t is obvious from the way the women in the photo above are dressed that it was not taken recently. Yet it illustrates what remains to this day a glaring injustice and exception to the “self-evident” truth that “all [humans] are created equal” that is the extraordinarily radical “proposition,” as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, upon which the United States was founded.
To put it in Lincoln’s style, twelve score and seven years after our fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal – of course that was only a proposition in 1776 – while the “Votes for Women” sign held by one of the woman’s suffrage demonstrators in the photo has been achieved for a bit more than a century, the “Equality for Women” called for in the sign held by the woman on the left is not yet “a thing.”
Almost all nations in the world have provisions in their constitutions guaranteeing equal rights for women. To be sure, in many of them those provisions are no more followed than was Liberty for all at the time the United States was conceived. But the United States Constitution still does not specifically prohibit discrimination against women.
“Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared in a 2010 interview. “The only question is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”
Here’s a fact that most readers will find astonishing: the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has been ratified by 187 of 194 countries. The seven that have not done so are the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Holy See (Vatican City), Somalia, Sudan, three small Pacific islands (Niue, Palau, and Tonga) … and the United States of America.
It is unsurprising that a so-called “Islamic Republic,” other extremist Islamic nations, or the seat of another religion that has subordinated women for two thousand years would not agree to eliminate discrimination against women. I don’t know what the problem is with the island nations. Though “Republican” idionuts such as Mike Johnson are working to transform our nation into the “Christian Republic” of the United States or Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, we’re not there yet and the nation that introduced the revolutionary ideals of equality and rule from below should not be included on this list of shame.
There have been efforts to bring women into constitutional full equality. One hundred years ago this week, a proposed Constitutional amendment was introduced in Congress. It stated:
“Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”
Three years earlier, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” had moved women closer to being included in the ideals enunciated in 1776.
The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced year after year in Congress, but never got traction until the new women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. More on that in a moment.
The implications of the ideals of the American Revolution were clear to some at the time. It is now widely known by Americans who have been taught factual history – the truths that the authoritarians now in control of the once Grand Old Party want to outlaw – that Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband in 1776 in which she implored him and the other men who were prepared to declare independence from Great Britain to “Remember the Ladies”:
and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.
John Adams’ response was to laugh off the suggestion, though his letter indicates that he understood the implications for the equality of all that were contained in the ideals his colleagues were stating to the world:
We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient – that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent – that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.
But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented. …
Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. … We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat … After stirring up Tories, Landjobbers, Trimmers, Bigots, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hanoverians, Hessians, Russians, Irish Roman Catholicks, Scotch Renegadoes, at last they have stimulated the to demand new Priviledges and threaten to rebell.
The blank space the male Adams left clearly refers to women. Why did he leave the word out? Surely the omission has been discussed by historians, but I have not at this point found any arguments on the question.
Whatever the reason for Adams using a blank space instead of writing “women,” it reflects the condition of women throughout most of history, including that of the United States. I could write books on that history. Indeed, I have written one book, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, and am currently writing another (working title, “Diving Beneath the Wreck … and Resurfacing: On the Origin and Consequences of Sexual Inequality”) on the centrality of the subordination of women to human history.
Here, of necessity, I’ll skip over most of that history in the United States from the time of the Adams family letters to the new Equal Rights Amendment being passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972.
Along the way, women and male allies gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 to write a “Declaration of Sentiments” patterned after the 1776 Declaration, demanding equal rights for women. Following the Enslavers’ Rebellion, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) provided birthright citizenship, but also placed the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time (which perhaps was progress – in earlier years, it may not have occurred to men in power that rights they enumerated could apply to anyone other than males) in an attempt to secure voting rights for formerly enslaved men, but not women. Then the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) provided that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” but said nothing about denying voting rights on the basis of sex.
Outraged by their omission, some suffragists decided to vote in the 1872 presidential election. One among their number, Virginia Minor, attempted to register to vote in St. Louis. The voting registrar, Reese Happersett, turned her away because she was, well, a “she.” Her husband brought suit (married women had no standing to bring legal cases).
The decision of the US Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett (1875) held that while the Fourteenth Amendment said that women are citizens, citizenship does not necessarily include the right to vote, so “the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void.”
That “problem” was eliminated in 1920, but equality for women in all other respects remained without Constitutional protection.
Finally, in 1971, Congress passed and sent to the states for ratification an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. It simply says:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
Does that sound controversial? It wasn’t in the 1970s, when most Republicans, along with almost all Democrats, supported it. By 1977, 35 of the required 38 states had ratified the ERA. Then, Phyllis Schlafly organized opposition and no more states ratified it.
A forceful new push to ratify the ERA arose in the current century. An organization called “Equal Means Equal” was founded in 2008 and a powerful film by the same name, made by my friend Kamala Lopez, was released in 2016, helping to bring public attention back to the issue. I became the state leader of the EME Mississippi affiliate, Miss Equality for Women.
In March 2017, Nevada become the first state in nearly four decades to ratify the ERA. Illinois followed in 2018. On January 27, 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, giving it the three-fourths of all states required to make an Amendment part of the Constitution.
The problem, though, is that the Congressional action extending the time limit to reach ratification by three-fourths of the states had expired in 1982. Advocates of equality have been pressing the Justice Department to instruct the Archivist of the United States to publish the Equal Rights Amendment as an official part of the Constitution because time limits cannot be put on ratification of constitutional amendments and the ERA now has been ratified. The Trump Administration blockaded the effort.
When Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs case was leaked, indicating that he was overturning women’s right to control their own bodies because a fundamental right to reproductive choice had to be at least “implicitly protected by [a] Constitutional provision” for the Court to recognize it as a right, women’s rights groups urged the Biden Administration to have the ERA published immediately so that there would be such a protection in the Constitution before the final devastating decision was handed down. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen.
With all sorts of American rights under dire threat by the MAGA authoritarians and a full century after the first introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment, the tine has come to say, “Not enough is not enough”:
