Equal Rights Amendment needs work

Have you ever heard of the Equal Rights Amendment? Well it’s an important piece of legislation that needs to be passed.

In 1923, feminists such as Alice Paul who had recently won the right to vote for women in the United States pushed for an Equal Rights Amendment to be added to the U.S. Constituiton, stating “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” 

Alice Paul worked to get this passed until her death. Feminists such as Gloria Steinman continued Paul’s work throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1970 the House of Representatives approved the measure. After many speeches by Steinman and other women seeking equality under the law, the measure was finally passed in the Senate in 1972 and sent out to be ratified by the states on March 22, 1972. 

So why are we still discussing it today?

Believe it or not, this amendment created to provide the legal equality of the sexes and prohibit the discriminiation based on the sexes still has not been added to our Constitution. It should have been ratified back in 1972 when it was first created, but now, we finally have a new chance. 

When the Senate passed the ERA in back in 1972, because of pushback by a group that thought the Equal Rights Amendment would change American life for the worse (one reason being big businesses were scared that it would limit the number of hours that women could work, and they wanted cheap labor), it failed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states and was virtually forgotten until these few past years. The amendment technically expired in 1979. However, this year the House of Representatives voted to remove the expiration date on the bill. This meant there is an opportunity to finally add the ERA to the Constitution.

On January 12, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, thus fulfilling its requirement of two-thirds states ratification. Unbelievably, this still doesn’t mean it will become a part of the Constitution. According to National Public Radio, the U.S. Department of Justice has said the 1979 expiration date sticks. There will need to be lots of advocating in order to make it a part of the Constitution, but it is worth it.

The fact that the U.S. does not have an Equal Rights Amendment already shows that we truly need one. No matter how far we have come from when it was created in the 1970s there is a lot of work still to be done.

On average women make 17.5 percent less than men for the same job. America is the only industrialized nation not to ever have a woman president. Out of the 500 Fortune American businesses, only 6.6 percent are CEOs. 

We need to fight to get the Equal Rights Amendment because it is a necessary step forward in women rights.