Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
It must have been the desperate urgency of the effort to defeat Bush in 2004, that caused me to fail to pay attention to the omission of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from the Democratic Party platform.
It was the first time in forty years that the Democrats failed to include the ERA in their platform, and I didn't notice.
The ERA was written in 1923, by National Woman’s Party leader, Alice Paul. It was first introduced in Congress that same year and every year afterward until it passed in 1972. When the deadline for ratification expired in 1982, the Amendment was 3 states short of the 38 needed for ratification (but see the 3 State Strategy). The two parties first supported the ERA in their platforms in the 1940s; the Republican Party withdrew its support in 1980.
Of late, many women have written of their dismay at the Democratic Party’s failure to take women’s rights seriously. Martha Burk expresses my own sentiments:
They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,” Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.” He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues” at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years. When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly.
As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was—sorry, Howard—pro-choice.
Increasingly, the Democratic Party appears weak in its defense of reproductive rights, and in recent years it has failed to make even a pretense of considering a woman for the presidential ticket. Maybe that will change in 2008, but I fear we will hear the same old tired refrain: someday a woman will be president, but not now, the time is not right, Hillary Clinton is too “ambitious,” too “polarizing.”
Diane E. Dees at MoJo Blog writes:
I left the Democratic Party for a long list of reasons, but the main one was the fact that I felt dismissed as a woman. And nothing has changed. Even in the 21st Century, all the Democratic Party had to offer for a presidential ticket was two white males.
Like her or not, Senator Clinton gets the same kind of bashing from Democrats that she gets from Republicans, and it isn't about her politics. When the subject of her possible presidential candidacy came up on the MSNBC program "Hardball," host Chris Matthews, a Democrat, immediately said: "Well, that would motivate all the men in the country to vote against her." All the men? Those are some mighty strong feelings of insecurity.
American women have never had a constitutional guarantee of equality, but for a while we still had one party that explicitly supported the attainment of that guarantee. In 1978, now Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg weighed in on the importance of putting women into the Constitution:
With the Equal Rights Amendment, we may expect Congress and the state legislatures to undertake in earnest, systematically and pervasively, the law revision so long deferred. And in the event of legislative default, the courts will have an unassailable basis for applying the bedrock principle: All men and all women are created equal. (emphasis addded)
After Alice Paul’s brilliant and tireless efforts at winning the right to vote for American women, she devoted the rest of her life to the passage of the ERA. Paul first introduced the ERA at the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848. As always, Alice Paul was thinking of the women of the future when she spoke that day in 1923:
"If we keep on this way they will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Convention without being much further advanced in equal rights than we are. . . We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government."
In 2005, women are not gaining rights, we are losing them. In the entire history of this country, less than 2% of the people who have served in Congress have been women. We have never come close to having a woman in the highest office in the land. This does not feel like a democracy to me.
feminism Democrats ERA democracy Equal Rights Amendment
