
likely. Only five more states ratified the measure,
however, by the end of the seven-year deadline,
leaving it three states short in its bid to become
law. In June 1979, Congress extended the ratification
deadline to June 30, 1982. During the
extension, ERA supporters organized economic
boycotts of states that failed to ratify the amendment.
Despite all these efforts, and even though
public opinion polls indicated that a majority of
U.S. citizens supported the measure, no more
states ratified the ERA.
Supporters of the ERA reintroduced the
amendment in Congress yet again on July 14,
1982. The House of Representatives voted down
the proposal on November 15, 1983.

FURTHER READINGS
Corwin, Edward S. 1978. The Constitution and What it
Means Today. 14th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press.
Daughtrey, Martha Craig. 2000. “Women and the Constitution:
Where We Are at the End of the Century.” New
York University Law Review 75 (April): 1–25.
Schwarzenbach, Sibyl A., and Patricia Smith, ed. 2004.
Women and the United States Constitution: History,
Interpretation, and Practice: A Collection of Essays. New
York: Columbia Univ. Press.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Equal Protection;Women’s Rights.