The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens, regardless of sex. The amendment reads: 208), by which the 92nd Congress proposed the amendment to the states, was prefaced by the following resolving clause: Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress: [emphasis added], As the joint resolution was passed on March 22, 1972, this effectively set March 22, 1979 as the deadline for the amendment to be ratified by the requisite number of states. The next year, the introduction of the federal equal rights amendment in Congress gave the state measure greater credibility. [38] When Kennedy was elected, he made Esther Peterson the highest-ranking woman in his administration as an assistant secretary of labor. On June 21, 2009, the National Organization for Women decided to support both efforts to obtain additional state ratifications for the 1972 ERA and any strategy to submit a fresh-start ERA to the states for ratification.[171]. On September 25, 1921, the National Womans Party (NWP) announced its plan to seek ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women and men. As of April 30, 2019, the resolution had 188 co-sponsors, including Republicans Tom Reed of New York and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. WHEREAS, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was first passed by Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification; and. [31][32][33], ERA supporters were hopeful that the second term of President Dwight Eisenhower would advance their agenda. While advocates attempt to draw a close parallel between the Madison Amendment and the 1972 ERA, the most obvious difference between them is the most relevant. Peterson publicly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment based on her belief that it would weaken protective labor legislation. In 1957, the B&PW sent attorney Hermine D. Tobolowsky of Dallas to a Texas Senate committee hearing to testify for a bill authorizing married women to control property separately from their husbands. For these reasons, the U.S. Department of Justices Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) concluded that Dillons discussionwas merely a dictum.REF, While the Courts comment in Dillon about ratification being sufficiently contemporaneous is irrelevant because, as dictum, it is not legal binding precedent, Colemans treatment of this issue is irrelevant for a different reason. It firmly rejects sharp legislative lines between the sexes as constitutionally tolerable. Instead, it was usually blocked in committee; except in 1946, when it was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 38 to 35not receiving the required two-thirds supermajority. 208. However, no additional states voted yes before that date, and the ERA fell three states short of ratification. If a ratification deadline placed in a joint resolutions proposing clause is valid, the 1972 ERA formally died on June 30, 1982. It would, therefore, no longer be pending before the states and no amendment would exist today for additional states to ratify. "Congress must act now to remove the . Between 1974 and 1977, only five states approved the ERA, and advocates became worried about the approaching March 22, 1979, deadline. [151], At the 1980 Republican National Convention, the Republican Party platform was amended to end its support for the ERA. Learn more about the history of the Equal Rights Amendment here. The authors of the 1997 analysis behind the three-state strategy, for example, assert that Congress promulgat[ed] the Madison Amendment in 1992REF and that congressional promulgation of an amendment is not essential for an amendment to become effective.REF Rather, they write, the date of the final state ratification is the determinative point of the amendment process and therefore, subsequent congressional promulgation is a mere formality.REF. The only period when the ERA was not introduced was immediately after Congress proposed and sent it to the states in 1972. [citation needed] By the late 1960s, NOW had made significant political and legislative victories and was gaining enough power to become a major lobbying force. Support in the states that had not ratified fell below 50%. 4010 to retroactively clarify that North Dakota's 1975 ratification of the ERA was valid only through "11:59 p.m. on March 22, 1979" and went on to proclaim that North Dakota "should not be counted by Congress, the Archivist of the United States, lawmakers in any other state, any court of law, or any other person, as still having on record a live ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States as was offered by House Joint Resolution No. [173] In 2013, ERA Action began to gain traction with this strategy through their coordination with U.S. Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides for two methods of proposing amendments. In 1893, the fair featured a woman's congress of over 300 women. In order to be added to the Constitution, it needed approval by legislatures in three-fourths (38) of the 50 states. "[159] Historian Judith Glazer-Raymo asserted: As moderates, we thought we represented the forces of reason and goodwill but failed to take seriously the power of the family values argument and the single-mindedness of Schlafly and her followers. In 1972, Idaho was among the first wave of states to ratify the ERA, approving it overwhelmingly. if(document.getElementsByClassName("reference").length==0) if(document.getElementById('Footnotes')!==null) document.getElementById('Footnotes').parentNode.style.display = 'none'; What's on my ballot? The state ERA was passed first in the Senate, then in the House. Congress, they point out, did so when it extended the ERA ratification deadline from March 22, 1979, to June 30, 1982. The ERA has been ratified by the following states:[60], ** = Ratification revoked after June 30, 1982, Although Article V is silent as to whether a state may rescind, or otherwise revoke, a previous ratification of a proposedbut not yet adoptedamendment to the U.S. Constitution,[66] legislators in the following six states nevertheless voted to retract their earlier ratification of the ERA:[67]. In June 1966, at the Third National Conference on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., Betty Friedan and a group of activists frustrated with the lack of government action in enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) to act as an "NAACP for women", demanding full equality for American women and men. Texas ratified the federal ERA on . Frances "Sissy" Tarlton Farenthold and Barbara Jordan between 1968 and 1972. The resolution must be adopted by a vote of at least two-thirds of the membership of each house of the legislature. First, ERA advocates falsely assert that Congress promulgated the Madison Amendment after assessing whether the amendment had lost its vitality through lapse of time.REF Michigan became the 38th state to ratify the Madison Amendment on May 7, 1992.REF On May 18, 1992, pursuant to statute,REF the Archivist certified that the Madison Amendment has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States.REF, Thereafter, the House and Senate passed resolutions recognizing the Amendment.REF House Concurrent Resolution 320, for example, declared that the Madison Amendment has been ratified by a sufficient number of the States and has become a part of the Constitution.REF Two Senate resolutionsREF declared that the Madison Amendment has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution. On their face, these resolutions recognize or memorialize what had already occurred. Advocates began developing this strategy after the Madison Amendments 1992 ratification. Four of the six unratified amendments remain pending before the states because they were proposed without a ratification deadline. [44], A new women's movement gained ground in the later 1960s as a result of a variety of factors: Betty Friedan's bestseller The Feminine Mystique; the network of women's rights commissions formed by Kennedy's national commission; the frustration over women's social and economic status; and anger over the lack of government and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement of the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. [119] On March 10, 2020, the Plaintiff States (Virginia, Illinois and Nevada) filed a memorandum in opposition to the five states seeking to intervene. The 15 states that did not ratify the Equal Rights Amendment before the 1982 deadline were Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. [170] Those who espouse the "three-state strategy" (now complete if the Nevada, Illinois and Virginia belated ERA approvals are deemed legitimate) were spurred, at least in part, by the unconventional 202-year-long ratification of the Constitution's Twenty-seventh Amendment (sometimes referred to as the "Madison Amendment") which became part of the Constitution in 1992 after pending before the state legislatures since 1789. On March 22, 1972, the Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, which proposed banning discrimination based on sex. [95], According to research by Jules B. Gerard, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, of the 35 legislatures that passed ratification resolutions, 24 of them explicitly referred to the original 1979 deadline.[96]. State executives | After. The amendment was finally ratified in the election of November 7, 1972, with 80 percent of voters in favor. The 115th Congress lasted from January 3, 2017, to January 3, 2019. On March 5, 2013, the ERA was reintroduced by Senator Menendez as S.J. During the 1975 legislative session, a statewide coalition of women's organizations returned to lobby the legislature when ERA opposition groups tried to have the Texas ERA rescinded. On August 10, 1970, she gave a speech on the ERA called "For the Equal Rights Amendment" in Washington, D.C. [49], On August 10, 1970, Michigan Democrat Martha Griffiths successfully brought the Equal Rights Amendment to the House floor, after 15 years of the joint resolution having languished in the House Judiciary Committee. The Texas B&PW campaigned before the ratification election in November 1972. Three-fourths of the states needed to then agree to ratify it as a constitutional amendment, but it failed by a margin of three. [28][29] The party then took the ERA to Congress, where U.S. senator Charles Curtis, a future vice president of the United States, introduced it for the first time in October 1921. [78], A resolution was introduced in the Minnesota Senate on January 11, 2021, whichif adoptedwould retroactively clarify that Minnesota's 1973 ratification of the ERA expired as of the originally-designated March 22, 1979, deadline.[79]. These women argued that the ERA would disadvantage housewives, cause women to be drafted into the military and to lose protections such as alimony, and eliminate the tendency for mothers to obtain custody over their children in divorce cases. However, Gus Mutscher, the new speaker of the House, refused to let it out of committee. In the 1880s, Texas women active in the woman suffrage movement were often also involved in the campaign for prohibition and temperance with the Texas Woman's Christian Temperance Union. A joint resolution is pending at the proposal stage during the Congress in which the joint resolution is introduced. On March 22, 2017, 45 years to the day after Congress passed the ERA, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify it. Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. [1] The first version of an ERA was written by Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman and introduced in Congress in December 1923.[2][3][4]. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hollingsworth v. Virginia (1798)[91] that the President of the United States has no formal role in the passing of constitutional amendments. To sneak it into the Constitution through this illegal process would undermine the very basis for our constitutional order. ", "2009 National NOW Conference Resolutions: Equal Rights Amendment", "The Equal Rights Amendment: Why the ERA Remains Legally Viable And Properly Before the States", "As women march in D.C., Cardin co-sponsors new Equal Rights Amendment", "Let's Ratify the ERA: A Look at Where We Are Now", "The ERA's Revival: Illinois Ratifies Equal Rights Amendment", "Illinois Senate approves federal Equal Rights Amendment, more than 35 years after the deadline", "Virginia could be the last state needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. By May 1919, Hobby recommended that the Texas Constitution be amended to offer full voting rights to women, but the amendment was defeated by a majority of 25,000 votes. On January 15, the Senate voted 2614 to approve the amendment and forward it to the House of Delegates, but it was defeated there in a 5050 tied vote; at the time, the Republican Party held one-seat majorities in both houses. However, no additional states ratified. [185] Keeping to their word, they did so, with ERA ratification resolutions HJ1 and SJ1 being passed in their respective chambers on January 15, 2020, and being passed by each other on January 27. [107], On February 27, 2020, the States of Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota entered into a joint stipulation and voluntary dismissal with the Archivist of the United States. Meanwhile, Congress passed the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act and a federal equal rights amendment, the latter of which was ratified by the Texas legislature in a special session in March 1972. South Dakota's 1979 sunset joint resolution declared: "the Ninety-fifth Congress ex post facto has sought unilaterally to alter the terms and conditions in such a way as to materially affect the congressionally established time period for ratification" (designated as "POM-93" by the U.S. Senate and published verbatim in the Congressional Record of March 13, 1979, at pages 4861 and 4862). Second, the Supreme Court vacated the district courts decision because, as the Acting Attorney Generals memorandum to the Administrator of General Services explained, the 1972 ERA had failed of adoption after the ratification deadline passed with fewer than three-fourths of the states ratifying. They conflate whether Congress can change a ratification deadline before and after that deadline expires. In 1923, at Seneca Falls, New York, she revised the proposed amendment to read: Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. This means there are fifty-two senators who back the resolution, however, no vote on the resolution has taken place by the committee or by the full Senate.[206]. If passed, legal rights would no longer be determined by gender. The seven-month struggle in California resulted in a vote for ratification and motivated several years of legislative activity on women's issues. 29), Idaho (February 8, 1977: House Concurrent Resolution No. Second, these advocates create an artificial distinction between ratification deadlines that appear in the amendments text and those that appear in the joint resolutions proposing clause. SENATE AND HOUSE TO GET AMENDMENT; A Proposed Constitutional Change To Be Introduced On October 1", "Dr. Frances Dickinson women's equal rights", "The Proposed Equal Rights Amendment: Contemporary Ratification Issues", "Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment", "What's in a Name? The joint stipulation incorporated the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel's opinion; stated that the Archivist would not certify the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment and stated that if the Department of Justice ever concludes that the 1972 ERA Resolution is still pending and that the Archivist therefore has authority to certify the ERA's adoption the Archivist will make no certification concerning ratification of the ERA until at least 45 days following the announcement of the Department of Justice's conclusion, absent a court order compelling him to do so sooner. Chicago . That amounts to a minimum of 100 votes in the House of Representatives and 21 votes in the Senate. Neither the House nor the Senate has voted on a resolution to propose the ERA in more than three decades. If it is not, however, the 1972 ERA cannot be ratified because it no longer exists. 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