Chronicle of the Equal Rights Amendment Quiz

Answer: True

That was section 1. Section 2 gives Congress the power to pass laws to enforce the amendment, and Section 3 simply states that the amendment takes effect two years after ratification.

Answer: Alice Paul

Alice Paul was a member of the National Woman's Party, a lobbying group that formed after women won the right to vote. She called it the Lucretia Mott Amendment after the famous 19th-century Quaker feminist and abolitionist who founded Swarthmore College.

Answer: True

Yes, it was, although rarely did it leave committee to end up on the floor for a vote. It was first introduced by Susan B. Anthony's nephew, Senator Charles Curtis.

In 1972, Congress finally passed the Amendment, and it was sent to the states for ratification. This is the process for all amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Answer: Dwight D. Eisenhower

Surprised? It might have passed in the 1950s had it not been for the attachment of the Hayden Rider, which stated: "The provisions of this article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex." The Hayden Rider was intended to preserve protective legislation for women workers, including limitations on work hours and restrictions from dangerous jobs, which were supported by labor unions.

The National Woman's Party, the lobbying group that advocated most strongly for the ERA, opposed this addition, and the bill died.

Answer: National Organization for Women (NOW)

Founded in 1966, NOW also pushed for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibited sex discrimination), tax deductions for childcare expenses, maternity leave, and many other issues.

The League of Women Voters, daughter group of the National-American Women's Suffrage Association, opposed the ERA until 1972 because they wanted to keep protective labor legislation for working-class women. NARAL's name should be self-explanatory. Women Strike for Peace was *primarily* an anti-war and anti-nuclear group, although they did support many of the same issues as NOW did.

Answer: Hawaii

Hawaii led the vanguard, even though New York might seem more likely. Before Wyoming became a state, it became in 1869 the first U.S. territory to allow women to vote in national elections. (Colorado would be the first proper state to enfranchise women.) Indiana was the last state to ratify the ERA in the twentieth century (in 1977).

Answer: Betty Ford

Ms. Ford blazed the trail for politically active First Ladies. Not only the ERA and equal pay for women, but also reproductive rights, breast cancer awareness, gun control, funding for the arts, and improved access to mental health care were among her passions. Conservatives in the Republican Party despised her, but most Americans loved her, for she held an approval rating of 75%, much higher than her husband's during his re-election campaign.

Eleanor Roosevelt opposed the National Woman's Party and the ERA. She felt that the ERA was mainly useful to middle-class women, as working-class women needed protective labor legislation. (Ms. Roosevelt had already died, however, before Congress passed the ERA.)

Answer: Just three states short.

There are fifty states in the Union, and so 38 of them make the three-quarters necessary for ratification. Although not all amendments are given deadlines, Congress had set one for the ERA. Thirty-five of the necessary 38 states had ratified by the original 1979 deadline, which was extended to 1982.

Answer: Phyllis Schlafly

Phyllis Schlafly was the instigator of a group who called themselves STOP-ERA. She claimed that the ERA would deny woman's right to be supported by her husband, privacy rights would be overturned, women would be sent into combat, abortion rights would be upheld, and homosexual marriages would be legalized. Ironically, the erosion of alimony began during the 1980s, and the remaining worries had either come true or started to come true by the early 21st century, without the ERA.

Answer: the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)

Labor unions (the AFL-CIO) initially opposed the ERA because they wanted to keep protective legislation for women, and they feared that women's increased presence in the workforce would lower wages. In 1973, however, the AFL-CIO reversed its position.

Health insurance companies opposed the ERA because they feared they would be forced to cover men and women equally, in particular to cover the expenses of pregnancy (or the termination thereof), and not be allowed to charge women higher premiums than men. Feminists accused insurance companies of underhanded manipulation of the public.

Answer: both the Republican and Democratic parties

The Republican Party had added the ERA to its platform in 1940; the Democratic Party in 1944, although until 1972 the labor unions (AFL-CIO) continued to fight it, while mainly Southern Democrats supported it. The Republican Party removed the ERA plank in 1980, thanks to the conservatives' transformation of the party.

The Democratic Party removed the plank in 2004, for reasons unclear. In 2012, the Democratic Party returned the ERA plank to its official National Platform after the Supreme Court ruled that women employees could not bring a class-action suit against Wal-Mart.

Answer: Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and Arizona

Additional states that never ratified the ERA include Utah, Iowa, and Mississippi.

The states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Idaho, and Nebraska had ratified the ERA early in the 1970s but later voted to rescind, although the legal validity of rescission is dubious.

Only one of two legislative houses approved the ERA in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Since the 1970s, only one house (the Assembly) had approved the amendment in Nevada as well, but in 2017 the Senate came on board. Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the ERA, forty years after the previous state, Indiana.

Answer: Antonin Scalia

Justice Scalia asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment had been wrongly applied to sex discrimination cases, despite decades of precedence, as he believed that the writers of the amendment did not intend it. (It is an Amendment passed during Reconstruction that includes the famous Equal Protection Clause, that no no state shall deny to any person "the equal protection of the laws".) At the time of his pronouncement, he was the longest-serving member on the Court.

Scalia subsequently received numerous accusations of hypocrisy, especially for ruling on the notion that a corporation is a person, as the Founding Fathers did not intend for corporations to be understood as persons.

Answer: 21

Even though the federal amendment did not pass, many states of the Union included some language of gender parity in their constitutions. They are as follows: AK, CA, CO, CT, HI, IA, MD, MA, MT, NH, NJ, NM, PA, TX, WA, WY, FL, IL, LA, UT and VA. Interestingly, some of the states with ERA-like constitutional clauses (FL, IL, LA, UT and VA) never ratified the federal ERA.

Answer: False

Actually, during the early 3rd millennium, the equality bees were buzzing. In the 110th Congress (2007-2008), Sen. Edward Kennedy (MA) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) re-introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. In the 112th Congress (2011-2012), Maloney did so again with Sen. Robert Menendez (NJ). Additionally, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Sen. Benjamin Cardin (MD) introduced legislation to remove the ratification deadline, so that the ERA would become law as soon as three more states ratify it. This is called the Three-State Strategy.

The Three-State Strategy began to meet some success in the late 2010s. Two states, Nevada and Illinois, ratified the ERA, in 2017 and 2018 respectively. At that time, only one more state was needed to achieve the 38 state ratifications necessary for the ERA to become the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.