Called the “Alice Paul Amendment,” this constitutional amendment was first introduced into both houses of the U. S. Congress in 1923. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed to add the simple language that “Men and women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction” to the Constitution. Its author, Alice Paul, was the motive force behind militant suffrage tactics in the Congressional Union and the National Woman’s Party (NWP). After the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified in 1920, the NWP turned away from conservative approaches to women’s rights in order to launch massive lobbying efforts in favor of equal rights for women at the national and state levels. The key to their campaigns was the case for women’s absolute equality under the law. Arguing against those who treated women as a protected class, the NWP urged that women should have the same rights that men had. For Alice Paul and her followers, no sexual difference between men and women justified unequal pay, restrictions on women’s labor, or women’s lack of political rights. Women’s loss of citizenship when they married foreign nationals, for example, discriminated against women, since men suffered no such loss. While women could fight for legal changes on an issue-by-issue basis, as they did with the Cable Act, a blanket constitutional amendment was preferable. Despite these arguments, the Paul amendment did not receive support for passage in the 1920s. Similar bills were proposed and failed in several states, including Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The Equal Rights Amendment sparked a debate among feminists on the appropriate strategy to ensure women’s equality in public life. Women activists divided into two camps: one advocated women’s rights on an equal basis with men, the other was more concerned with granting women legal protection based on their differences from men. The latter group believed that women’s role as mothers required legal protections that were more important than formal legal equality. Further, those who fought for protective wage and hour legislation for women workers, including labor unions such as the INTERNATIONAL Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, thought that the passage of an equal rights amendment would jeopardize these laws. When the Supreme Court declared a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women unconstitutional in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital in 1923, the fears of the protectionists seemed to be confirmed. Arguments about women’s equality continued to block efforts to introduce and pass state and national equal rights legislation.
Divisions among women on the various merits of sexual difference and sexual equality were only one barrier to the passage of the ERA. Women’s political weakness in the decades between World War I and World War II, and the failure of women to demonstrate unity at the polls, kept legislation for women, whether equal rights acts or social welfare provisions, such as the continuation of the SHEP-PARD-ToWNER ACT for maternal and infant health care, from passing Congress or state legislatures. It would not be until 1946 that the ERA was shown any serious consideration from Congress, in response to women’s contributions to the war effort. And it was not until the 1970s, with the revival of the feminist movement, that the ERA was finally reconsidered and passed through Congress. It remains unratified today.
See also woman sueerage; women’s status and RIGHTs.
Further reading: Susan Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981); Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910-1928 (New York: New York University Press, 1986).
World History
