The Failure of the Equal Rights Amendment

Summary

The Equal Rights Amendment was unsuccessfully introduced in every session of Congress from 1923 until 1972, when it finally passed both houses by a substantial majority. Twenty-two states ratified it in 1972, but a total of only thirty-five states, three short of the number required for the Amendment to take effect, ratified it before the deadline for ratification expired. Polls showed public opinion in favor of the ERA. Its opponents, however, took advantage of the slowing of the ratification tide in the late 1970s to launch a movement powerful enough to prevent its ratification.

Phyllis Schlafly led the crusade against the ERA. A wife, mother, devout Catholic, and charismatic speaker, she had a long history of conservative political activity and lobbying for "family values." Along the way she worked her way through college and wrote nine books. Although not a housewife, Schlafly spoke for housewives and mothers. She justified the contradiction between her career and her insistence that women should be wives and mothers above all by saying that women should work only if they can put home and family first.

Schlafly's organization, The Eagle Forum, claimed that the ERA would harm women by reducing their rights to freedom from the draft, financial support from husbands, and the benefit of protective labor laws. She argued that women were not the victims of discrimination. In her view they enjoyed privileges that men lacked, which were endangered by the ERA. For her, the equality envisioned by the Equal Rights Amendment was not desirable--the status quo was.

Schlafly and her colleagues gained the attention of women the ERA's proponents failed to reach--traditional wives and mothers. She made them fear the consequences of the ERA. With its passage, she told them, their roles and identities as women would be threatened. Many women came to feel that the ERA was a personal attack on them, their lifestyles, and their values. Schlafly, for example, often argued that the ERA would result in women being drafted and sent into combat. Proponents of the ERA were caught in a bind, for they could not definitively assert that women would not be drafted. The ERA's opponents, claiming that the ERA would force a vision of strict equality on America, also contended that it would make women 50% financially responsible for their families, force the repeal of protective divorce and dower laws, and remove the obligation of men to support their wives and children. This panoply of consequences was a daunting prospect to housewives who had no professional education or training. Though ERA proponents promised that the ERA would actually benefit wives by forcing states to recognize the contributions housewives make to family life, they were unable to provide concrete enough assurance to assuage the fears generated during the campaign to ratify the constitutional amendment.

The ERA also faced opposition from religious groups, especially Mormons, fundamentalist Christians, and Catholics. The ERA, they claimed, conflicted with God-given differences between men and women and disregarded traditional family and gender roles embedded in their religious beliefs. Schlafly claimed that God's mission for women was to give their families spiritual and emotional guidance. The ERA, she argued, threatened this mission and forced women to question their value.

The equality rhetoric of the ERA and its proponents could not overcome the fears engendered by the campaign against its ratification. The sight of traditional women vocalizing their opposition to the amendment altered the political dynamic in enough states to cause the ERA's failure.

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