The Nineteenth Amendment Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli

Chapter 8 concludes that the Nineteenth Amendment can be revitalized today, to more fully ensure women’s equality. It reviews new legal scholarship that suggests direct applications of the Nineteenth Amendment to today’s voting rights challenges. And it describes how some scholars suggest that the Nineteenth should be read together with the Fourteenth Amendment, as a normative matter, to provide a more capacious understanding of the Fourteenth, as applied to women’s rights, beyond voting. Given persistent gender inequality, and the uncertain status of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the chapter concludes that it is worth revisiting the jurisprudential potential of the Nineteenth Amendment, at its centennial.

Author(s):  
Katherine M. Marino

This chapter examines how, during the Second World War, Latin American feminists continued to push broad meanings of international women’s rights and human rights in spite of little support from their U.S. counterparts. The women from the U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus who replaced Doris Stevens in the Inter-American Commission of Women avoided promoting women’s “equal rights” because of the fraught Equal Rights Amendment debate in the U.S. Latin American feminists effectively pushed these U.S. counterparts on a number of issues, including toward advocacy for maternity legislation, which Latin American feminists asserted as a human right. The Atlantic Charter and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which underscored social and economic rights, inspired Latin American feminists’ broad calls for human rights. Their framings included women’s rights, and greater economic security and multilateral relations in the Americas. These demands came together at the 1945 Chapultepec conference where a number of Latin American feminists in the Inter-American Commission of Women also paved the way for Latin American countries to appoint women to their delegations going to the conference that would create the United Nations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 716
Author(s):  
Dede Kania

Up to now, the law is still considered discriminatory and gender inequality. Though the law should be equal or sensitive to gender inequality to guarantee women’s rights. By following the principle of equality in all areas of the good men  and women have equal rights or opportunities to participate in every aspect of social life and state. so if there is discrimination against women, it is a violation of women’s rights. women’s rights violations occur due to many things, including the result of the legal system, where women are victims of the system. Reform Order is the most progressive period in the protection of human rights. Various laws and regulations come outin this period, including laws and regulations concerning women’s rights. Seen from the government’s efforts to eliminate discrimination based on sex are included in many  legislations.


This volume reframes the debate around Islam and women’s rights within a broader comparative literature. It examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality. Part I addresses the nexus of religion, law, gender, and democracy through different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, anthropology, political science, law). Part II localizes the implementation of this nexus between law, gender, and democracy, and provides contextualized responses to questions raised in Part I. The contributors explore the situation of Muslim women’s rights vis-à-vis human rights to shed light on gender politics in the modernization of the nation and to ponder over the role of Islam in gender inequality across different Muslim countries.


Author(s):  
Julie Miller

This book shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. Norman also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers. This book describes how New Yorkers followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained sympathys, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. The book weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.


Author(s):  
Tracey Jean Boisseau ◽  
Tracy A. Thomas

A politicized culture and century-long debate over women’s nature and role may turn out to be the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)’s principal contribution to American feminism. Despite perceptions that an equal rights amendment was the next logical step following the Nineteenth Amendment, arguments broke out among feminist activists over whether an equal rights amendment would menace important legal victories, such as protective legislation for women’s employment. Yet even after other federal legislation quieted labor advocates’ concerns, virulent disagreement over an equal rights amendment among politicized women continued for years. Only in the late 1960s did politically active women come to embrace the ERA as a strategic goal. Even then the question of women’s differences from men—whether physical, psychological, or social—did not evaporate. Instead, new battle lines between progressive and newly organized conservative women were drawn in ways that doomed the amendment’s ratification chances.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Smyth

The aim of promoting gender equality and women’s rights as integral parts of development efforts is enshrined in the key strategies and plans of many organizations. This is the case for the individual affiliates that comprise Oxfam International (OI), and the Oxfam confederation as a whole. This report sets out to assist Oxfam to better understand and learn from the Confederation’s work in this area to date. The purpose of the report is to provide an initial mapping of work on transformative leadership for women's rights (TLWR) in order to offer suggestions, impetus and a programmatic framework for the development of an ambitious global program on TLWR. It is intended to complement and drive Oxfam’s efforts to bring about the transformation of the pervasive gender inequality that limits women’s wellbeing, confidence and potential, reproduces negative masculinity traits, and contributes to the inequity dominant in contemporary societies.


Author(s):  
Marjorie J. Spruill

The late 20th century saw gender roles transformed as the so-called Second Wave of American feminism that began in the 1960s gained support. By the early 1970s public opinion increasingly favored the movement and politicians in both major political parties supported it. In 1972 Congress overwhelmingly approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and sent it to the states. Many quickly ratified, prompting women committed to traditional gender roles to organize. However, by 1975 ERA opponents led by veteran Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly, founder of Stop ERA, had slowed the ratification process, although federal support for feminism continued. Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D-NY), inspired by the United Nations’ International Women’s Year (IWY) program, introduced a bill approved by Congress that mandated state and national IWY conferences at which women would produce recommendations to guide the federal government on policy regarding women. Federal funding of these conferences (held in 1977), and the fact that feminists were appointed to organize them, led to an escalation in tensions between feminist and conservative women, and the conferences proved to be profoundly polarizing events. Feminists elected most of the delegates to the culminating IWY event, the National Women’s Conference held in Houston, Texas, and the “National Plan of Action” adopted there endorsed a wide range of feminist goals including the ERA, abortion rights, and gay rights. But the IWY conferences presented conservatives with a golden opportunity to mobilize, and anti-ERA, pro-life, and anti-gay groups banded together as never before. By the end of 1977, these groups, supported by conservative Catholics, Mormons, and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, had come together to form a “Pro-Family Movement” that became a powerful force in American politics. By 1980 they had persuaded the Republican Party to drop its support for women’s rights. Afterward, as Democrats continued to support feminist goals and the GOP presented itself as the defender of “family values,” national politics became more deeply polarized and bitterly partisan.


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