Women's Equality Day: Past and Present

August 25, 2024

This Women’s Equality Day (Monday, August 26th)—while celebrating the anniversary of women’s right to vote—I’m also thinking about the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality, a euphoric march of women demanding full citizenship that changed America’s political landscape. Once again—with Kamala Harris’ candidacy—American women are feeling the same kind of giddy, determined hope.

In that similarity lies both a wondrous sense of destiny finally fulfilling and a warning for her supporters to heed during the next 70 days. One in keeping with Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ much meme’d advice to her daughter that she hadn’t “fallen out of a coconut tree” but existed “in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Let me explain:

54 years ago today, women flooded the streets in over 40 cities across the nation.  In New York City, an estimated 30,000 women shut down Fifth Avenue. Carrying signs like "Don't iron while the strike is hot," protestors demanded equal opportunities in education and employment, affordable and more accessible childcare, and legal access to abortion. Many homemakers joined in, refusing to clean or cook that day.

As never before, women seemed united.

Riding the momentum of that 1970 march and second wave feminism being led by activists like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm—Congresswoman Martha Griffith (D-MI) managed to collect enough signatures on a rarely used procedural tactic to drag the Equal Rights Amendment out of committee—where opponents had kept it bottled up for years—onto the floor for debate.  

There were only 12 women among the 435 House members. And yet, on October 21st, 1971, the House passed the ERA with a resounding 354 yeas to 24 nays. Five months later, the then all-male Senate also adopted the ERA: 84 to 8. (Even arch conservatives like Strom Thurmond voted for women’s rights that day.)

Within 48 hours, Hawaii, Delaware, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Idaho ratified. By the end of a year, 30 states had followed suit. Only eight more were needed to reach the required 38 out of 50.

At 1973’s dawning, feminists and their male allies—and there were many at that time, including a majority of Republicans—rejoiced. Final ratification before a 1979 deadline seemed an easy certainty.

No longer would states be allowed to implement laws that denied a woman the right to own property, start a business, obtain a loan on her own, or stop her from holding certain types of jobs, demanding the same pay as male colleagues, or continuing to work after marrying or when pregnant. No longer would women have to pick off discriminatory practices one at a time, lawsuit by endless lawsuit.  

And no longer would women have to hold our collective breath every four years that some anti-women president or Congress could be elected and start rescinding our rights.

With the ERA’s simple 40 words, the Constitution would protect us.

That was before the backlash—led by conservative author and mother of six, Phyllis Schlafly and a coalition of mostly upper class, suburban housewives, feeling dismissed and replaced by the ascendency of “women’s lib.” They flooded state houses wearing STOP ERA pins (Stop-Taking-Our-Privileges). Armed with home-baked bread and valentines (tagged: from bread-bakers to our breadwinners) they begged legislators to protect motherhood. They argued the ERA would destroy the American family—requiring women to produce 50 percent of a household’s income and denying them the choice of being stay-at-home mothers. That husbands would now be entitled to avoid financially supporting them or their children either during marriage or in the case of divorce.

Their fearmongering arguments turned the varying hopes and dreams of women into a bitter culture war about gender roles and “family values.” It fueled the rise of the “moral majority” and the religious right’s political clout. When that anti-ERA, anti-abortion coalition elected Ronald Reagan president, he became the first since the ERA’s passage to oppose it—even though 83 percent of polled Americans believed the amendment should become law.

 When the ratification deadline came, the tally of required states fell short. By three.

Many of the STOP ERA campaign's dire claims of what the amendment would cause—more and more women forced to work for economic reasons, exhausted by having to juggle their roles as mothers and wives with full time jobs, many delaying or not have children because of financial pressures and lack of childcare support—have come about anyway. Just without the ERA’s guaranteed protections.

Witness data in the 2020 census: American women still made less than men in the exact same jobs. White women: 83 cents to a man's dollar. Black: 64 cents to the same dollar. Latina: 57 cents. Women must work 40 extra days to equal men's wage in the same job.

The ERA would also automatically protect women’s reproduction freedoms because of its guaranteed equity regardless of sex/gender, according to the Columbia Law School Center for Gender & Sexuality Law.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that a stereotyped, gendered notion of citizenship in which women were “regarded as the center of home and family life, with attendant special responsibilities that precluded full and independent legal status under the Constitution” denied equal citizenship. “Those views,” she continued, “are no longer consistent with our understanding of the family, the individual, or the constitution.” 

And yet, here we are again.

In 1973, the ERA’s majority support was blindsided. They didn’t think Americans would listen to the out-of-step STOP ERA hyperbole and disinformation—until that suburban, “trad-wife” backlash turned into a juggernaut. 

Consider the statement by GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, about: “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

His damnation echoes Schlafly's about "sharp-tongued” unmarried women sowing seeds of discontent “so that all women can be unhappy in some new sisterhood of frustrated togetherness."

Now consider what Project 2025 says. Claiming “the American family is in crisis,” it blames single women and/or unwed mothers for the country’s ills and promises to reinstate by legal force the traditional mother-father-two kids paradigm.

Among other things, the 900-page document calls for further tightening on reproductive choices with a life-begins-at-inception philosophy that would ban certain contraception and outlaw IVF.  It would do away with no-fault divorces, making it harder for women to leave dangerous marriages, reflecting Vance’s belief that women should not be able to “shift spouses” like they “change underwear,” and instead stay in abusive unions for the sake of the children. (A flawed contention since wife abusers typically turn their wrath on children as soon as they express their own opinions.)

Project 2025 also wants to do away with government-funded early childhood programs like Head Start and would incentivize “home-based” childcare solutions. The goal of pushing women into staying home and birthing more babies is only so veiled.  

I’m not an expert on second wave feminism, simply a working mom, reporter, and author who’s spent 40 years covering women’s issues as a Washingtonian magazine senior writer and now a historical, biographical, and political era “docudrama” novelist. My latest, Truth, Lies, and the Questions In Between, took me on a deep dive into 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings, the struggle over the ERA, and Roe v. Wade.  The irony of truth finally working in Watergate— (Americans were allowed to hear evidence of wrongdoing and we actually listened) —while fearmongering and hyperbole unraveled the ERA seems striking allegory right now.

As author Glennon Doyle urged in a Zoom call among 160,000 Harris supporters, it is so important that we women “not turn on one another now.” That we don’t fall into the trap of polarization, of defensive entrenchment, villainizing other women, and assuming that because they choose to be something different from us that they condemn our hopes and self-definition.

Democracy believes we have the intrinsic ability and right to think for ourselves—but that also requires we remember the basic, glorious tenet of this nation: e pluribus unum. From many, one. Informed, civil debate among many ways of thinking leading to an eventual consensus—the will of the people, for both the common good and the upheld dignity of each individual.   

In 1977, facing the unexpected surge of anti-ERA and anti-choice forces, Jill Ruckelshaus—(an influential moderate Republican)—spoke to a NWPC (National Women’s Political Caucus) gathering. A cofounder and best spokesperson for its bipartisan quest to groom women to run for office, Ruckelshaus had long and eloquently urged what feminists have now learned the hard way post-Dobbs: that tweets, impassioned Oscar speeches, and cultural representation are great, but do not have the same power as legislative seats and votes.

(Today, out of 435 voting members of the House, 125 are women—28.7 percent. Better than 1973! But certainly not equal to the 51 percent of the American population that women constitute.)

Ruckelshaus’ words hauntingly apply today: “Sisters, you were all here because you are smart. You are committed to an idea that is much larger than ourselves or the length of our lifetimes. You want to elect women to public office because we want to gain some control over the issues that affect our lives.

“We want the women of America to understand what it is to be raised female where we have met the government and it is not us. Somebody is making laws in this country that affects our legal rights, even our basic right to control our own bodies. And there are not enough of us among those somebodies.

“We’ve learned that we have to win our fight, then win it again four years later, and four years after that. . . I am asking for everything you have to give... your youth, your sleep, your patience, your sense of humor. . . your pride in being a woman and all your dreams you've ever had for your daughters, and nieces, and granddaughters.”

On this Women’s Equality Day, let us cross over the proverbial playground or boardroom or church hall and reach out to one another to ask: What do we really want for our sisters and daughters and all the young, vibrant, promising girls to follow?