During the 1970s, hopes were high that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would finally be added to the U.S. Constitution. The ERA passed both houses of Congress and in 1972 was sent to the states for ratification with a seven-year deadline. In 1978, time was running out, but only 35 states had ratified the amendment. (Article V of the U.S. Constitution requires that 3/4 of the states must ratify a Constitutional amendment for it to be adopted. With 50 states in 1978, ratification by 38 states was needed for adoption of the ERA.) The National Organization for Women (NOW) declared a state of emergency on the ERA.
Ratification in Danger
The national board of NOW voted unanimously to declare the ERA state of emergency in February 1978. NOW issued a declaration that all of the organization’s resources would be committed to the state-by-state ratification campaigns and to an effort to win an extension of the seven-year deadline.
The ERA as a Political Football
Eleanor Smeal, then president of NOW, said that throughout the 1970s the ERA had become a political football. Backlash against feminism had begun in earnest. Anti-feminists struck fear into the hearts of voters by arguing that an amendment guaranteeing equality for women would lead to women in combat, homosexual marriage and unisex bathrooms. Trumpeting these “fears”, along with ratcheted-up rhetoric about traditional family roles, had a significant effect in the volatile political climate of the late 1970s. NOW and other organizations tried to fight the fears as they led the drive for equality.
The 1978 Declaration
Some key points of NOW's Declaration of State of Emergency on the ERA:
- The time had come to recognize “harsh political realities,” namely that those with power had dealt in hypocrisy. They paid "lip service to the ERA" while compromising in backroom political deals to sabotage passage of the amendment.
- If the ERA were defeated, it would be perceived as a vote against equal rights for women, even though the defeat would actually be due to political tricks and an indifferent national press.
- Public opinion polls showed majority support for the ERA. Two-thirds of the states with three-fourths of the population had already ratified. Therefore, representatives of three-fourths of the people in the country had ratified, but the Constitution requires three-fourths of state legislatures to ratify amendments.
- It had been 55 years since Alice Paul's ERA was first introduced in Congress. “Two generations of women have now struggled for its ratification,” NOW declared. “If it fails, it will take two more generations to recover from the loss. There comes a time when we must have the courage to declare ‘This ABOVE ALL.’”
A Deadline Extension to Save the ERA?
The feminists of NOW worked on many women’s rights issues during the 1970s, from abortion to employment equality. They had not previously committed all resources to the ERA struggle. In 1978, however, they had to meet the critical challenge of the dwindling time period for ratification. It was an ERA state of emergency because:
- The legislators who stalled with “parliamentary delaying tactics” would be thwarted by a deadline extension.
- The “traitors who switched votes and sold us out” could not be held accountable until after the original March 1979 deadline, because most of them were not up for re-election until 1980. If Congress extended the deadline, voters who wanted the amendment ratified could hold their state legislators accountable in the next election.
- The idea that the ERA could just be reintroduced in 1979 – as it had been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923 – was a “false hope” that erased 55 years of work.
Fighting the Backlash
Unfortunately, the forces against the ERA were successful. The original seven-year deadline was extended, but only for three years, to June 1982. The backlash continued. In 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke against the ERA, in favor of enforcing existing state laws against discrimination. Ultimately, the ERA fell three states short of ratification. Perhaps the ERA state of emergency never ended.