Equal rights for women in U.S. an ongoing battle

It was a back-page story relegated to filler between print ads for bladder control pills and generic Viagra, but it came with almost 50 years of modem history and a century of baggage.

If I hadn’t been paying attention, if I hadn’t lived through the initial defeat, The Associated Press story that Virginia had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment would have been just another one and done news report.

The event should remind all Canadian women how fortunate we are to have Section 15 embedded in our Constitution. We take it for granted; we take equality as a given; we rarely acknowledge the women who fought fiercely to have equality guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our female neighbours to the south have not had that privilege.

That makes the Virginia decision important: in ratifying equality, it becomes the 38th state to do so, the minimum number required. The ERA was first passed in 1972 and within a year, led by Hawaii, 30 other states ratified the equality amendment. By 1977, 35 of the needed 38 states had passed the resolution. Then, to put it mildly, the backlash erupted. Phyllis Schlafly and a cadre of anti-feminists entered the fray. To this day, despite various laws and pieces of legislation, American women are still not guaranteed equality under their constitution, although naysayers will insist that a constitutional amendment is not necessary.

Read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s

Tale and its “sequel” The Testaments should you be encouraged to believe this. (Curiously, in The Testaments, the whip-yielding Aunts, who dole out vicious punishments to non-believers and blasphemers meet at the Schlafly Cafe, a throwaway nod to the woman who orchestrated the defeat of the ERA.) It’s a reminder that privilege is frequently given, not guaranteed.

By contrast, it took only three years for the committed Canadian women led by the late Doris Anderson to insist on equality being added to Section 15, in 1985, following the passing in 1982 of the Canadian Constitution. (Read Judy Rebick’s Ten Thousand Roses for an insight into the enduring power and potential of women working toward a common cause.)

This is important because rights and freedoms are not absolute, although it would be unusual — and fatal — for any government to attempt to limit the equality provisions in the Charter. There’s a simple reason for this: equality is written into our Constitution and that can only be changed through a complex series of negotiations and votes and, well, who would want to change it other than the troglodytes? Constitutional change is enough to give anyone a giant headache — think Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord, both of which went down to ignominious defeat under both Liberal and Conservative prime ministers.

I lived through, worked on and reported on both and, meanwhile, watched in horror as the Judas women of the U.S., in concert with men who didn’t like the idea of having to treat women as equals, murdered the ERA.

Maybe time really does wound all heels as the ERA now heads for the U.S. courts. Just days ago, the attorneys general of Virginia, Illinois and Nevada launched a lawsuit to recognize the final adoption of the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Those three states all ratified the amendment in the past three years. Also, in the past three years, Schlafly died at 92, gone to whatever awaits her as the final reward for being the most virulent opponent of the

ERA, arguing it would destroy family life as she imagined it to be. (Think all the shibboleths of “proper” femininity including the barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen trope.)

She was also anti-homosexual (despite one of her sons being gay), dismissive of the United Nations, anti-communist, anti-globalism and pretty much anti-anything that smacked of equality that didn’t include the natural superiority of men. She believed in the traditional roles of women — motherhood and stay-athome wives. It was the height of irony that she did not practise what she preached. Because while she bore six children, she was a highly educated lawyer, writer, author and public speaker. I don’t imagine she spent much time in the kitchen, other than to brew up more vitriol.

To call her a female Donald Trump (whom she endorsed in 2016) would be to burnish both their characters, giving him her education and qualifications and her the raw power and bombast. Neither deserves such.

Catherine Ford is a regular columnist for the Calgary Herald.