2021 Could Finally be the Moment for the Equal Rights Amendment

The Biden administration’s proclamation for Women’s History Month underscored the undue social and economic struggles that still disadvantage women in the United States. Women continue to suffer from significant gender disparities in wages and carry the burdens caused by unequal caregiving duties and family responsibilities. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these inequities, especially for Black and Hispanic women. Food insecurity and domestic violence reports have increased considerably during the pandemic, primarily in households with children where women are the primary earners.

These hardships have left supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) wondering whether the turbulence of the pandemic has primed the political and social climate in a way that will allow them to finally push the amendment forward and ensure that it is fully incorporated into the U.S. Constitution. And they may be right.

The long history of the ERA, which dates to the 1920s, shows us that when events disrupt the traditional societal order, they produce a cultural opening for newfound appreciation for the gender equality that undergirds the ERA. Almost a century ago, the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the political upheaval of World War II helped ERA activists create considerable momentum behind the amendment. By the end of World War II, the ranks of amendment backers had grown to include Democrats and Republicans, working-class and upper-class Americans, as well as White and Black Americans. And this is the history that should make the amendment’s supporters hopeful today.

Originally introduced in Congress in 1923, the purpose of the ERA is to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and to ensure sex-based equality in the Constitution. In the 1920s, most Americans opposed the ERA. At the time, an array of organizations stood firm against the amendment because they were attached to the belief that women required special protection and sex-based legal treatment. But the Depression-era increase in the regulation of workingwomen pushed more women’s groups to recognize the potential disadvantages embedded in sex-specific labor laws. For many women, sex-specific labor polices hindered their ability to find and maintain gainful employment.

The leading organization behind the ERA, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), cultivated this growing discontent with such laws through its Depression-era economic campaign, which especially attacked escalating discrimination against workingwomen. Starting in the mid-1930s, the majority of groups that had supported the NWP’s economic campaign eventually moved to endorse the ERA. By 1937, official backers of the amendment had grown to more than 10 national women’s organizations. Because of a reinvigorated congressional campaign for the ERA, which the NWP launched in the mid-1930s, and the growing support for the amendment among other women’s groups, Congress soon became more receptive to the idea of complete constitutional sexual equality. After 1936, congressional subcommittees reported the ERA favorably nearly every year, and by the late 1930s, the ERA had gained the strong backing of several influential members of Congress.