More Than A Magazine, A Movement
By providing an explicit guarantee of sex equality in the Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment holds the power to transform the underlying power dynamics fueling gender-based violence.
(This essay is part of “The ERA Is Essential to Democracy” Women & Democracy collection.)
Twenty-nine years ago, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), finally putting the full force of our federal government into efforts to stop domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking to help survivors. VAWA was transformative. In the years after it was enacted, domestic violence against adult women in the United States declined by more than 60 percent.
The pandemic set us back, and there’s much more work to do. We will keep working to improve VAWA, and to support the Biden administration’s National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence: Strategies for Action, a truly groundbreaking whole-of-government approach to addressing and preventing violence of all kinds.
If you thought the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the end of the Court’s war on women, think again. Now gender violence laws are under attack. Case in point: last term’s decision in Counterman v. Colorado striking down a stalking conviction as unconstitutional. This upcoming term, the Court is poised to deal another blow to domestic violence laws, in a case about guns: United States v. Rahimi.
The only answer is for women to return to a newly vital project since Dobbs: the Equal Rights Amendment.
(This article originally appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
Some lawmakers want to change the masculine default in government documents. Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) are introducing legislation that would replace masculine generics with gender-neutral language in the U.S. legal code.
The Equality in Our Laws Act would direct the Office of Law Revision Counsel (OLRC) to to make non-substantive, gender-neutral revisions to many portions of the legal code.
Nearly one in three women have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner. But in 2000, in the case of U.S. v. Morrison, the Supreme Court decided to leave survivors of gender-based violence to this day without the legal tools necessary to sue their attackers for damages or other relief in federal court.
One hundred years ago, women’s rights activists introduced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to guarantee equal rights for women under the U.S. Constitution. On Thursday, April 27, the Senate will vote on the ERA. Among many other benefits to the law, this vote also represents an opportunity to protect survivors of gender-based violence—which, even in today’s heated political climate, commands bipartisan concern and support.
Since the news broke about Pat Schroeder’s death on March 14, there have been thousands of tributes, obituaries, tweets and social media postings in her honor. They described her as a maverick, pioneer, feminist champion, trailblazer, fearlessly independent politician, and an icon and role model for many elected officials, men and women. We agree—but for the feminist movement, Pat Schroeder was much more. On March 22, 2023, the House of Representatives will honor Schroeder with a moment of silence. In honor of this one minute—60 seconds—of silence, we’ve compiled 60 stories from people who knew and admired Pat Schroeder.
“Pat was best known for being a fierce advocate for women. And many young women asked her for advice. She told them to make sure women were in rooms where decisions were being made. And if they were not, to kick the door down and hold the door open for those behind them.”
“In the Depp v. Heard trial, behaviors that are common to survivors were relentlessly mocked and misunderstood,” said Dr. Emma Katz, author of Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives. “These common survivor behaviors—including covering injuries with makeup and leaving your abuser then arranging to meet with them again—were widely condemned as signs of deception. Many survivors watched these public conversations unfold with dread, as the question, ‘Will I be believed if I come forward?’ seemed to be met with a resounding ‘no.’”
Diane Rosenfeld’s new book The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance is a call to action, a way forward and societal shift that can free us from the grips of patriarchy.
“The bonobos are peaceful, loving, food sharing, freely sexual and xenophilic, meaning they love strangers, they do not fear them,” because “they have nothing to fear,” she writes. In the bonobos, Rosenfeld finds proof positive that “patriarchy is not inevitable.”
On Tuesday night, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators working on landmark bipartisan gun legislation reached a compromise on the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” blocking dating partners convicted of a misdemeanor from buying guns, but allowing them to regain the right to buy a gun after five years provided that they were first-time offenders and not found guilty of any other violent misdemeanor or offense.
Special interest groups funded by corporations and the ultra-wealthy went all out in attacking Build Back Better. These groups hide behind a woman’s face to conceal anti-feminist policy positions while reproducing social inequalities for families across generations by opposing policies and structures that would advance equality and improve economic mobility.
