By Shawne Wickham
The New Hampshire Union Leader, Manchester
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) As Shawne Wickham reports, “Even among ERA supporters, there’s disagreement over how best to proceed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, long a champion of women’s equality, told an interviewer earlier this year that she thinks starting over is the best path forward.”
Manchester
On Wednesday, residents and staff of Kendal at Hanover will don suffragist white and hold a small parade for Women’s Equality Day.
The senior living community will mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which affirmed women’s right to vote, with one of the few centennial events in New Hampshire that hasn’t been canceled.
So if women have been voting for a century, why has an Equal Rights Amendment — a Constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women — been so difficult to pass?
And do we even need one anymore?
The country in 2020 is surely a lot different than it was in the early days of the ERA — Congress sent it to the states in 1972 — and the national conversation about equal rights has evolved.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 approved same-sex marriage, and today people are talking about the rights of transgender individuals and what that should look like in our schools, workplaces and public restrooms.
And after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, the Black Lives Matter movement has pushed racial injustice to the forefront of political debate and public demonstrations.
Meanwhile, women have ascended to top positions of power and authority. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one of the nation’s most influential political leaders. Sen. Kamala Harris just became the first woman of color to be nominated as vice president by a major political party. And a record number of women are serving in the U.S. Congress (101 in the House and 26 in the Senate), running Fortune 500 companies (37) and sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court (three).
Still …
America remains a nation where women have never attained the highest political office in the land. A historically diverse group of candidates ran in this year’s Democratic presidential primary, including Harris and five other women, but voters in November will be choosing between two 70-something white men.
And despite equal-pay laws, the Washington-based National Women’s Law Center reports that women at all education levels and in nearly every occupation still make less than men doing the same work.
NH an early adopter
It’s been nearly a half-century since New Hampshire passed the ERA, which consists of just two dozen 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.”
In fact, we might well have been the first state in the nation to ratify the amendment but for the rotation of the Earth.
After Congress passed the ERA on March 22, 1972, the Hawaii legislature quickly moved to ratify it, the first of the 38 states required to add the amendment to the U.S. Constitution. New Hampshire was close behind.
“It passed Congress in the afternoon and so Hawaii was able to ratify it first because they were still in session,” recalled Elizabeth Hager, who was elected to the Legislature later that year. “We had to wait ’til the next day because it was so late in the day we weren’t in session.”
Supporters of equal rights here felt passing the federal amendment was not sufficient.
As a freshman Republican lawmaker, Hager was elected to serve as a member of the state’s 1974 Constitutional Convention, and then-Gov. Walter Peterson appointed her as chairman of the Bill of Rights committee. She was the prime sponsor of Resolution 96, which proposed adding this sentence to Article 2 of the state Constitution: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by this state on account of race, creed, color, sex or national origin.”
The amendment was on the November ballot that year, needing two-thirds of the votes to pass. When the votes were counted, it had passed, with 135,989 in favor (67.52%), and 64,421 against (23.48%).
A recount produced the same result. The equal-rights language was added to the state Constitution the following March.
Still deeply divided
For those too young to remember, the early 1970s in America was a turbulent time. The Vietnam War was dividing the nation, the Watergate scandal was about to bring down a president, and the feminist movement was in full roar.
A year after Congress sent the ERA out to the states for ratification, 90 million people around the world watched as 29-year-old Billie Jean King competed against 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in a tennis match dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” King won.
Fast-forward to 2020, and the country once again is deeply divided across social and political fault lines.
The election of Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 reinvigorated the women’s movement. The day after Trump’s inauguration, millions of women marched and protested in cities around the nation.
Nearly 2,000 people attended the Women’s March for Civil Rights in Portsmouth that day. In Concord, where thousands attended a rally at the State House, activists dressed the statue of Daniel Webster in a red “equality” shirt and pink “pussy” hat. The crowd sang along to Gloria Gaynor’s feminist anthem “I Will Survive” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
Elsewhere, ERA supporters were roused to action. Nevada passed it in 2017, followed by Illinois the next year. Last January, the Virginia legislature ratified the ERA, the 38th state to do so, thus reaching the three-quarters threshold required to amend the Constitution.
That’s not the end of the story.
Headed to court
In 1972, Congress set a seven-year deadline for ratification. After 100,000 women marched on Washington in 1978, Congress extended that deadline to June 30, 1982. But by 1982, only 35 states had ratified the ERA — and five had voted to rescind their earlier votes. Legal scholars differ on whether such rescissions count.
After the Virginia vote, the U.S. House passed a resolution removing the ratification deadline for the ERA. Both of New Hampshire’s Democratic senators are co-sponsors of a similar bill in the Senate and have called on Senate President Mitch McConnell to bring it to the floor for a vote.
“There should be no expiration date for equality,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said in an email. “This shouldn’t be hard — all Americans should enjoy the same freedoms and rights, and the Senate should be afforded this opportunity to stand with women.
Sen. Maggie Hassan also supports removing the deadline, “so that we can finally guarantee women and men have equal rights under the law,” she said in a statement.
However, shortly before Virginia voted, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that “the ERA Resolution has expired and is no longer pending before the States.” The only path forward is to start the ratification process over again, the opinion said.
Court challenges have been filed, and new versions of the ERA have been introduced.
Suffrage and equal rights
The League of Women Voters of New Hampshire also is celebrating its centennial this year. The nonpartisan organization grew out of the suffrage movement after the 19th Amendment was ratified, according to Liz Tentarelli of Newbury, its president.
Last Friday, Tentarelli dropped off a box full of yellow sashes reading “Votes for Women” at Kendal for its Wednesday event. She had made the sashes for LWV members to wear at 19th Amendment events across the state this year, but the Hanover event will have to suffice, she said.
Tentarelli said she understands the argument that the ERA is no longer necessary, since most states have their own versions in their constitutions. “But you have to ask why, if we’ve been voting for 100 years, are we unable to pass the ERA?” she said.
“I think there are underlying emotional biases that say women are not quite equal,” she said, noting women are still underrepresented in corporate and political leadership.
Tentarelli still wears her 1973 ERA button from time to time. She thinks about the women suffragists who lived in states that had already passed voting rights before 1920 but who continued to work for ratification of the 19th Amendment.
“They didn’t stop the fight,” she said. “They wanted this for other women around the country, and there was a certain symbolic value even to those women who had the vote to see it enshrined in the federal Constitution.
“And I think I feel the same way about the ERA.”
Starting over?
Even among ERA supporters, there’s disagreement over how best to proceed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, long a champion of women’s equality, told an interviewer earlier this year that she thinks starting over is the best path forward.
The League of Women Voters’ Tentarelli said she would rather see the courts decide on the ERA. She worries that going through ratification again would resurrect old arguments, old divisions. “It could start exacerbating those differences rather than healing them,” she said.
Elise Bouc, national chairwoman for the ERA at the Eagle Forum, which has led the fight against the ERA since 1972, believes the amendment is dead. But she said, “We’re never going to stop fighting it. As long as they are trying to pass it, we will step out and educate people.”
“It’s not that we’re opposed to equal rights for women,” Bouc said. “It’s the language in this amendment.”
Liz Hager points out that in New Hampshire and other states that put equal-rights language into their state Constitutions, the social upheaval predicted by opponents never materialized.
After the 1974 Constitutional Convention, Hager chaired a committee to study the effects of the ERA on New Hampshire laws. It was a short study, she said with a laugh, “because basically there were very few results.”
One judge, she recalled, had cited the language in ruling that a woman was entitled to go back to her maiden name after a divorce. Many references to wives and husbands in state statutes were changed to “spouse,” Hager said.
In the years since, she said, “Really, there have been no giant consequences to having an equal rights amendment in our Constitution, and I’m sure that’s the same in other states, or we’d read about it.”
A new ERA?
If the courts decide that proponents have to start over to pass the ERA, its wording could end up looking different from what people have been arguing about for half a century, given how much society has changed in that time.
Asked what version of an ERA the Eagle Forum would support, Bouc said she hasn’t found the “perfect language.”
But Bouc believes compromise is possible. “We’ve got to start listening to each other,” she said. “This divisiveness will destroy us.”
Hager said she is glad the debate over the ERA has been revived. “I’m a little beyond my activism years, so I’m not marching in the streets trying to help with this, but I think it’s great that people are informing themselves about this again and that they are working on it,” she said.
“All these things are evolving anyway, and there are not going to be major shifts in society if those words are in our Constitution,” Hager said. “We have all these states that can share that with us, and I think that’s a pretty strong argument that we didn’t have in those days.”
‘Remember the ladies’
The debate over women’s rights is as old as our Republic.
In 1776, Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John Adams at the Continental Congress, urging him to “remember the ladies.”
“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could,” the future First Lady wrote. “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
That remains a powerful argument for including the ERA in the Constitution, Hager said. “We’ve been asking them for all these years to remember the women,” she said, “so I think it’s still relevant.”
“The Constitution should be worded in such a way to clearly include all of us.”
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
