By Carmen Rios

When the 19th Amendment was added to the Constitution, making it illegal to deny women the right to vote based on their sex, lawyer and suffragist Crystal Eastman was hungry to take things even further. 

“Now at last,” she wrote, “we can begin.” 

Inspired by Lucretia Mott’s suggestion at the historic Seneca Falls Convention that women deserved “equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce,” Eastman and suffrage leader Alice Paul authored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Paul’s final edit on the language offered a concise vision for women’s constitutional equality that endures today: a future in which “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and Congress has the responsibility to make sure of it. 

In a 2011 interview, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia infamously declared that women were not protected from discrimination by the Constitution. “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex,” he told California Lawyer. “The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

The ERA’s meaning has transformed over time, but women in the “current society” — and generations of activists before them — have worked steadily to make such cavalier dismissals of women’s equality inadmissable in U.S. law and in the lives of everyday Americans by advocating for the ERA. The amendment would force discriminatory laws off the books and provide a Constitutional mandate for policies advancing parity and improving the lives of women and girls.

First introduced in Congress in 1923, the ERA wasn’t approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification until 1972. Another half-century later, despite having met the requirements for ratification in the Constitution, the ERA still hasn’t been officially added to the Constitution as the 28th amendment. Now, a diverse coalition of women have come together to wage an intersectional fight for gender equality, taking inspiration from their feminist foremothers. 

“The fact that it hasn't happened isn't in any way a reflection of a lack of stamina, or innovation, on their part,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), a Congressional leader in the fight for certification of the ERA, asserted to NWHM. “They've given us a great blueprint: to organize, to mobilize, to legislate, to resist, as if lives depend on it — because they do.”

The Intersectional History of the ERA

“We need to emphasize not just that it was women from different parts of the political spectrum, but also women of color, and some of the first women of color who were in Congress who really led the fight,” emphasized Julie Suk, legal scholar, co-host of the Constitutional Crisis Hotline podcast, and author of We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment. “That contribution is extremely important. It's always been intersectional.” Suk’s book paints a more complete picture of the century-long fight for the ERA — one that doesn’t discount or omit the contributions of women of color, and illustrates that intersectional history.

“It is hard to believe that the men in this country who have it in their power to deal justly in this particular [issue] will refuse any longer to enact this legislation which will redress a wrong and lighten the burdens which thousands of women now unnecessarily bear,” National Association of Colored Women President Mary Church Terrell declared in her 1948 Congressional testimony in support of the ERA. In the 1970s, racial justice groups, including The National Black Feminist Organization, the NAACP, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, also came out in support of the ERA.

“There were no Black founding fathers, there were no founding mothers—a great pity on both counts,” Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, declared to her peers in 1970. “It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so.” Chisholm reintroduced the ERA in the House of Representatives shortly after she was inaugurated, and, together with Representative Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to the House of Representatives and the first Asian American woman to serve in Congress, created through testimony and floor speeches a Congressional record of the ERA’s meaning that centered women of color and working women.

Civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray, the uncredited mind behind the winning legal case in Brown v. Board of Education, defined the two-pronged approach ERA advocates took to achieve legal equality — challenging sex discrimination under existing law while also advancing the amendment. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the sex discrimination case Reed v. Reed, she credited Murray and feminist lawyer Dorothy Kenyon, another ERA pioneer, for her argument. When arguing another gender equality case before the Court, Frontiero v. Richardson, Ginsberg quoted abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Moore Grimké in her oral arguments: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our neck.” 

“Ratification of the ERA would put black women in a better position to fight on all fronts,” Black feminists Cathy Sedwick and Reba Williams wrote in The Black Scholar in 1976. “Each gain for black women’s rights is a gain for the black liberation movement — a gain which helps to strengthen that movement as well…It is in the interest of all black people to join the struggle for the ratification of the ERA, as a way to advance the conditions of black women.”

“We were in a time when things were changing for civil rights and women's rights,” Eleanor Smeal recalled. The founder of Feminist Majority Foundation and former president of National NOW led the fight to ratify the ERA during the 1970s and 80s — and got her start in activism as a student at Duke University organizing for civil rights. “There was an intertwining of these movements. It wasn't like we were fighting each other. Not at all. We were exchanging information.”

“For women of color through the 1970s,” asserted Katherine Turk, associate professor of history and adjunct associate professor of women's and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America, “African American women are more in favor of the ERA than white women, on balance. They see equal rights as one piece of a broader strategy, one step on the road to making this nation live up to its promises and its potential as a place that's truly fair for everyone.” In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 1970, Pauli Murray even wrote that Black women “have the most to gain from the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment.” 

“Even though women of color, Black women, our LGBTQ siblings, bear the brunt of this intersectional marginalization and oppression, and stood to benefit the most from the passage of the ERA, we were not reflected in the movements,” Rep. Pressley said. “It did not seem that there was space for us. And that is changing.” Rep. Pressley, who cited Murray and Chisholm as two of her inspirations to NWHM, co-founded with Rep. Cori Bush the first-ever ERA Congressional Caucus, which used the ERA’s centennial last year as an opportunity to highlight the contributions of women of color to the ratification drive of the sixties and seventies. In her work as a leader in the ERA fight in Congress, she’s been heartened to find women across lines of race, class, and sexuality united to finish the fight together. 

“As a Black woman in America, I've always known that my rights are tenuous and subject to someone else's whims,” Zakiya Thomas, president and CEO of the ERA Coalition, explained. “There's a lot of Black and brown women, cis and trans women, who are leading this effort, because we understand that…it benefits all of us. We've seen that if we keep being siloed, then we're going to continue to be fractured and not be able to advance our cause.” 

That’s where the Coalition comes in — a “movement of movements” made up of 290 partner organizations, from labor unions to racial justice groups to LGBTQ+ rights organizations and feminist nonprofits, harnessing the power of a combined 80 million supporters to make constitutional equality a reality. 
 

“The ERA movement today is a broader movement, and is becoming even more so than it was then because we're better understanding the need for the big tent,” explained Jen Tucker, senior advisor, strategic partnerships and engagement at the Coalition and former vice president at the Center for Women Policy Studies. “There's still a perception for some that the ERA is a ‘white woman's issue.’ But more and more people are feeling like: This is important to me. And more white women are feeling that: This is not just mine alone, and understand that all of these issues are connected, and that we have a common foe to overcome.”

“We're in a new era of feminism that is really about showing up for all communities and all people and approaching feminist issues with a really intersectional lens, thinking about race, class, sexuality,” explained Rosie Couture, co-founder and executive director of the pro-ERA Young Feminist Party. “We can't keep on advancing an ERA that's not gonna be about abortion, or that we're gonna say isn't related to trans rights, because if we're not fighting for equality for everybody, we're fighting for nobody.”

“I see the diversity of this coalition in this moment,” Rep. Pressley shared. “It is people from every walk of life representing every race, ethnicity, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation, young and old.”

“The movement has learned a lot about how to pursue its goals…how to succeed, how to build coalitions, how to frame issues broadly,” Turk echoed. “That's the result of generations of people, of women of color, demanding that their concerns and their interests be at the center of the movement.”

The Power of the ERA

“My method of understanding what the ERA would mean legally goes back to: Why was it introduced, why was it adopted, and why was it ratified?” Suk explained. “In 1923, the reason you need to have an ERA is completely different from the reason you need to have an ERA in 1972."

In 2024, the list of reasons goes on and on. At the top is the ruling in Dobbs that overturned Roe v. Wade and led to a flood of abortion bans and restrictions nationwide. “If gender equality was already enshrined in the Constitution, perhaps the Supreme Court would not have moved with such callousness, cluelessness and disregard for the women in this country,” Rep. Pressley asserted, “because we would have had legal protections.”

“Dobbs was a huge earthquake wake up call,” said Katherine Spillar, executive director of Feminist Majority Foundation. “It really is a symbol of what we're up against in this country, this entrenched patriarchy that is determined to turn back the clock.”

“Unless we want to continue to have the ability for rights and privileges that we think we have and keep them from being taken away,” Thomas added, “we have to have the Equal Rights Amendment.”

“Feminists in the 1970s, many of them knew this too,” Turk said, “that you need to work with the tools you have at hand in the context that you live in. We live in a nation of laws and we need to have fair laws, but changing the law itself is never gonna be enough to really create the kind of society that most feminists want.”

Even its pioneers knew that the ERA was one piece of a much larger puzzle. Eastman, in addition to advancing the ERA, called for equal pay, equal education, reproductive choice, and paid maternity leave, and feminist advocates have long taken a multi-pronged approach, advocating not just for sweeping reforms like the ERA but for more specific legislation and cultural changes that reinforce the idea of equality. “I think you can be multi-issue and get further,” Smeal echoed. “It teaches the basic premises of what we're doing: Human rights are important, and they belong to everybody, so you don't wanna cut anybody out.”

Today’s torch-bearers emphasize, too, that the ERA is a foundation for much bigger social change. “It's about equality for all,” Tucker emphasized. “It protects us from sex discrimination, but in protecting us from sex discrimination, it protects women of color who may experience sex discrimination somewhat differently than white women…We just have to implement it and recognize that all of these different people are affected, and it's our experiences that determine how it gets supplied to us in our communities.”

“One of the things that intrigued me tactically is that we had never considered the ERA as the tool and the protection from the many other status quo injustices that women continue to face,” Rep. Pressley explained. “If you're in a room talking about the wage gap, it was very rare that someone in the room would say, ‘that's why we need to pass the ERA.’ If we're in a space talking about domestic violence or sexual assault, and the lack of justice for survivors, you wouldn't say ‘and that's why we need to pass the ERA.’ If you were talking about inequitable health care systems or the Black maternal morbidity rates, you would not say ‘that's why we need to pass the ERA.’ And I wanted to change that. I wanted people to see the connection — that these inequities and disparities that we have normalized, as a conflated part of the experience and what it means to be girl, to be women, are all connected to the fact that gender equality has not been enshrined in our Constitution.”

“It's the same forces fighting against us, so why don't we come together and work together to push it forward?” Thomas posits. “We don't need to buy into this theory that there's only so much we can do.”

What’s Next in the Fight for Equality

The ERA legislation approved by Congress in 1972 included a seven-year deadline for the Amendment to meet the ratification requirements. Constitutional scholars agree that Congress has the power to extend and even dismiss the restriction—which they did in 1978, adding four more years. The ERA deadline ultimately expired, but 50 years later, it finally crossed the finish line, thanks to women lawmakers in Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia. 

In each state, the ERA’s story illustrated how the centuries-long feminist movement in the U.S. has expanded equality and empowered women to claim their rights. In all three states, it was women lawmakers, and particularly women of color, who spearheaded legislation to ratify the ERA. In all three, a broad, bipartisan coalition of women across lines of race, class, sexuality, and gender identity came together to advance the ERA. Also in all three, lawmakers passed significant legislation alongside ERA resolutions to advance women’s rights and improve the lives of women and girls — from measures on equal pay and violence against women to accommodations for pregnant and nursing women, LGBTQ+ protections, and paid family leave. In all three, feminist trailblazers — from Ginsburg to Chilsholm to Black feminist lawyer and politician Barbara Jordan, who led the 1978 push to extend the deadline — were named as inspirations for a new generation of feminist leaders.

“Activists and the movement might focus on the end goal—being able to open up your pocket Constitution and seeing that ERA there,” Suk explained, but “it's often not just a constitutional amendment itself, but the process of advocating and making arguments for constitutional amendments, that we get other kinds of Constitutional changes — changes in the way that the people and the courts interpret abstract principles that we already have in the Constitution in the direction more closely aligned to what the ERA proponents were advocating for initially.”

While setting their sights on constitutional equality, feminists built a movement that has expanded opportunities for women and girls, increased women’s political power — and led the ERA to a tipping point. 

“There is an awareness that it's been 100 years too long,” Rep. Pressley declared. “And the time is now.”

2022 is the year the ERA should have taken effect. Advocates now are putting pressure on Congress to affirm the ERA, remove its deadline, and add it to the Constitution. Rep. Pressley introduced legislation to recognize the ERA as ratified and do away with the arbitrary deadline and authored a discharge petition to move that legislation to the floor; she is encouraging voters to reach out to their representatives and urge them to support both efforts. Smeal and other ERA leaders and activists are also collecting signatures at Sign4ERA.org urging Congress to act. 

Polls have found consistently overwhelming support for the ERA, even across party lines. A recent poll by Feminist Majority Foundation, Ms. magazine, and Lake Research Partners also identified that it is a leading issue for voters in the 2024 elections.

“We are in a place where there are no other questions that need to be answered about the ERA that prevents it from actually being treated like it's the 28th amendment,” Ting Ting Cheng, director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia Law School, noted during a National Women's History Alliance webinar on the ERA. “There are no clear rules about whether or not it's in the Constitution, because there's a strong argument that it’s already in there. It's just up to the people to give it the legitimacy that it deserves.”

And then, once more, we can begin.

“Getting the ERA in the Constitution is the first step of our fight,” Couture noted. “It'll then be a series of court decisions that really determine what the ERA is. As a movement, we have a responsibility to shape what the ERA is, who it protects, and what it stands for. We need to be very vocally and clearly pro-abortion, pro racial justice, pro-LGBTQ+ rights, so that when the originalists of the world interpret the ERA in a hundred years, they can undeniably say: This is what they intended.”

“There's a very big role for an active feminist movement” after the ERA is added to the Constitution, Spillar echoes. “Whether your big interest is education or employment or violence… there is a role to play in bringing the ERA into lawsuits and into the push for reforms.”

Thomas and the ERA Coalition are engaging in audits and roundtables that imagine implementation of the Amendment, doing the work needed to draw up blueprints for the world that comes after it. “What I love about the Equal Rights Amendment is that it's a promise,” Thomas said. “It says what it intends: You can't discriminate on the basis of sex. But then the next clause empowers Congress to act, to implement the amendment. Which means Congress can create laws that actually protect against discrimination, if they feel like they have the mandate. It could protect against violence against women. It could make college campuses have to actually report when sexual assault happens on campus. It could mean that LGBTQ folks could get married and live their fullest lives without fear of discrimination, where trans people can put on a show or read to kids without fear of going to jail, where women could be paid the same as a man for doing the same work.” 

“On the other side of this,” Rep. Pressley sees “something transformational. I see freedom. I see justice. I see fairness.”

Carmen Rios is a feminist writer and broadcaster who has spent the last decade telling feminist stories. Her work has been published by platforms including Ms., Autostraddle, BuzzFeed, Bitch, CityLab, DAME, Everyday Feminism, Feministing, GirlBoss, SIGNS, and the Women’s Media Center. Follow her at @carmenriosss.