About

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is an amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all regardless of sex.

On July 21, 1923, in Seneca Falls, NY, suffragist and feminist leader Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party unveiled the Equal Rights Amendment at the 75th anniversary celebration of the first Women’s Rights Convention. Paul saw this as the next logical step for those who had worked in the women’s suffrage movement. They named it the “Lucretia Mott Amendment,” after the famed abolitionist and suffrage leader. 

On December 13, 1923, former-Representative Daniel Anthony (KS-01), nephew of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, introduced the ERA in the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time and former-Senator Charles Curtis (R-Kansas) introduced it in the Senate. The proposed amendment was on the national political platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties and was introduced in Congress every year and gained popularity with the growing women’s movement in the early 1970s. 

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is recognized as the “founding mother” of modern constitutional sex equality law because of her briefs and arguments in landmark Supreme Court cases. But, it was the theories of constitutional gender equality that Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray that made Ginsburg famous. Murray was a transgender attorney, pioneering civil rights lawyer and ERA advocate. Murray’s written statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in September 1970 in support of the ERA argued, “Negro women as a group have the most to gain from the adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

The ERA was also championed by women legislators like Martha Wright Griffiths (MI-17),Patsy Takemoto Mink (HI-at large), Shirley Chisholm (NY-12), and Barbara Jordan (TX-18). On October 12, 1971, it passed in the House with a vote of 354 yeas, 24 nays and 51 not voting. It was then adopted by the Senate on March 22, 1972, by a vote of 84 yeas, 8 nays and 7 not voting—far more than the 2/3rds required by Article V of the U.S. Constitution. It had met the first constitutional threshold to amend the constitution.

The ERA was then quickly ratified by 30 states in that first year. However, due anti-ERA backlash that grew only after it was passed in Congress, progress on ERA ratification stalled.  that first go-round. An arbitrary 7-year deadline that was put in the proposing clause of the congressional ERA resolution in 1972 was set to expire in 1979. However, that time limit was never a constitutional requirement and over 100,000 people marched in DC in support of extending the deadline. Representative Barbara Jordan, who was the first-ever Black woman elected to Congress from the South, testified on May 18, 1978, in support of extension of the 1979 deadline for ERA ratification. She said, “The Equal Rights Amendment is for men and women. It is a constructive force for liberating the minds of men and the place of women. It is inclusive. The Equal Rights Amendment is about human values. It defines the standard by which future Congresses, legislatures, Presidents, Governors and courts will define human relationships. It amends the equal protection values of the 14th Amendment beyond race, color, and national origin to include gender. It is about equality and freedom and the pursuit of happiness. I favor the Equal Rights Amendment, and I favor extending the time limit for its ratification.”

Under immense national pressure, the 95th Congress passed a resolution by a simple majority extending the ratification deadline from 1979 to 1982. However, extending the deadline by just three years was a procedural trick by anti-equality legislators. They knew that three years was not enough time to remove anti-ERA state Senators in key states and the amendment would still fail despite the extension.

Due to procedural maneuvering and fierce opposition by anti-equality activists at the state level, the ERAfell just three states short of ratification in 1982, after the extended time-limit lapsed. 

There were several attempts to reignite the ERA fight on the federal level in the intervening decades, but none successful. However, state-level ERA advocates never gave up the dream of constitutional equality and pursued what they dubbed the “3-state strategy” to get it ratified in the three additional states needed. This strategy began to gain support after the 2016 Presidential election left women across the country and around the world to fear for their basic rights and fundamental freedoms.

In 2017, a queer Black preacher, Nevada State Senator Pat Spearman, re-introduced ERA ratification in Nevada. She was successful and the  ERA was ratified in Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018 and Virginia in 2020—completing the three states left needed to ratify. This final ratification opened the question: Is the ERA now the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? 

It is the position of the Congressional Caucus for the Equal Rights Amendment and many esteemed constitutional legal scholars that the ERA is the 28th Amendment and has been validly ratified. It just needs to be recognized by the federal government as a valid part of the U.S. Constitution. The ERA Caucus has been formed in pursuit of that goal.