You know, until just a few minutes ago, I had no idea that the ERA, giving constitutionally-protected equal rights to women, was never ratified. This completely blew my mind. Passed by the House of Representatives and by Congress in 1972, there was then a seven year deadline to get 38 states to ratify the amendment. Unfortunately, only 35 states ever did, even after Congress extended the deadline for an additional five years, until 1982.
After the deadline passed, the ERA was re-introduced to Congress in 1982, and has languished there ever since.
Currently there is a move to keep the original 35 states that ratified the amendment legally attached to the current bill, should it ever make it though Congress and the House of Representatives and go back into the state ratification phase, thanks to the “Madison Amendment” becoming the 27th amendment to the Constitution, 202 years after being passed by Congress. Should that happen, though, we still need at least three more states to admit that women are equal members of society, and should be legally protected from discrimination.
So — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia — what do you say we move into the 21st century and get the ERA passed?
(via Bob Harris, mentioning the death of Martha Griffiths, who spent most of her life championing equal rights for women)
2 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
i have decided that in the interests of your pg-13 rating i will hold my tongue and keep the incredibly long and angry string of nastiness for another time. suffice it to say - this sort of thing makes me furious.
This has always saddened me greatly. Due to my age, I have watched society being integrated both by race and gender. I see this lack of ratification as wrong.
As an aside, Mike’s mom and I were invloved in what we thought was a limited equality issue at Indiana University - in the dorms, as I am male, I was allowed to be out and about 24/7, but Berta, as a female, was locked in the dormitory at 11 PM on weekdays and 1 AM on weekends, on threat of expulsion if she was not in her room when bed checks were done. A whole lot of the students, including the two of us, felt this was unfair, and there were protests and political actions. The policy was changed, though, by that time, we were married, and it did not apply to us.
Little did we know, but this simple issue turned out, in later years, to be the birth of the Women’s Movement at IU.