After Suffrage Comes Equal Rights?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Jean Boisseau ◽  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Federal Legislation ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Principal Contribution ◽  
Strategic Goal

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.

Equality Challenged: Equal Rights and Sexual Difference

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Sherron de Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Federal Legislation ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
The Law

“ERA Won't Go Away!” The words were chanted at rallies and unfurled on banners at countless marches as the deadline—June 30, 1982—approached for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. To include in the Constitution the principle of equality of rights for women, supporters insisted, was an essential of republican government in a democratic society. Congress had shared that perception in 1972, passing a series of measures aimed at strengthening and expanding federal legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sex. Included was a constitutional amendment simply stating that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Thirty-five of the thirty-eight states necessary for a three-fourths majority needed to amend the Constitution had given their approval.

Anti-Feminist, Pro-Life, and Anti-ERA Women

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronnee Schreiber
Keyword(s):  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Reproductive Health Care ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Pro Life ◽  
Pro Choice

For more than a century, women have organized for anti-feminist and conservative causes, including opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and legal abortion. This chapter outlines anti-feminist women’s activism ranging from their opposition to suffrage, to their support for the Ku Klux Klan, to their formation into contemporary national organizations. It examines the fight over the ERA, with special attention paid to the conservative women who opposed it, the tactics they employed, and how racial and class differences among women factored into support for, or opposition to, the amendment’s passage. Finally, an analysis of pro-life women’s activism provides insights into the strategies they use to counter feminist and pro-choice efforts. Talking as women, about women’s interests, enables pro-life groups and actors to tackle pro-choice advocates who have long argued for attention to women’s bodies and lives in reproductive health-care debates.

The Nineteenth Amendment Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Women's Equality

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.

Constitutional Orphan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
African American Women ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Perceived Need ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
National League ◽  
Voter Suppression

This book explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters (NLWV), and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a “thin” conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth Amendment, and connects that with the NWP’s perceived need for southern congressional votes for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election. And it evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA; and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth Amendment could be used today to expand gender equality.

Defining Equality

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Children's Hospital ◽  
United State ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
Children’S Hospital ◽  
Minimum Wage Legislation

Chapter 7 describes how class intersected with the Nineteenth Amendment, in the context of the United State Supreme Court’s decision in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital and the divisions over a proposed Equal Rights Amendment. It explores the NWP’s negotiations with social feminists and legal progressives, in the three years after ratification. That negotiation was focused on modifying the language of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to ensure that courts would not use it to strike down protective labor legislation for women. These efforts came to naught, and the “neutrality feminists” within the NWP arranged for the ERA to be introduced into Congress in 1923. Chapter 7 argues that Adkins was the high watermark for a potentially robust or “thick” interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. Social feminists and legal progressives feared that the ERA would be used in the same way Justice Sutherland invoked the Nineteenth Amendment in Adkins, to justify invalidating minimum wage legislation for women. One consequence of this battle over the ERA is that it has still not been ratified, one hundred years later. But, another consequence was to create a vacuum around the Nineteenth Amendment, contributing to the thin constitutional conception that emerged following ratification.

The Battle over the ERA

Big Sister ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Erin M. Kempker
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
The State ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
International Women's Year

Chapter 3 zeros in on Indiana to investigate how conservativism infused with one-world conspiracism developed there and affected feminist goals like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Feminism was alive and well in the state and existing liberal groups formed a coalition that called itself the ERA Coordinating Committee (later renamed Hoosiers for the Equal Rights Amendment) in the early seventies in order to achieve state ratification of the ERA. Feminists adopted a “low key” approach--a strategy to make feminism palatable to the general public in the state. On the right, conservative women effectively transitioned old anticommunist fears to a new target and in editorials described the ERA as communist directed. State ERA ratification riled and rallied the rightwing and made conservatives all the more determined to stop “the planners” in their next showdown, International Women’s Year.

Enforcement Legislation

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-68
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Colored People ◽  
National Woman's Party

Chapter 3 raises the issue of how race intersected with the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment. It argues that the immediate pivot of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), to a federal equal rights amendment, played a significant role in the failure of enforcement legislation to be enacted by Congress. The chapter explores the fear of a “Second Reconstruction,” by white southern congressmen, as an element in that story. And it suggests that the NWP’s failure to support African American women suffragists, and white NWP members who were co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was both a moral and a strategic failing. That choice, animated by concerns around white southern political support for the proposed equal rights amendment, contributed to the failure of enforcement legislation. The chapter links the lack of such legislation to the absence of a federal judicial forum, in which to more fully develop the meaning and scope of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Glamour and Aspiration: Women's Employment and the Establishment of Midlands ATV, 1956–68

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 635-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Murray
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
Television News ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Television Production ◽  
News Broadcasts ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Female Employees ◽  
Status Of Women

This article uses an extant collection of television news inserts and other television ephemera to examine women's employment at Midlands ATV. Focusing on the years between the first Midlands News broadcasts in 1956 until major contract changes across the ITV network in 1968, it examines the jobs women did during this formative period and their chances for promotion. In particular it suggests that contemporary ideas of glamour and their influence in screen culture maintained a significant influence in shaping women's employment. This connection between glamorous television aesthetics and female employees as the embodiment of glamour, especially on screen, did leave women vulnerable to redundancy as ‘frivolity’ in television was increasingly criticised in the mid-1960s. However, this article argues that the precarious status of women in the industry should not undermine historical appreciation of the value of their work in the establishing of television in Britain. Setting this study of Midlands ATV within the growing number of studies into women's employment in television, there are certain points of comparison with women's experience at the BBC and in networked ITV current affairs programmes. However, while the historical contours of television production are broadly comparable, there are clear distinctions, such as the employment of a female newscaster, Pat Cox, between 1956 and 1965. Such distinctions also suggest that regional news teams were experimenting with the development of a vernacular television news style that requires further study.

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