The Equal Rights Amendment Campaign and Its Opponents

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsy Kretschmer ◽  
Jane Mansbridge
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Organization For Women ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formal Equality ◽  
Working Class Women

This chapter traces the history of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and its relationship to the women’s movement. The ERA has both mobilized and divided the American feminist movement from its inception in the 1920s, backed by the National Woman’s Party, through its defeat in the 1980s. A broad coalition of feminist groups fought for the ERA, yet also were divided on issues of race, class, and political ideology. Some radical feminists, socialist feminists, women of color, and working-class women publicly questioned what impact the ERA would have on women’s everyday lives, suspected its formal equality, and criticized the National Organization for Women and liberal feminists for allocating significant resources to a seemingly single-minded pursuit of the ERA. The conservative countermovement finally blocked the amendment’s ratification. The ERA today faces a revival, prompted by a legally innovative “three-state strategy.”

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

When the Old Left Was Young … and Went to Washington

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Consumer Rights ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
Old Left ◽  
National Woman's Party

This chapter introduces a group of young radicals, male and female, who ascended with surprising rapidity in the Roosevelt administration. Many of the younger group advocated women's sexual emancipation and conducted their personal lives accordingly. Women in the younger cohort were less likely to make “maternalist” arguments that stressed women's innate differences from men, and they identified less exclusively with women-only organizations. These women did not call themselves “left feminists,” but the term usefully distinguishes them from nonfeminist leftists and from the “pure” feminists of the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment antagonized advocates of wage and hour laws for women. However, not all women in government were left feminists. Those who were gained force from the fact that they often knew one another, through shared interests in labor, poverty, housing, public health and health insurance, consumer rights, and international peace—interdependent causes that in their vision had a feminist subtext.

Aspiration for Independence

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Irina Andrianova
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Special Investigation ◽  
Outstanding Achievement ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Book Selling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Publishing Business

This article analyzes Anna Dostoevskaia’s (1846–1918) publication work on the basis of new evidence drawn from hitherto unpublished archival materials. Dostoevskaia’s contribution to the world of publishing has never before been the subject of a special investigation; the documents testifying to her massive work, such as her memoir, correspondence and notebooks, all kept in archives, have never been published. Anna Dostoevskaia was not only the wife of the great Russian author Feodor Dostoevsky, but also one of the first female publishers and book-sellers in Russia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when women were struggling for economic independence and equal rights to take up “men’s jobs,” Dostoevskaia managed to start out and successfully handle a publishing business. The article expands on Dostoevskaia’s educational and professional development, the history of her publishing and book-selling business, and the difficulties she encountered in the process. Her most outstanding achievement was Dostoevsky’s Complete Works which underwent seven editions (1882–1906). Anna Dostoevskaia had an immense contribution to the publishing business of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and played an important role in the enhancement of the cultural life and feminist movement in Russia.

Making a Spectacle of the Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie J. Dow
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Media Activism ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
National Organization For Women ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Masses

This chapter focuses on the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970. By this time, women's liberation seemed poised for its triumphal moment in the media spotlight. The House of Representatives had passed the Equal Rights Amendment a few weeks earlier, and all three networks had produced stories that linked this outcome to the movement's momentum. The strike seemed to confirm that momentum: involving tens of thousands of women in the United States and abroad, it was the subject of more national print and broadcast attention than any other feminist event that year. Despite the strike's inclusion of an array of liberal and radical feminist groups, it was an instance of media activism conceived and controlled by the National Organization for Women (NOW), and it put the organization's media pragmatism on full display. Confounding NOW's careful planning, the reports on the strike took an essentially liberal action and presented it as a radical one. Featuring almost no discussion of the three carefully chosen issues—abortion, equal pay, and child care—that the event was designed to dramatize, the network reports instead presented a narrative of feminist deviance, visually depicting the masses of women protestors as an entertaining spectacle.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union ◽  
Compensation Law ◽  
International League

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

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.

Passages: Feminism, Journalism, and the Transatlantic Twenties

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-242
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
International Treaties ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Great Demand ◽  
Complicated Problem ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Alice Paul

After the vote was won, Crystal Eastman hoped to transform successful but single-issue suffragism into a class- and race-conscious, transnationally minded feminism. She ran afoul of Alice Paul, unquestioned leader of the National Woman’s Party, who wanted another targeted single-issue campaign. By 1923, Eastman, Paul, and the organization agreed on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as their new “great demand.” In its all-encompassing simplicity, the ERA solved the problem of how a single-issue campaign could seek redress for the huge and complicated problem of gender inequality. Unfortunately, the idea splintered coalitions in the wider women’s movement, alienating the party from a whole network of once-compatible Progressive groups. Eastman, now living in her husband’s native London with their children, worked as a journalist, covering this debate. By 1926, little progress had been made, and she welcomed a fresh tack. She began working with Paul to campaign for equal rights provisions in international treaties.

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