Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a
proposed amendment to the United States
Constitution which was intended to guaran-
tee that equal rights under any federal, state
or local law could not be denied on account
of sex. The ERA failed to gain ratification be-
fore its deadline and although it has been re-
introduced in every Congress since 1982,
public attention to it has greatly diminished.
Text
“ Section 1. Equality of rights under
the law shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by
any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have
the power to enforce, by appropriate
legislation, the provisions of this
article.
Section 3. This amendment shall
take effect two years after the date
of ratification.[1][2]
”
History
In the Congress
Although the Nineteenth Amendment had
prohibited the denial of the right to vote be-
cause of a person’s sex, Alice Paul, a suffra-
gette leader, argued that this right alone
would not end remaining vestiges of legal
discrimination based upon sex. In 1923, Paul
drafted the Equal Rights Amendment and
presented it as the "Lucretia Mott Amend-
ment" at the celebration of the 75th an-
niversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declara-
tion of Sentiments.
The National Woman’s Party took the ERA
to Congress in the 1920s, where Senator
Charles Curtis and Representative Daniel R.
Anthony,
Jr.—both Republicans and both
from Kansas—introduced it for the first time
as Senate Joint Resolution No. 21 on Decem-
ber 10, 1923, and as House Joint Resolution
No. 75 on December 13, 1923, respectively.
Though the ERA was introduced in every
Congressional session between 1923 and
1970, it almost never reached the floor of
either the Senate or the House for a vote—in-
stead, it was usually "bottled up" in commit-
tee. Exceptions occurred in 1946, when it
was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 38 to
35, and in 1950, when it was passed by the
Senate in a modified form unacceptable to its
supporters.
The Republican Party included support of
the ERA in its platform b