Meet the Voices

• Pat Spearman, cleric, veteran and former Nevada state Senator who led efforts to ratify the federal ERA in 2016 and add an ERA to the state’s constitution. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
• Eleanor Smeal, founder and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms. and three-time president of the National Organization for Women. Follow FMF on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky and read Ellie’s work in Ms.
• Carol Moseley Braun, who made history as the first Black woman elected to the Senate, the first Black democratic senator, the first woman elected to represent Illinois in the Senate, the first woman on the Senate Finance Committee and the first woman and African American person ever appointed to serve as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Follow her on Facebook.
• Katherine Spillar, executive editor of Ms. and former president of Los Angeles NOW. Read her work in Ms. 
• Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project, now a part of NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center. Follow the ERA Project on Instagram and Twitter and read Ting Ting’s work in Ms.
• And your host, Carmen Rios, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky and read her work in Ms.

Bonus Content From This Episode

• Gender-Based Violence Is Everywhere. What Will It Take to Break the Cycle?

Further Reading From the 50 Years of Ms. Collection

Get a copy of the book.

• “We Want In,” by Carrie N. Baker. Spring 2020.
• “A Case for the Equal Rights Amendment,” by Victoria F. Nourse. Fall 2021.

Further Reading From the Ms. Archives

Explore our coverage of the Equal Rights Amendment, including our series on why The ERA is Essential to Democracy.

• “The Equal Rights Amendment: What’s In It For You?” by Ann Scott. July 1972 Preview Issue.
• “ERA: Fiction And Fact,” by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. May 1973.
• “Why Big Business Is Trying To Defeat The ERA: The Economic Implications Of Equality,” by Ellinor Langer. May 1976.
• “New Lease On Life For The ERA?: The Case For Extension,” by Mary Thom. May 1978.
• “Pennsylvania: ERA In Practice,” by Peggy Andersen. September 1978.
• “We’ll Do It Again Until They Get It Right: The Only Way A Majority Can Lose Is If It Is Silent,” by Susan Dworkin. April 1979.
• “The ERA: Should We Eat Our Words?” by Eleanor Smeal. July 1987.
• “Toward a More Perfect Union,” by Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug. Summer 2023.
• “Abortion Bans = Sex Discrimination,” by Carrie N. Baker. Spring 2024.
• “If You Value Democracy, Support Women’s Rights.” Fall 2024.

More Links & Resources

• Show your support for the ERA at Sign4ERA.org.
• Learn more about the ERA Project’s Model Policy Agenda.
• Read Carmen’s full interview with Victoria Nourse from E4 of LBMF, about the importance of the ERA as a tool to address and prevent gender-based violence.
• Read Carmen’s full interview with Susan Frietsche from E2 of LBMF, about the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruling that abortion bans are in violation of the state ERA.
• Special thanks to the office of Rep. Ayanna Pressley for allowing us to use footage of her remarks on her resolution affirming the ERA’s ratification and the 2023 press conference she convened to mark the 100th anniversary of the ERA.
• Explore bonus content from every episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, including full interviews with every guest!
• Want to dig deeper? You can explore an interactive timeline of Ms. history.

Episode Transcript

[THEME MUSIC FADE UP + OUT]

Carmen Rios: Welcome to the fifth and final episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a Ms. Studios podcast that traces the intertwined history of Ms. magazine and the feminist movement it has given voice to for over 50 years—and explores where the fight for gender equality must go next. 

I’m your host, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios.

Today, we’re going to explore why we’re long past due for the Equal Rights Amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution—and how the push for women’s constitutional equality connects the dots between everything we’ve explored in the first four installments of this show: the struggles for political representation, reproductive freedom, economic justice, and an end to gender-based violence. 

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: The ERA is made up of just 24 words: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. 

For more than a century, those words have been a rallying call for women across the country—and a reminder of how far we still need to go in the fight for gender equality.

“On Sunday, July 9, 1978, at 7 AM,” an anonymous reader told Ms. in a letter that month, “my daughter and I boarded a school bus at Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station bound for Washington, DC, to demonstrate for the Equal Rights Amendment. The waiting, the heat, the lack of sanitary facilities, the expense of money and energy, was shared by 100,000 other people.”

Countless Ms. readers, over the decades, submitted notes to the magazine about conversations they’d had with neighbors, letters they’d written to their state and congressional representatives, and protests that they had attended for the ERA. 

“On June 6, two days after the North Carolina legislature failed to ratify the ERA, I attended the ERA rally in Raleigh,” another anonymous reader wrote to Ms. on the ERA in August 1982. “Later that day I went to a restaurant with my family. I met a nine-year-old girl, her hair in pigtails…. Very tentatively, she asked, ‘Have we ever had equal rights?’ I answered: ‘No.’” 

‘Will we ever have them?’ she wanted to know.”

The reader ended her note to Ms. with a question of her own: “Who will answer this child?”

In the Summer 2019 issue of Ms., Virginia state delegates Hala Ayala and Jennifer Carrol Foy promised their own response, sharing their plan to have the state become the 38th state needed to ratify the amendment.

“We know that we stand on the shoulders of women who have come before us and blazed the trail,” they wrote in their letter to Ms., “ so that we can declare our yea votes for the Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia, in that chamber where Madison and Jefferson did not imagine twenty-eight women delegates were going to have a seat at the table.”

Just a few months later, Ayala and Carrol Foy kept their word. 

“We’ll accept no more lip service from our colleagues,” they wrote in 2019. “No more empty promises, no more ‘I respect you by shaking your hand.’ Respect will be shown when we gain equality in the Constitution.”

[Transition Music]

Margaret Mitchell: We were here a hundred years ago and we are here today, but not One Day More. Young women ask me all the time: Why do I have less rights than you had during your lifetime? And we need to respond with the ERA. The time is now. I look forward to celebrating with all of you when it is ratified.

Carmen Rios: That was Margaret Mitchell, CEO of the YWCA, an organization founded in 1850 that continues to advocate for eliminating racism, empowering women and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity. Mitchell joined a group of movement leaders and members of Congress, convened by Rep. Ayanna Pressley in front of the US Capitol in 2023, to mark the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Alice Paul, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, announced in 1923—three years after the 19th amendment was ratified, prohibiting states and the federal government from denying women the right to vote, and 75 after the Seneca Falls Convention kicked off the suffrage movement—that she had written a new constitutional amendment that called for women’s full equality.

That same year, the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in Congress—and it was re-introduced in every session for the next 48 years, until, in 1971, it finally passed in the House of Representatives, and, in 1972, just months after Ms. first appeared on newsstands, it was sent by the Senate to the states for ratification.

22 state legislatures ratified the ERA in 1972. Eight more followed suit in 1973, and five more did as well between 1974 and 1977. But lawmakers in the House and Senate had attached an arbitrary deadline on ratification—first requiring that the necessary three-fourths of states ratify the ERA by 1979, and then, after feminists pushed for an extension, by 1982. And although a majority of states had ratified by the deadline imposed by Congress, the final three needed for ratification wouldn’t approve the amendment for another 40 years.

In the process, those states—and the activists driving the fight for the ERA within their capitols—would reignite the fight for women’s constitutional equality across the country.

Pat Spearman: I was born in a filthy freight elevator at a hospital, and I was born in the freight elevator because, at the time that I was born, coloreds couldn’t go through the front door of the hospital. My dad ran in and said my wife is in labor, and can I get a wheelchair? And the receptionist looked up and politely said, no, coloreds don’t come through the front door. Go around to the back to the elevator there. Ran back down, got in the car, drove my mother around to the back, and the elevator in the back was a freight elevator, where they took all the garbage down and refuse and all of that sort of thing. While they were on their way up to labor and delivery, my mom started to pass out. My dad put his hands under her head so she wouldn’t fall into the trash, and her feet were facing the door, the elevator door. When the doors opened up, the nurses said, oh my god, the baby’s here, the baby’s here. The head and shoulders are already out. They took my mom into labor and delivery and finished getting me into the world. I often say to people that was a precursor to what my life was supposed to be, fighting those kinds of injustices. No baby should ever, ever be born in trash. Never. Never.

Carmen Rios: That’s former Nevada state Senator Pat Spearman. During her time in the legislature, Spearman advanced a series of feminist policies—and championed ERA ratification.

Pat Spearman: I’m a Black woman. I am a same-gender-loving woman. My whole life, I’ve been fighting for equality for myself and every body else. The ERA was, for me, a natural progression. 

Carmen Rios: Spearman had first learned about the ERA in high school, but in the years after 1982, all she’d heard was that the fight was over, and that the feminist movement had failed. And yet, in 2015, she became the chief sponsor of legislation in Nevada to ratify the ERA—nearly four decades after the arbitrary deadline imposed by Congress had expired.

Pat Spearman: When I was asked to do it, quite frankly, I didn’t even know that we had a chance to still pass it. I thought it was done and over, and they said, ‘No, we can still get this done, Senator—and we’d like you to do it because we know you won’t back down.’

Carmen Rios: Spearman was re-elected in 2016 on the promise that she would get the ERA over the finish line in Nevada in her next term. And she made good on that promise.

Pat Spearman: Some of my colleagues said, oh, this is just a stunt. Why are you doing this? It’s over and done with, and it won’t mean anything. I said, well, you know, unless the Constitution’s changed, yes, it will mean something, okay?

They wouldn’t bring it out of committee in 2015. I remember walking out of the committee room and walking down to the then majority leader’s office, and I said, so, what’s up with this? You’re not going to bring it out of committee? What? You know, he said, well, I just think it’s just a stunt. I said, well, it’s not a stunt. I said, and if it is a stunt, humor me. Bring it out of committee, and let’s see who votes for it. I promised the women that were out there in the hallway, ‘Get me back here,’ and I said, ‘In the next session, this will be the first bill that we work on.’ And it was.

Carmen Rios: During the first Trump administration, the need for the ERA became even more clear. Carrie N. Baker reported in the Spring 2020 issue of Ms. that, quote, “feminists turned with laser focus to a three-state strategy–seeking three more states to ratify the amendment and then a congressional joint resolution to remove the timeline.” Facing the same old challenges—male lawmakers refusing to bring votes on ERA legislation—feminists also focused on electing more women candidates and flipping legislatures blue.

Nevada voters, in the same election that kept Spearman in the Assembly in 2016, flipped the Legislature Blue and elected a record number of women. Nearly 40 percent of the Legislature that voted to ratify the ERA in Nevada was female, and more than 14 percent of its members were women of color. A slew of women’s groups had also built the foundation for both Nevada’s political transformation and its ERA ratification—among them Emerge Nevada, the Nevada Women’s Lobby, The Nevada Coalition for Women’s Equity, National Organization for Women, Battle Born Progress, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada and the Service Employees International Union.

After Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, ERA activists in Illinois forced the state Speaker to bring a vote there on ratification as well—and in 2018, with Black women lawmakers leading the fight, and speaking about the intersectional oppression women of color face on the floor of the Capitol, it became the 37th state to ratify.

In 2020, on the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, women of color, including Ayala and Carrol Foy, did the same thing in Virginia, pushing the ERA over the ratification threshhold. The groundbreaking vote took shape under the leadership of the state’s first-ever woman (and Jewish) speaker of the House and its first Black and female House Majority Leader and President Pro Tempore of the State Senate. 

Republicans had blocked ERA legislation in the Virginia House for decades—and when Democrats flipped seats in 2017 and 2019, gaining control of both chambers and landing women in positions of power, the ERA became a priority. Votes to ratify the ERA in Virginia were cast by a multigenerational group of Black women lawmakers—and the first out transgender woman ever elected and seated in a state legislature in U.S. history. 

Pat Spearman: As soon as we get this in the Constitution, people are going to look at this the same way my generation looks at you couldn’t sit where on the bus, you know? What do you mean you couldn’t go in through the front door in Dairy Queen? I don’t understand that. What do you mean that you had to have a court order to integrate schools? You’re either going to be on the right side of history, or you’re going to be on the sidelines watching us make history. The right side of history or on the sidelines watching us make history, because we ain’t going to stop. We are not going to stop. 

Carmen Rios: Feminist activism and women’s growing political power have always been critical parts of the fight for constitutional equality.

After all, the ERA began with the victory, in 1920, of the suffrage movement—and Alice Paul’s vision of more progress for women. In 1923, it was the nephew of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, in the House, who sponsored what would soon be called the Alice Paul amendment. And after the ERA languished in committee for decades—because male leaders in key positions of power obstructed its progress—it was activism that forced it to the floor. 

Feminists organized marches, protests, and rallies. They staged hunger strikes. Leaders from the National Organization for Women, in 1970, even disrupted hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, demanding the ERA get a vote in both chambers of Congress.

Ellie Smeal: One of the things I remember is that we did a 24-hour vigil on the steps of the Senate. We’re dead tired, and we stayed over the National Women’s Party, Alice Paul’s group. We go to knock on the door—I was sort of embarrassed, because it was dark, I thought, ‘Maybe we should go to a motel.’ It was, like, the middle of the night. ‘We’re waking up these people, they’re probably pretty old, we shouldn’t do it.’

Carmen Rios: That’s Ellie Smeal, one of the architects of the movement to ratify the ERA in the 1970s and 1980s. Now the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and publisher of Ms., Smeal became involved in feminist activism in the 1960s and joined the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1970. She went on to serve as president of national NOW for three terms, from 1977 to 1982 and again from 1985 to 1987. 

Ellie Smeal: The door opens a little bit, and we said, ‘We’re NOW.’ And she swings open the door, and she says, ‘They’re here, they’re here!’ And she starts running up the stairs to tell, there’s about 7 or 8 people staying, that we had come. We were saying, well, ‘We don’t have to disturb you.’ ‘Oh, no, no, no, let’s make some breakfast.’ She took the toaster out! She was so thrilled that we were doing this all-night vigil. That’s my opening to my work at the national level. 

Carmen Rios: In 1971, it was Representative Martha Griffiths who championed the ERA in the House and filed a discharge petition in the Judiciary Committee to bring it to a vote on the floor. In 1977, it was Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, with support from the Congressional Women’s Caucus, who introduced legislation to extend the ERA deadline. And in 1978, it was NOW, in coalition with other women’s organizations, who convened the March for Equality in Washington, DC—then the largest gathering of activists in feminist history—to call for Holtzman’s legislation to be passed. (One month later, after lobbying by women’s rights organizations, it was.)

Ellie Smeal: We knew that we had to get an extension of time. We also had to know if that time deadline really meant anything. It was in the preamble of the resolution, so no one got the vote on it. We said it didn’t count. 

We asked people if they would, bank some messages that we could send out right at the right time from Western Union. We had over 800 teams doing this nationwide. Our goal was that they would know, nationwide, with a lot of depth, people wanted full equality for women. We want to release them while people are marching. We’d give them a sign that we’re in every district, we’re in every grassroots, and we’re also at the national level. When we were marching down that street, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands were being sent through. I think it was about 500,000 Western Union telegrams went in.

Someone ran back to me and said, ‘Ellie, Ellie, good Lord,’ she said, ‘They’ve collapsed. They crashed the Western Union!’ It was the first time so many were sent. 

Carmen Rios: Through the 1970s and 80s, organizers crossed the country to knock on doors, convened record-setting marches, sent hundreds of letters, signed countless petitions, and staged boycotts that cost anti-ERA states tens of millions of dollars in business. 

Ellie Smeal: We rented four cars, filled them, on whatever the railroad was then, from New Jersey to Illinois. And the kids decided, they were gonna have their own car, they were going to establish all their own rules. They had a blast, they loved it. I remember once we were really busy before one of the big rallies, and I asked Todd—my son’s name is Todd—if he wanted to go for a walk with me, because I was feeling guilty. I hardly had talked to him, and he’d come all the way downtown, we lived in the suburb, to do this. And we were walking along, and he said, ‘You know, Mom, I think that you did this because you’re afraid I was missing something. I think we should go back there. Those people need us. Let’s go back.’ And before I know it, he’s turning around and both of us went back to work. 

Carmen Rios: The stories from the grassroots movement for the ERA are proof that feminist activism has always been the heart of the fight for constitutional equality. Take, for example, Alice Paul’s continued involvement in the strategy to ratify—even well into the 1970’s.

Ellie Smeal: Alice Cohan, who became our march director, went to meet Alice [Paul] in a nursing home—times had passed, she was older—and asked her advice. And she said, ‘Go to Indiana, we can get Indiana.’ So, before I know it, we’re in Indiana. We had a huge crowd. We did a march. We were from cold weather. I was raised in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was cold that day, snowing like mad, but that was not going to deter us. Some people raised the question, ‘Should we postpone it?’ I said, ‘No, we’re here. We can’t get this all together again. Don’t worry about the weather.’

Carmen Rios: The headline wrote itself: ERA Supporters March Through Blizzard. (And Phyllis Schlafly’s right-wing STOP ERA campaign, for the record, had postponed their competing march that was scheduled for the same day.)

Ellie Smeal: And we win, in Indiana, with one vote. 

Carmen Rios: It was decades of growing feminist power, and the election of a diverse slate of women to public office, that paved the way for the 36th, 37th, and 38th states that ratified the ERA—and legislation that led to the Senate’s first vote on the ERA in 40 years. Today, ERA organizers are still shutting down traffic with ERA banners, risking arrest to raise awareness, and lobbying lawmakers to enshrine the ERA in the Constitution.

“Congressional passage of the ERA is something—an enormous something—that the women in this country did for themselves,” Ann Scott wrote in the July 1972 issue of Ms., “with little help, and over a staggering combination of apathy, ridicule, and organized opposition.” 

“Anyone who thinks that a movement capable of passing a Constitutional amendment through Congress by those margins is just for laughs,” she added, “has to be a damn fool.”

Carol Moseley Braun: How’d I get involved with the Equal Rights Amendment? The fact is it was hard not to at that stage in time. If you were breathing and you read any newspaper anywhere, you knew there was a big battle around ERA across the country.

Carmen Rios: That’s Carol Moseley Braun—a trailblazing feminist politician who made history as the first Black woman elected to the Senate, the first Black democratic senator, the first woman elected to represent Illinois in the Senate, the first woman on the Senate Finance Committee, and, then, the first woman and African American person ever appointed to serve as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. 

Carol Moseley Braun: I’m not going to tolerate being treated as a second-class citizen. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a Black person, I’m not going to do it because I’m a woman.

Carmen Rios: Moseley Braun worked closely with Smeal in the fight to ratify the ERA in Illinois in the 70s and 80s. 

Ellie Smeal: We all had become fast friends. It tells you that we were a lot younger, at least, is that we were sitting on the floor, designing how we would engineer this.

Carol Moseley Braun: I had an apartment right across the street from the Capitol, and my roommate was also a state legislator. So, it was just kind of natural that we would go over to my place to work together to try to figure out how we handle this situation. The speaker was not against ERA. He wasn’t going to push it, either, but he wasn’t against it. In some regards, the opposition was really kind of scattered and disparate. It was hard to really reconcile these people’s districts and where they were from and why they were so opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Ellie Smeal: We were doing a first-rate campaign in all these places. We had done our homework, we knew who was up against who in the next election, we knew their whole history, of the key votes, etcetera. And of course, we were working with the speaker and the leadership of the Democratic Party, which obviously was our strength. 

Carol Moseley Braun: You have to count one vote at a time. You can’t make any assumptions about things like this, and so, we went around and really surveyed all the different members in terms of where they were on the Equal Rights Amendment. I thought we had the votes. We all thought it was going to pass.

Carmen Rios: Smeal and Moseley Braun pushed for the ERA right up until the congressionally imposed deadline in 1982—and even though they didn’t win ratification, when they laid out district maps in Moseley Braun’s apartment and began building momentum, they seeded the movement for constitutional equality. They finally saw victory when Illinois became the 37th state to ratify—nearly forty years later.

Carol Moseley Braun: It was really encouraging, and I was glad to see it. It was kind of like, you know, déjà vu all over again. How could you not pass this? Now we just have to get it into the U.S. Constitution. That’s the next battle. Why haven’t we gotten this right yet? 

Lesson number one is, don’t give up. Continue fighting, because without raising the issues, they will get lost in the noise, and I just hope that women are not discouraged, particularly in these times. That we continue to recognize the importance of our voices and how important it is that we continue to press for equality and the law. I mean, that’s all the ERA ever was.

Ellie Smeal: I’m the kind of person that wants to make something happen, and work very hard to do it. I thought it was the most important thing I could do. The reality is it affected half the population. What keeps you going, in my opinion, is you know you’re making a difference.

Carmen Rios: For the last century, feminist advocates and lawmakers have put that advice into practice and continued to beat the drum on the urgency of women’s constitutional equality—and they’ve never given up. 

Kathy Spillar: My ERA activism began seriously in 1982. I had been following the debates around the Equal Rights Amendment, and I could even recite it. This is long before I joined any feminist organization of any kind. I thought, this thing is going to pass. Who could be opposed to this? This is such a simple statement.

Carmen Rios: That’s Katherine Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and the executive editor of Ms.—and the former president of Los Angeles NOW. 

Kathy Spillar: The Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization for Women was very active, because a lot of people who lived here were traveling to Illinois and Florida and Oklahoma, you know, the unratified states, and were going on what was called missions, and literally, massive numbers of people, but I didn’t know any of that was going on. I somehow got a hold of a flyer for a big rally in Downtown Los Angeles on June 30, 1982, marking the end of that ratification period that everybody was operating on, and went to it because I was so outraged at the thought that this had not been ratified, and there was a big crowd there, and heard the speeches. In fact, I heard Toni Carabillo, who is a leader in Los Angeles now, read a statement from Eleanor Smeal, President of NOW. I went to the table and picked up the materials on Los Angeles NOW. Joined right there. Made a decision that I would get involved, because I couldn’t bear the thought that we could go more years without an Equal Rights Amendment, and so, that’s when I got involved.

It truly is my North Star, in terms of what needs to happen here in the United States If we’re going to get real equality, we have to have a constitutional guarantee of equality.

Carmen Rios: Spillar, like many ERA activists in the decades after that 1982 deadline, have refused to bear that thought. 

Every single year after the ERA’s arbitrary deadline passed in 1982, legislators have reintroduced the amendment in Congress. In 2023, Rep. Pressley introduced a joint House resolution to remove the deadline on the ERA’s ratification and affirm the ERA as the 28th amendment—and announced the formation of Congress’ first-ever ERA Caucus. 

That same year, students at Hunter College, in partnership with former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms., launched a petition drive calling for members of Congress to enshrine the ERA in the Constitution. You can sign it today at Sign4ERA—that’s the number four—dot org.

In March of this year, Rep. Pressley once again re-introduced the resolution, titled “Establishing the Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

“I would venture to guess that you have grown tired and weary of our statistics of all the disparate treatment that women experience in this country,” Rep. Pressley explained, during a 2023 press conference announcing the formation of the ERA Caucus. “Imagine how tired we are of living them.”

The fight for constitutional equality has also been unfolding at the state level since before the federal ERA was even passed through Congress. Before she was organizing vigils and marches for the federal Equal Rights Amendment, Smeal helped make history in the fight to add an ERA to Pennsylvania’s state constitution. In 1971, voters there approved a referendum on the amendment, making the commonwealth the first state to include an ERA in its constitution. 

Equal Rights Amendments have continued to proliferate at the state level since the 1982 ratification deadline attempted to end the fight for the federal ERA. In Nevada, the push for a state ERA began taking shape during the state legislature’s consideration of ratifying the federal Amendment. 

Pat Spearman: When we were working on the federal ERA, one of my colleagues stood up and said, “well, you know, I don’t know why we’re working on a federal ERA when we don’t even have a state ERA.” and I was sitting next to the now majority leader. That’s what we did for the next year and a half, and in 2019, we came back, and we were the first female majority legislature in the country, and it’s like I say, when women are in charge, relax [laughter]—or let me put it like this. When smart women are in charge, right?

Carmen Rios: Nevada’s state ERA became law in 2022—and it made history as one of the most inclusive and diverse ERAs in the country, explicitly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of, quote, “race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry, or national origin.”

Pat Spearman: We wanted to make sure that it was always and forever. We included everybody that had been marginalized and that could be marginalized. We didn’t want to come back and say, well, now let’s get it for the transgender. Well, now let’s get it for the…no, no, we put in everybody that had been marginalized, everybody that the other side of the aisle hated. They qualified for our state ERA, okay?

Carmen Rios: Today, 27 states have ERAs or other gender equality provisions in their state’s governing documents—and the current nature of national politics has driven ERA activists to state houses across the country.

Ting Ting Cheng: State constitutions can, and often do, provide more protections than the federal Constitution. They’re also more responsive to on-the-ground needs. They’ve been amended over 7,000 times. Many contain what we call self-executing provisions that operate more like statutes, and unlike the federal Constitution, which only applies to government actors, some state constitutions can extend to private actors, like businesses, so even broader scope for attaining rights. 

Under current federal law, equality jurisprudence just means treating everybody the same, regardless of your circumstances or the social and economic disparities that you may face. We’ve seen this framework, and the way that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause has been interpreted in the recent decades to be used and weaponized to restrict equality, and you see that in the context of the defeat of Affirmative Action measures that were designed, in the first place, to enhance equality and not restrict it. The opportunity of state ERAs is to tackle very important issue areas, but, taking a step back, it’s also an opportunity to embrace a different kind of equality framework.

Carmen Rios: That’s Ting Ting Cheng, Director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project, founded at Columbia Law School in 2021 and now a part of NYU Law’s Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center. The ERA Project is a law and policy think tank working to advance gender justice through Equal Rights Amendments, and one particular area of focus for the organization now is the power of state ERAs.

Ting Ting Cheng: Given the composition of the federal government, it’s really ripe opportunity to focus on state ERAs—and it’s doing the work, it’s building the pieces of fundamental equality case by case, state by state, that gives me a lot of hope. Since Dobbs, we’ve seen state courts increasingly decide whether their constitutions protect reproductive rights, and we see the trend toward adopting inclusively-worded modern ERAs, like what happened in Nevada and in New York and Delaware; similar efforts, although not yet passed, in Minnesota and Maine, to go beyond the language of the federal ERA, to prohibit discrimination based on abortion access, pregnancy discrimination, bodily autonomy, race, religion, age, disability, and immigration status. State ERAs are defining equality in real time. The meaning making that’s coming out of the states right now will inform the legal foundation for how a federal ERA will be and should be interpreted.

Carmen Rios: That’s precisely why the ERA Project’s Model Policy Agenda aims to harness the power of state ERAs—and give policymakers the tools to leverage them effectively in this challenging moment for gender equality. 

Ting Ting Cheng: The goal was to turn the focus on states and to build a ground-up approach and develop a robust equality infrastructure at the state level, in partnership with elected officials, particularly when we see our fundamental rights being dismantled at the federal level, and we see, increasingly, abortion bans and bans on transgender-affirming care for minors being proposed in different states. We wanted to provide an actionable roadmap for state and local policymakers to make sex equality a reality under their state ERAs. It’s about rethinking how, systematically, we can approach gender justice and sex inequality. 

Carmen Rios: The ERA Project’s Model Policy Agenda lays out three critical recommendations: utilizing gender impact assessments as a litmus test for ERA compliance, creating oversight bodies for implementation and integration of ERA principles throughout government, and advancing affirmative policy initiatives. Together, these recommendations pave the way for widespread transformation—as opposed to lip service and symbolic gestures.

Ting Ting Cheng: The obligation is on elected officials to actively level the playing field, and this means addressing visible inequalities and hidden inequalities, not just what’s written in the laws, but also to think through what contributes to inequality, beyond what the law says. ERAs are here for elected officials to lean on to start to design comprehensive solutions that address deep structural issues that impact gender justice and beyond.

Inequality isn’t just about getting rid of existing discriminatory laws. We have to fundamentally rethink how we distribute resources in society. We have to take a harder look at the real disparities and barriers that people face, and also, to understand them as interconnected systems and not as separate issues that, together, perpetuate inequality. Legal equality alone will not overcome deeply-entrenched structural barriers. Economic support systems that enable equal participation, safety measures that protect against gender-based violence, healthcare access that addresses gender-specific needs, and work-life balance policies that don’t penalize people for caregiving—these are not extras. They’re also not beyond the scope of legal change. They’re essential building blocks for real equality.

We want the ERA to revolutionize governance. Rather than fixing discrimination after it happens, we want it to have it be a preventative framework, meaning that discrimination rarely makes it to implementation. This anticipatory approach should be standardized practice, to reduce the harm that’s caused.

Carmen Rios: The fight for constitutional equality at all levels continues, in the simplest of terms, because women are still not equal. Because a slew of feminist laws alone have not solved the problems of gendered economic, reproductive, and political injustice, nor have they broken the cycles of gender-based violence and harassment. 

And yet, the fight for the ERA, while fueled by these injustices, has also been key in shaping the feminist agenda that demands that we confront them.

Kathy Spillar: The push to pass the Equal Rights Amendment has, itself, had massive impact on the laws in this country. When the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, it was still legal to discriminate, by banks and credit card companies, against women. The fight for the ERA, those campaigns, got the Equal Credit Act passed in the later ‘70s. It was the Women’s Educational Equity Act that was passed in the ‘70s and ‘80s that further opened up opportunities for women in education. The Supreme Court decided that to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy was not sex discrimination. So, this movement had to go back in and get the Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed. It’s all because we don’t have our rights spelled out in the Constitution. There would be no Violence Against Women Act, there would be no Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law without a very mobilized movement around these very key issues, and that is the result of the fight for the ERA. It woke up the country in so many ways to what was happening and you know, how women were suffering because of these laws. It’s already had massive impact, and it continues to have impact as we move forward.

Carmen Rios: “Contrary to what some say,” Smeal wrote in the July 1987 issue of Ms., “the ERA doesn’t take strength from the women’s movement, it adds to it. We can use it to continue to build our political clout on a whole range of feminist issues, from wage discrimination to child care, from family law to insurance policies.”

“I believe the Equal Rights Amendment is tied to our entire feminist legislative agenda,” Smeal added. “We must insist that this nation keep fath with the American promise and that we, as feminists, keep our covenant with Alice Paul.”

[Transition Music] 

Carmen Rios: The federal ERA endows Congress with, quote, “the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”—ensuring that it would become not just the moral, but legal responsibility of lawmakers, once the ERA was ratified, to craft and pass policies addressing sex discrimination in all forms.

That’s the true promise of the ERA—that it demands wholesale transformation of our laws, and by extension, our sociopolitical lives.

Kathy Spillar: Section 2 is empowers Congress to pass laws to implement the Equal Rights Amendment. So, it specifically says to Congress, you must act to affirmatively pass laws to prohibit sex discrimination, and where you find it, you’ve got to root it out. It’s not like it just goes in the Constitution and then is ignored—and clearly, we’re in a period of this country’s history when, frequently, the Constitution is being ignored, but this specifically directs Congress to take action, and that’s very important. 

Carmen Rios: Although the movement to pass state ERAs is also a critical stopgap in this moment, and fertile ground to envision a more inclusive democracy in this country, a federal ERA is also important precisely because it enshrines equality for everyone, meaning we would no longer have a patchwork of laws that make women’s lives different state-by-state— and women would have protection from state laws that seek to deny them their constitutional equality. 

Kathy Spillar: A lot of sex discrimination occurs at the state government level. The most obvious example, in many ways right now, is access to abortion. So, if, now, states cannot discriminate on the basis of sex in their laws, they should be prohibited from cutting off Medicaid funding for abortion, even worse, from banning abortion in any way, because that is sex discriminatory. That will be the argument, ultimately, before the Supreme Court when we get an Equal Rights Amendment. A state like Texas cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, which is what it’s doing when it cuts off access to abortion, when it bans abortion. 

Great legal minds believe that, if we can get an Equal Rights Amendment, we can get rid of these terrible abortion bans. I think that’s the only way, because these states are so gerrymandered, and their Supreme Courts are so compromised because of the way the members of those courts are elected or appointed, that we have to have a federal law. Now, that isn’t going to take care of the changes we need in society. But it will go a long way towards establishing a baseline to root out sex discriminatory practices and laws that are so damaging to our lives. 

Carmen Rios: In a 1978 piece for Ms. on the “ERA in practice,” Peggy Andersen used Pennslyvania as a case study on the amendment’s potential impact. 

The ERA’s opponents, Andersen noted, were wrong to predict “the demise of the family as we know it.” But it did end generations of discriminatory law and social practices.

In just the seven years between Pennsylvania adding an ERA to its constitution and Andersen’s piece, Pennsylvania’s appellate courts had ruled that wives could sue for loss of consortium, just like men; that women’s monetary and non-monetary contributions to a household would be counted in divorce proceedings; that parents had equal responsibility for child-rearing, and that alimony judgements would no longer be tied to a spouse’s gender—just their economic status. 

In the lower courts, Pennsylvania women had won the right to use their birth names to apply for licenses and register to vote, treat male clients at beauty parlors, keep their jobs when they got pregnant, and be granted equal insurance benefits and coverage. Single-sex classes ended in public schools, and girls were finally able to stop signing up for newspaper routes using their brothers’ names when a law forbidding them to do such work until they were 18 was struck down.

And while women won the right to get licenses for boxing and wrestling, girls won the right to participate in interscholastic sports.

All told, Pennsylvania’s Commission for Women, charged in 1975 with implementing the state’s ERA, had passed 24 of 26 bills neutralizing hundreds of discriminatory laws on the books in the state. (They left in place a law ensuring that women, like men, could purchase sewing machines.)

Ratifying the ERA in Nevada also fueled a feminist legislative agenda in the state—even before the state passed an ERA of its own. Spearman and her colleagues were able, in the years after the state ratified the federal ERA, to expand protections for employees and hold employers accountable for pay discrimination, eliminate the statute of limitations for cases of sexual assault in which there was DNA evidence proving who the perpetrator was, create oversight and regulation of solitary confinement practices in prisons and jails in the state, and treat all persons involved in human trafficking operations as primary perpetrators.

The Women’s Law Project in Pennsylvania, more than 50 years after the state’s ERA was added to its constitution, continues to leverage the amendment for feminist gains—and, as you may recall from our episode on reproductive justice, in 2024 they won a massive victory when the state Supreme Court struck down a previous ruling declaring that the ERA didn’t apply to abortion, and ruled that a state ban on Medicaid funding for abortion was a form of sex discrimination prohibited by the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.

Pennsylvania’s ERA has nearly identical language to the ERA that feminists have been aiming to add to the federal Constitution: “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged in the commonwealth of pennsylvania,” it states, “because of the sex of the individual.” This, in particular, makes Pennsylvania a promising case study when it comes to how the ERA might change laws nationally—and why the ERA matters.

“Sex equality and bodily autonomy are the backbone of a free and fair democracy,” Ms. declared before a series of essays, in the Fall 2024 issue, that connected the dots between democracy and the equal rights amendment. “The parallel fights to enshrine equality into the constitution, cement abortion rights, and end gender-based violence,” the introduction observed, “have been foundational to Ms. since the magazine’s inception 52 years ago—and are equally so today.”

In a contribution to the feature on feminism and democracy in the Fall 2024 issue, Steph Sterling, executive director of the democracy revival center, wrote that, quote, “despite the changes we’ve made in the past 235 years, the us government is still based on the prejudices, the compromises, and the limits of imagination of [an] earlier era. It was created by and for wealthy white men whose interests and ideologies would not allow women —or really, anyone who was not a white, property-owning man—to participate.”

“We must expand our fight,” she concluded. “It’s no longer possible for the millions of us who have marched, demanding to be seen and heard, to operate as if the political system we have now is working.”

You also may recall that in the last episode of this show, Victoria Nourse—the Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown Law—broke down the urgency of ratifying the ERA to better confront and remedy issues of gender-based violence. In the Fall 2021 issue of Ms., she reminded readers that Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court Justice, had once remarked that, quote, “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”

Scalia dismissively added that “if the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex…we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.” Nevermind, Nourse points out, that in 2000, when Scalia sat on the bench, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress didn’t have the constitutional authority to enact laws against gender-based violence. “It is long past time to add the ERA to the constitution,” Nourse wrote, “to address this matter and right a constitutional wrong.”

In that Fall 2024 collection in Ms., ERA Project Policy Associate Naomi Young echoed the sentiment. “The current reality in the US,” she wrote, “that one in three women experience sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner within their lifetime, is rooted in the history of a legal system that upheld gendered hierarchies and tolerated, if not promoted, violence within marriages.” 

Despite gender-based violence being what Young called “the most literal form of patriarchal power and control” she noted that it has rarely been treated as a form of sex discrimination. 

“The ERA invites us to envision bolder solutions to gender-based violence,” she explained. “The potential of the ERA’s constitutional sex equality guarantee lies in its ability to address the power dynamics underlying gender-based violence.” 

“In its best interpretation,” Scott wrote in her 1972 piece for f Ms., “the ERA means that the policy of this country is now to consider people first as individual human beings, and second as women and men; that the opportunities—and penalties—that are part of being citizens will be parceled out according to personal capabilities rather than as an adjunct of the accident of sex.”

“Most of all,” Scott added, “the ERA will create a moral atmosphere of equality and justice. For the first time in this country’s history, women will know that the Constitution applies to them.”

Contained in that promise is a powerful vision of a feminist future—one advocates are still working tirelessly to make possible.

[Transition Music] 

Rep. Ayanna Pressley: We’re here to make plain that constitutional equality is powerful, and equality is long overdue. How long have we been waiting? [Too long!] That is why we’re using every tool and every lever of power at our disposal to get the ERA over the finish line. We’re introducing a bill demonstrating that the ERA has satisfied all of the criteria in the Constitution to be added. We’re being exhaustive in this fight because the stakes cannot be higher, whether we’re talking about equal pay, LGBTQ and trans rights, reproductive freedom, or our very humanity.

It’s time we finish this century-long job so our generation is the last generation to live without gender equality, and I will close with the words of Angela Y. Davis: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change instead I am changing the things I can no longer accept.”

Carmen Rios: That’s Representative Pressley, speaking out with other ERA leaders in Congress in 2023 in support of her bicameral, joint resolution to remove the arbitrary deadline for ratification of the ERA and recognize it as the 28th amendment to the Constitution.

Constitutional law experts and the American Bar Association agree that the ERA has satisfied congressional requirements to be added to the constitution—but, five years since Virginia pushed it over the threshold, the ERA has yet to be enshrined in our founding documents. 

When the ERA passed the needed threshold of 38 states for ratification, during the first Trump administration, Carrie N. Baker explained in the Spring 2020 issue of Ms., his administration blocked recognition of the amendment—claiming that the arbitrary deadline imposed by Congress left them powerless to recognize an amendment with, quote, “massive public support.” 

In 2020, Rep. Jackie Speier introduced a joint resolution in Congress to remove the timeline imposed on ERA ratification. Although the legislation passed in the House, it was blocked in the Senate from receiving a vote on the floor by Mitch McConnell – who says he’s “personally not a supporter” of women’s constitutional equality.

If this all feels familiar, that’s because it sounds precisely like the battle feminists faced 50 years ago—demanding our hard-won rights from men in positions of power, who maintain them largely by restricting our freedom.

That’s why the future of this fight is procedural and political. 

Kathy Spillar: The right wing has got a drumbeat going that the ratification period ended in July of 1982, or June 30, 1982. In fact, some of them want to push it back to 1979, which was the original deadline. That was extended by Congress with a simple majority vote in both the House and the Senate. They keep wanting to say it’s dead, you have to start over. That’s disinformation, and they know it, but they keep that out there because that gives Republican members of Congress a cover on their failure to support the resolutions that have come before Congress to eliminate the timeline, to say that, notwithstanding the deadline, the Equal Rights Amendment has met the requirements laid out in the Constitution to be the 28th Amendment. There’s only two requirements to amend the Constitution. Congress has to pass the original bill out of Congress by a two-thirds supermajority. That happened in 1972. Then three-quarters of the state legislatures have to vote to ratify the amendment for it to be added to the Constitution. That happened when the 38th state, Virginia, voted to ratify in early 2020. On good legal authority from many legal scholars, Congress, just as it extended the timeline in 1979 to 1982, it can also lift the timeline in its entirety. That is the last remaining hurdle: Getting Congress to vote on the resolutions that are entered into the hopper right now, notwithstanding the time limit, that the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified and must be added as the 28th Amendment. 

The strategy going forward to secure the federal ERA in the Constitution is all about elections. Right now, we have a majority in both the Senate and the House who oppose the resolution to recognize the ERA has been ratified. The 2026 elections are pivotal, because that could change the balance of power in the House. It might even change the balance of power in the Senate. And then we have to make sure that supporters for the Equal Rights Amendment, and it does include a couple of Republican members of the Senate and potentially the House, have to step up and do the courageous thing, and that is to push it over the finish line. If that means suspending the filibuster as it applies to these fundamental constitutional rights, they must do that—and this movement must continue to press for that. 

Carmen Rios: The urgency of enshrining the ERA could not be more obvious in this moment. The Trump administration is rapidly rolling back the gains women, people of color, the poor and working-class, immigrants, and other marginalized communities have made in the last 50, 100, even 250 years. The headlines chronicling the unraveling of an American dream that is supposed to be for all of us are coming so fast that it’s hard to remember that the far-reaching damage of the president’s destruction of our democracy will be felt for generations.

Ting Ting Cheng: Things are pretty dire right now. Our institutions are crumbling, and we have branches of the federal government operating with near absolute immunity and a Supreme Court that actively advances conservative ideology. The implementation of Project 2025 is proceeding at a pace that’s really scary. Even though we’ve made remarkable strides in expanding our understanding and definition of sex and gender discrimination without explicit constitutional sex equality provisions, protection, every single step forward is vulnerable to rollback. These advances are hostage to the political process. They’re subject to contraction rather than expansion, depending on who holds power and regardless of what the needs are on the ground, and that’s just not how democracy should work. The reality is that the erosion of sex equality is not going to stop until women and gender minorities and anyone who refuses to conform to traditional views on gender is, legally, a second-class citizen.

Carmen Rios: The ERA can be an antidote.

Ting Ting Cheng: There are really harmful policies from the first Trump administration that we’re still trying to undo. Somebody once said to me, ‘Once the egg has been scrambled, it’s almost impossible to unscramble the egg,’ and that’s true. We have to prevent harm. This is where the ERA becomes essential. It is a long-term project in a moment where it seems like we all struggle with thinking beyond the short-term reactionary policymaking. We need a long-term vision to achieve systemic equality in the face of Dobbs, in the face of Skrmetti, in the face of Trump’s executive orders on gender ideology, and we need that vision to be inclusive, intersectional, and embrace Democratic principles, rather than reduce them. 

The ERA demands, from all of us, to be creative and to imagine and to build a system that can actually deliver equality to all people, regardless of sex and gender. Clearly, gender discrimination is baked into the system. The conversation that we should be having right now is: How do we reshape legislation and governance at every level, exactly like what the current administration is doing right now, in the opposite direction? The ERA represents both a response to the crisis moment that we’re in right now and a longer-term roadmap for a more just future.

Carmen Rios: In order to advance that future, we need not only a clear vision of a new political order worth fighting for—but the clarity to see the interconnected social forces intent on sending this country backwards.

Our opponents in the fight for constitutional equality are not just lawmakers attempting to follow arbitrary rules; they’re people in power, across sectors, who see the threat of empowered women for what it really is: the foundation for changing the world as we know it.

The very same year that the ERA was sent to the states for ratification, Phyllis Schlafly launched a campaign called STOP ERA. (The STOP stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges—a nod to what Schlafly called the “wonderful” right afforded to women to be mothers and wives with no public, intellectual, or professional lives.)

Schlafly was such a study in contrasts that it’s hard to believe she didn’t recognize herself as the caricature of an anti-feminist villain. She demanded equal airtime to protest the ERA in the media, but peddled anti-equality conspiracy theories. Despite being an attorney who ran for Congress and then traveled the country full-time to push a right-wing agenda, she shouted that women’s priorities should be homemaking and child-rearing. She spoke of the “privileges” of being a woman and wife at a time when women couldn’t even call the police when their husbands beat or raped them—and dressed immaculately for the male gaze, down to dripping in jewels, when she spoke out against women’s rights. 

Adding insult to injury, Schlafly wasn’t the voice of a silent majority as she claimed, but the scream of a pitiful minority. During NOW’s involvement in the ERA ratification efforts of that time, their membership doubled. By 1975, NOW had 643 chapters across the country. By 1978, it had over 100,000 members; and by 1982, it had 220,000. STOP ERA, in contrast, had 20,000 members.

Remember that anonymous Ms. reader who attended an ERA protest in 1978? “When we returned home nearly midnight,” she recalled in her letter to the magazine, “my husband told us how NBC radio had covered the historic event: not with Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, or Ellie Smeal, but with Phyllis Schlafly, who claims to represent a non-existent majority in opposition to the ERA.”

Even the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School, spoke out in Ms. about the mis- and disinformation being spread by Schlafly. In a May 1973 piece on “ERA Fiction and Fact,” the future Supreme Court Justice—and lifetime ERA advocate—pulled excerpts from law review articles, government reports, and expert testimony before Congress in response to some of Schlafly’s arguments against the Amendment.

“ERA supporters,” Ginsburg wrote, “have come face to face with people who try to awaken fears that the Amendment, rather than insure our rights, will deprive us of privileges… The factual inaccuracies of such an argument demands an informed and logical response from those who wish to keep the discussion on a rational plane.”

Of course, the so-called “culture war” amongst women that Schlafly alleged she embodied was largely a contrived media distraction, helpful most to the people in power. 

“The beneficiaries of this diversion,” Ellinor Langer wrote in the May 1976 issue of Ms., “are the major business interests, splayed within both political parties, which have concluded that equality for women, coming out on top of the decreased flexibility in the hiring and firing of Black people that has followed the civil rights movement, would introduce an inelasticity into the labor force that their profit margin cannot bear.”

Langer’s report on “Why Big Business is Trying to Defeat the ERA” exposed who was really behind Schlafly’s so-called movement: right-wing extremist groups like the John Birch Society, an anti-labor organization founded by wealthy white male businessmen who believed in unregulated free enterprise.

“Suddenly, at a moment of great tension,” Langer wrote, “when the economic balloon had popped and uneasiness was spreading across society like oil from a stricken tanker, at just that moment there appeared on the horizon… a Lady on a white charger raising her banner shaped like a street sign: STOP ERA. Is she alone? No, hundreds are with her, and suddenly there are hordes of women and men, we can see them, racing toward us, holding aloft their banners, the vital acronyms of their mother organizations flapping in the winds: HOT DOG (Humanitarians Opposed to Degrading our Girls), HOME (Happiness of Women Eternal), AWARE (American Women Are Richly Endowed—alternatively, American Women Against Ratification of the ERA), FOE (Females Opposed to Qquality), HA! (Home Administrators, inc.) and HAM (Housewives And Motherhood anti-lib movement).”

“If this is a grassroots movement,” Langer added, “the grasses have been well-fertilized—and, in this case… it is no secret who is doing the gardening.”

Suffragists, too, faced challenges from corporate power and titans of industry—even if they did it so quietly that most Americans may not have noticed. Langer explains, citing suffragist historian Eleanor Flexner, that suffrage organizers noted the presence of manufacturing lobbies, quote, “whenever suffrage was up for legislative action of referendum.” 

Ellie Smeal: We heard very early on that the oil interests were opposed to us, and it reminded me of what happened to the woman’s vote. The biggest opponents To them were the liquor interests. Women didn’t really approve of the guy getting paid, and going to a bar, and getting drunk. In the environmental thing, women are for, controls, and worry very much about the environment—and they want no rules.

Carmen Rios: Life insurance was one industry, Langer noted, that had faced feminist criticism for unfair, sex-based pricing. In some states, reports from ERA organizers revealed that anti-ERA votes in the legislatures were, quote, “cast by people with insurance ties.”

“Just as every suffrage worker… caught the scent of the liquor interests,” Langer explained, “so everywhere across the country ERA workers are hearing the shuffling papers of insurance.” 

Ellie Smeal: There’s no question in my mind that the insurance interests were very important. And in fact, started to take ads against us. Women were charged more and got fewer benefits. It affected not only auto insurance, health insurance, etcetera—it affected also retirements, benefit packages. There’s no question that it made it so that we were the underpaid, underrepresented. 

Carmen Rios: Economic opposition to the ERA may not have been covered on the nightly news with the same gusto as the home-grown housewife opposed to her own rights—but big business’ reasons for resistance were far more obvious. Langer wrote that “the economic consequences to industry as a whole of the genuine inequality for women implied by the Equal Rights Amendment are enormous.” 

“Existing legislation encourages women with ambitions or grievances to seek redress for discrimination in pay scales or job classifications,” she explained. “The ERA presages a change in the character of the work force.” All told, Langer declared, “the Equal Rights Amendment and the traditional role of women in the capitalist economy are incompatible.”

As Smeal explained to Susan Dworkin in the April 1979 issue of Ms.: “There’s billions of dollars at stake. If women had equal treatment under the law,” Smeal said, “we could file endlessly against economic discrimination and educational discrimination.”

In the July/August 1990 issue of Ms., co-founder Gloria Steinem explored the challenges of using commercial advertisements to fund a feminist magazine. Advertisers, she explained, didn’t want ads for their services or products in issues where content conflicted with the capitalist patriarchy. Airlines balked at coverage of flight attendants attempting to unionize. Car companies insisted that their former business practices be erased from the record. And beauty companies skirted the opportunity, to focus on their target market: quote-unquote “kept women.” (And the quote, by the way… is theirs.)

In correspondence from the Ms. archives, between then-editor-in-chief and publisher Patricia Carbine to Sears in 1976, Carbine attempted to assuage their concerns about an ERA letter-writing campaign that had been included in Ms. previously—something that had apparently caused the department store chain some serious concern. 

There is a clear reason why: So much of what Ms. knows, what our readers know, and what the ERA, in particular, affirms, is that women deserve better than exploitation and disregard. 

Pat Spearman: The people who are trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen, if they stop fighting and recognize the Equal Rights Amendment—then they also have to recognize that because of the ways in which we’ve been put down, and had to fight our ways back, and because of the ways that we have had to prepare ourselves and do extra, extra, extra… As a woman, you have to do twice as much. As a Black woman, you got to do six times as much. They are afraid that once equality is recognized as the law of the land, that they will actually have to compete, and they’re not ready.

Carmen Rios: Our opposition, decades later, hasn’t changed.

Ellie Smeal: I still think that we do not argue enough of who’s behind holding women in an unequal status. We should be much more specific on it. When it comes down to it, it’s money. 

Carmen Rios: But as our opponents push back, Ms. and the feminist movement continue to fight forward. (And luckily, the magazine is now published by the nonprofit Feminist Majority Foundation, so it doesn’t have to apologize to advertisers anymore for doing it.)

Kathy Spillar: Without Ms., there would be very little reporting about the Equal Rights Amendment right now, and in fact, over the last probably 10 years. When Nevada ratified it, Illinois, and then Virginia, that made news in mainstream media for about a day, but all of the struggle leading up to it was never in mainstream media. It was like it just happened. Ms. has hung in there because it is so fundamental to equality. Ms.’ role throughout has not only been to keep activists engaged and involved, but to make sure that the opponents are unveiled.

We’re not fighting public opinion. We’re fighting real economic interests and religious interests that are opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, and who our elected representatives in these state legislatures and in Congress are in hock to, and they are doing everything they can to stop the final enshrinement of the Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution. That’s what has to be focused on in this next phase of pushing forward.

Carmen Rios: In this challenging moment, the fight for constitutional equality remains strong. Advocates are not deterred by what we’re up against—instead, they’re defiant. They’re leveraging every strategy possible to advance the federal ERA, state ERAs, and feminist policy agendas that redefine legal definitions of equality. 

Ting Ting Cheng: For states with existing state ERAs, this is the moment to activate them. These are not decorative constitutional provisions. They’re powerful tools waiting to be used. Activists should be identifying strategic test cases, pushing for gender-impact assessments in policymaking, oversight bodies, and demanding that elected officials fulfill their ERA mandates. 

For states without ERAs, success starts with on-the-ground coordination, building a big tent coalition where there are diverse stakeholders, including advocates and grassroots organizers and elected officials and youth aligned behind a unified vision of what their ERAs ought to look like, and looking at recent successes, in Nevada and in New York and in Delaware, and comparing and contrasting. earn from their invaluable, hard-earned wisdom about messaging, coalition-building, and navigating the opposition.

Kathy Spillar: We’ve got to keep our eye on the political fight to get the ERA in the Constitution federally. In many other countries that have an equal rights provision for sex in their constitutions, they’re light years ahead in terms of the kinds of laws that are getting passed and women’s rights as they are protected, including reproductive rights and access. Marriage laws and employment laws, but also things like equal representation. Without equal representation to ensure that the laws are going to be structured properly and enforced, we’re always going to be fighting our opponents. 

Ellie Smeal: I don’t think we’re going to go backwards. But I know one thing: They try to push us back—the people who will go to move to the front will be overwhelmingly women. They’ve had it. There’s no question. We’re the vast majority. We do poll after poll to find out the majority of American women are, without a doubt, supporters of feminism, or call themselves feminists. Or they might not call themselves feminists, but they do believe in equality. Those numbers are going up and up and up in our direction.

Pat Spearman: For the people that keep saying, so, when you all going to quit? I told them in New York in Seneca Falls, we’re not going to quit until done o’clock. And you can throw at us whatever you want to throw at us. We’re coming in waves. The first wave, they may get tired, and they may have to stop for a rest, but there’s another wave coming. For the people who don’t want to see equality, they must know this. They must know that there ain’t no quit in us, and there ain’t enough bad in them.

We’re not fighting to win the race. We have already won. We are fighting so that other people will know, hey, already won. Already won.

I want us to hurry up and get this done, because I’m ready to pick another fight.

Carmen Rios: Although we’re in a particularly exhausting moment, as we’ve explored throughout this show, our history reminds us that these times are less unprecedented than we think. Our foremothers, our ancestors, spent generations pushing to get us to this point—and the women I spoke to for this episode were determined not to forget our progress, and to continue their fight.

Ellie Smeal: They used to chant at us, ‘Women don’t want to be doctors, they want to marry one.’ Now, there are more women in medical school than there are men. 

In one meeting with Board of Education officials in Pennsylvania, our state president was talking, and the slogan was ‘The best girl at sports is worse than the worst boy.’ She stood up so stark, and she said, ‘You’ll see how strong we are, and you will never say that again in the presence of women.’

The whole premise was that we were a different species, that we had no ambitions, that we weren’t smart, that we were weak, and the door opening by a male for a woman is just a symbol of that weakness. People do not believe that anymore.

Kathy Spillar: Social behavior, relationships between women and men, power dynamics within the workplace and within families—without those legal changes, frequently, those power relationships don’t budge. A good example of that is coverture laws. Used to be everywhere in this country where, if a woman gets married to a man, her identity, under the law, disappears, and it’s his identity that matters—and there are religious interests, to this day, that are literally preaching a return to those laws and relationships, but the Equal Rights Amendment not only can strike down those laws, which are sex discriminatory, but it gives a whole framework for how even these kinds of social relations can change and shift. 

Pat Spearman: The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, and many of my foreparents did not know that immediately, but what it also did was it, by extension, freed the slaveholders so that they could be free to recognize and to live in the fact that God made all of us, and we are all of God’s children. So, the Equal Rights Amendment is for not just women, but it is also for men, and especially for our sons and our grandsons and our nephews, because the next generation behind me and the generation behind them, they’re already growing up in a world that is dominated by women. 

Carol Moseley Braun: The expectation of equality is the most important cultural thing that we can achieve, and we have to keep holding up that light. We are obliged to continue this battle, continue this fight, because it’s our future that’s in the balance, our present as well as our future. We have to continue pressing forward so that we continue to make the changes that are necessary in our society that will give us true equality. 

Ellie Smeal: People think it’s either won, or we can’t ever do it. They’re both wrong. We’re gonna do it, and it will have a very positive effect.

Ting Ting Cheng: We’re crafting that blueprint for this future. Our vision for the ERA today, where equality is operational, intersectional, is embedded in every aspect of the government, will be the baseline from which future generations can build. 

Carmen Rios: Dworkin’s reporting on the extension of the ERA deadline featured headline that still catches the feminist eye: WE’LL DO IT AGAIN, it declared, UNTIL THEY GET IT RIGHT. 

Over 40 years later, it remains a fitting mantra for this fight—which only gets bigger and bigger the longer constitutional equality takes.

Kathy Spillar: This movement has always been quite massive. Certainly in terms of the activism in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. There were hundreds of thousands of people involved in getting those last states to ratify, but more than that, it enjoys such massive public support. That has continued to grow even as our opponents have cracked down and done everything they can to stop the forward movement towards equality in this country. Before the big campaigns for the Equal Rights Amendment, support for women’s equality was under 50 percent. The support for constitutional equality for women now, depending on what poll you look at, is anywhere from 80 percent to 90 percent-plus.

Carmen Rios: The ERA, which has had bipartisan appeal since it launched, still has wide approval numbers across party lines. In 2020, a survey by the American Bar Association found that 83 percent of Americans believe the ERA should be in the Constitution. Polling by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center’s Center for Public Affairs Research, the same year, even found that nearly three-quarters of Americans already believe the ERA is the law of the land. And when Ms. conducted polls in battleground states after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs, 73 percent of respondents agreed that the ERA was more urgent than ever to combat abortion bans. 

“Ellie Smeal and Joan McLean and Sheila Greenwald and Carol Burris and Jamie Malanowski,” Dworkin wrote in 1979, “and hundreds of field-workers and thousands of phone-callers and hundreds of thousands of letter-writers know that we are an absolute majority. And the only way a majority can lose is if it is silent.”

Let us vow, then, to continue speaking out.

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: “As the current rising authoritarianism around the world shows,” the editors of Ms. wrote in the postscript to the 50 Years of Ms. collection, “attacks on women’s fundamental rights precede other attacks on democracy.” 

The solutions, the antidotes, have been laid out in the first four episodes of this show—and in the last 50-plus years of feminist activism. 

We need more diverse representation in politics, and more women in office. We need to secure, without question, the right of every single person to their bodily autonomy and sovereignty. We need to build an economy in which people take precedence over power, in which structures are designed not to extract and exploit us, but to help us all prosper. We need to shift culture so that violence is no longer worshipped and normalized by our laws, by our friends and loved ones, and by the people in power. 

And we need the ERA—what the editors of Ms. called “a nationwide, permanent safety net for women’s rights.”

“Constitutional affirmation of equality between the sexes is the indispensable political condition for the next phase of the long struggle for female personhood,” Langer wrote in Ms. in 1976. “It is …the foundation on which all of us, and our children, will have to stand.”

The more than one century-long fight for the ERA is a pinnacle of the history of the broader contemporary feminist movement. This fight has persisted precisely because it speaks to women across lines of race, class, and sexuality; because it has been led by a diverse coalition of women of all ages, backgrounds, and experiences—and because it contains the much-needed antidote to the persistent challenges we’ve faced: a guarantee that instead of having to battle backlash, prevent backsliding, and continually remind the people in power why women’s lives and rights matter, we would finally be able to secure women the equal rights and protections that they deserve, simply by nature of their stature as citizens, as Americans—as human beings.

“We will meet this historic challenge,” the editors of Ms. promised as they looked back on 50 years of feminist writing and organizing, “and together we will illuminate a way forward—for all of us.”

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: Thank you so much for tuning in to the fifth episode of LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: a podcast celebrating more than 50 years of Ms. and what’s yet to come as we carve out the second half of this feminist century.

If you liked what you heard today, be sure to check out the full show archive to dive into the first four episodes. You can also find more from every installment, including my full interviews with our incredible guests and episode notes, at ms magazine dot com and ms magazine dot com slash podcast.

And be sure to stay in touch! You can follow Ms. on Facebook at msmagazine, at ms underscore magazine on Instagram and Threads and via msmagazine dot com on BlueSky, and you can find me at carmen fucking rios dot com and on social media everywhere at carmen rios, with three s’s—that’s c a r m e n r i o s s s. 

Looking Back, Moving Forward is produced by Ms. Studios. Our executive producers are Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar. Our Supervising Producer, Writer, and Host is yours truly, Carmen Rios. Our episode producers are Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug. This episode was edited by Natalie Hadland. Art and design for this show are by Brandi Phipps.

Ms. is a non-profit, reader-funded magazine. Head to msmagazine dot com and hit JOIN to become a member or sustaining member today. You’ll get every issue of the magazine in print and in the Ms. app, access special member-only newsletters, discounted and early access to our community events, and special supporter gifts! 

You can continue exploring the history of Ms. by ordering your copy of the collection 50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution at bookstores and online at ms magazine dot com slash book. And now, for the first time, you can explore the entire digital collection of Ms. magazines, 1972-present, at your public or university library through ProQuest! Ask your librarian to add the new Ms. Magazine Archive to their collections if you can’t find it.

Special thanks to the office of Rep. Ayanna Pressley for permission to use the archival audio of Margaret Mitchell and the Congresswoman herself featured in this episode. Head to msmagazine.com slash podcast to find the full video links in our episode notes.

Our theme song is stock media provided by ProClips via Pond5.

Thanks for listening, readers.

[THEME MUSIC FADE OUT]