Equal rights advocates plan birthday gift for the 19th Amendment: The ERA

It was a huge step forward for American women when, exactly 100 years ago, they finally gained the guaranteed right to vote with ratification of the 19th Amendment. But to Alice Paul, the step wasn’t nearly large enough.

Paul, a suffragist who’d waged hunger strikes and endured forced feedings in jail so women could get the vote, equipped herself with a law degree and got to work writing another constitutional amendment — one that would guarantee women equal rights under the law. She introduced that amendment — now known as the Equal Rights Amendment — in Congress in 1923.

Of course, the ERA, finally passed by Congress in 1972 only to stumble during a circuitous ratification effort, still isn’t law. But feminist leaders are determined to change that now. And they feel cultural momentum is on their side for another victory nearly a century in the making.

“To call them suffragists, it sounds like they only wanted one thing,“says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, of Paul and her colleagues. “The vote was an important step, but they didn’t believe the vote alone would give women full equality.”

“Basically, we want to finish this,” she says. “The women’s movement is not giving up until this thing is in the Constitution, period.”

It was a joyful moment for

Smeal and others when, in January, the Virginia state Legislature, under newly Democratic control, approved the amendment — becoming the crucial 38th state to cross the three-quarters threshold for ratification. But the move hardly resolved the issue, which will likely be decided in the courts over thorny procedural questions.

Still, for advocates, the Virginia vote was more than symbolic. “It’s a new day,” Smeal says. She and other activists are pinning their hopes on a Democratic presidential victory in November; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, she says, are strong supporters of the amendment. The key change, she says, will be if the Democrats can take over the Senate, where current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has expressed opposition to it.

ERA advocates were deeply disappointed, though, when in February, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she thought the entire state ratification process should be started over, dealing current efforts a potentially serious blow.

Polling has indicated public support for the amendment. A February poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that roughly 3 in 4 Americans support the

ERA.

And while the poll did find a significant partisan gap in views of the ERA’s adoption, majorities across party lines were in support. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats, compared with about 6 in 10 Republicans, said they were in favor.

Steve Helber / Associated Press Virginia Delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy holds her son, Alex Foy, as she and Delegate Hala Ayala, D-Prince William, back, celebrate the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the House chambers at the Capitol in Richmond, Va., on Jan. 27.