Despite the efforts of President Carter, Congress, and a quiet but determined coalition of Senate wives, the ERA remains unratified more than four decades after its extended deadline expired.
This Women’s History Month, we remember President Jimmy Carter’s role in establishing this official observance of women’s achievements, his related support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and some unsung heroes in the Senate Wives Club who were instrumental in gaining Carter’s support for an ERA milestone that advanced, but ultimately failed to achieve, ERA ratification.
Women’s contributions to building the nation were first recognized by presidential proclamation in 1980 when Carter set aside time in March to honor their role in history as being “as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.”
“Too often,” he said, “women were unsung” and “their contributions went unnoticed.” In establishing the observance that would later become Women’s History Month, he expressed his hope that “understanding the true history of our country” would translate to citizens comprehending “the need for full equality under the law for all our people.”
That equality could best be accomplished, the proclamation declared, by ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment “which states that ‘Equality of Rights under the Law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,’” in the U.S. Constitution.
Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) on March 22, 1972, and sent it to the states for ratification with a seven-year deadline. When that 1979 deadline was looming three states short of its goal, Carter added his signature to House Joint Resolution 638, extending it to 1982. Conventional wisdom at the time held that without that extension, the “ERA would have been doomed.”
During the October 1978 signing ceremony for H.J. Res. 638, Carter endorsed the ERA as a necessary and “simple acknowledgement that women should have equal rights under the laws of our Nation.” He credited by name “the extremely effective effort made by [Sen.] Birch Bayh [D-Ind.], [Rep.] Don Edwards [D-Calif.], [and] many others, certainly including the majority leader of the Senate, [and] the Speaker of the House…”—all men—for making the extension possible.
Those unnamed “many others” included Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.), one of only 20 women in the 95th Congress, who sponsored H.J. Res. 638, “Joint resolution extending the deadline for the ratification of the equal rights amendment” in 1977.
Other unsung ERA advocates whose efforts made the extension possible were invited attendees at the signing ceremony, including Marjorie Chambers, executive director of the American Association of University Women (AAUW); Harriet Hentges, executive director of the League of Women Voters; Ellie Smeal, then-president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and today the publisher of Ms. magazine; and former Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.), then co-chair of the National Advisory Committee for Women, established by President Carter earlier that year by Executive Order 12050.
Lori Hansen Riegle—who can be seen in official photos of the event beside her husband, Sen. Don Riegle (D-Mich.), looking on as Carter signed—was part of a much lesser known contingent, whose members were reported to have been “among the most effective lobbyists” in winning the necessary votes leading to the day’s celebration: Senate wives.
In the weeks leading up to H.J. Res. 638’s successful passage, ERA advocates, including a small group of Senate wives, worked to defeat a “a so-called ‘killer’ amendment” (also known as the Garn Amendment) that would have scuttled action on the joint resolution. The amendment put forward by Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) would have legitimized state legislative retraction of previous ratification. Sen. Birch Bayh, the bill’s floor manager, said that if the Senate had not voted down Garn’s proposed amendment, “not only would the ERA extension have been gutted to the point of death, but it would have effectively killed any chance for final ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by the necessary 38 states.”
President Carter personally made calls to lawmakers undecided about how they would vote on the Garn Amendment, as did Vice President Mondale.
Cokie Roberts of National Public Radio reported that Senate wives Lori Riegle, Rita Hollings, Susan DeConcini and Sharon Percy Rockefeller “prevailed on their spouses to vote against” the Garn Amendment and, joined by Second Lady Joan Mondale, helped persuade Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) to bring up the ERA extension bill “in the hectic closing days of the session.”
In a recent interview with Ms., Lori Hansen Riegle offered some insight on these events from the perspective of one of the wives involved. Hansen related that she had only been married to her husband Don for a few months at the time.
As a member of the professional staff of the Labor and Human Resources Committee herself, she had insight into how the political process worked, but said of her participation, “I was appropriately very deferential to the other women, who were more senior to me, and who knew the Senate from the perspective of the spouses and the members themselves in a personal sense.”
Describing the context of the “Senate Wives Club” in the late 1970s (it didn’t become the “Senate Spouses Organization” until the 1990s), Hansen noted that the group’s activities had long included rolling “bandages for the Red Cross. By the time I got there they were knitting, lap blankets, I think they were. The conversations were just polite—women talking about family, friends … not substance.”
It was “very uncommon” at that time for the Wives Club to be involved at all in trying to advocate for a particular policy outcome. “We were cognizant of the realities of the Senate at the time … and we thought that working quietly behind the scenes was the way for us to be effective” in that traditional environment, said Hansen.
“We were never trying to get any attention to what we were doing. We were trying to work respectfully to try to persuade the members that we could,” said Hansen. “And I don’t recall us coordinating with advocacy groups or anything,” but “we were watching what they were doing, and of course there was the wonderful Women’s March in July of that year, which was very motivating.”
The person-to-person approach taken by the 10 or so Senate wives involved in the effort allowed them to convey to members the importance of the ERA to “individual women’s lives—their daughters’ lives, their granddaughters’ lives…”
“Many of the people we” sought to convince, Hansen said (she did not use the word “lobby”) expressed support for the ERA, but in terms of agreeing to an extension, would say that they weren’t sure that the Constitution allowed for it, or would otherwise raise concerns with procedure.
“We had to keep it so that they were aware that it wasn’t just a technical issue,” said Hansen, but “that it was highly personal, and it affected more than half the population.”
The legitimacy of the deadline for ratification has continued to be a point of contestation between ERA advocates and opponents since the Carter-era extension vote.
The American Bar Association resolved in August 2024 that “(1) a deadline for ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not consistent with Article V of the Constitution, and (2) under Article V states are not permitted to rescind prior ratifications. Therefore, the resolution urges support of ERA implementation by the legal community and all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments.”
This position supported the resolve of some, including the ERA Coalition and 140 other nonprofit organizations, who called for President Biden to certify the ERA in the final days of his presidency—since the ERA met the requirements for certification when it passed the requisite two-thirds of Congress in 1972 and achieved ratification by three-quarters of the states in 2020 when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify.
Still, former archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, declared in December 2024 that she could not legally certify the ERA as part of the Constitution. Her position did not change after President Biden, at the eleventh hour, declared the ERA “the law of the land” in a statement that the White House conceded had “no immediate force of law.”
Shogan and others had pointed to a Trump-era memo issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2020 “stating that the ERA resolution expired after its 1982 deadline and that any state ratification that happened after 1982 was null.”
A subsequent memo from the Biden administration’s OLC, while acknowledging the complexity of the issue, “did not withdraw the Trump OLC’s previous opinion” and “effectively deferred the issue to Congress and the courts.” Ultimately, as the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) suggests, “The path to certifying the ERA as part of the U.S. Constitution” likely “lies with Congress.”
At the time of Carter’s sign off on H.J. Res. 638, he seemed confident that during the additional three years (until January 1982) afforded, the public would become well educated and the legislatures of the 15 states that had not yet ratified would become “thoroughly acquainted with the beneficial consequences” of the ERA and “show this by their full support of the passage of this amendment.”
Now, 43 years after the extended deadline—considered at the time to be a “political victory” for President Carter—expired, the fight for the passage of the ERA faces a period of substantial setback with President Trump again in the White House and Republicans holding majorities in both the House and Senate.
Since Congress passed the ERA in 1972, women’s representation has increased from less than 1 percent to 26 percent in the Senate, and from 4 percent to almost 29 percent in the House. Almost eight in 10 adults in the U.S. across parties say they “at least somewhat favor adding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.” And still, its ratification has remained elusive.
It remains an open question as to whether women’s rights will be more easily secured once their representation moves closer to parity, though that has not proven to be the case at the present time in the U.S., where “women and girls are facing increasing restrictions to their sexual and reproductive health and rights as the Supreme Court and multiple states have moved to ban or heavily restrict access to legal abortions.”
The role of Senate Wives in advancing the ERA through a deadline extension in 1978 illustrates the limits of such soft power in securing a place in media or historical accounts or steering the policy agenda.
Sen. Don Riegle alone received a personally signed note of thanks and a commemorative pen from President Carter after the signing ceremony for H.J. Res.638, as he had advocated for and cast a vote in its favor. An accompanying photograph, though, did bear the handwritten message: “Best Wishes to Lori Hansen and Don Riegle” signed by “Jimmy Carter.”
