40 Fun Facts About Equal Rights Amendment

Which conservative activist, author of A Choice Not an Echo, led the STOP ERA campaign in the 1970s?

Phyllis Schlafly began her campaign in 1972, when polls showed the amendment was widely popular. Political scientist Jane Mansbridge argues it would have been ratified by 1976 without her.

Which state ratified the Equal Rights Amendment first, within hours of the Senate vote in 1972?

Hawaii had the clock on its side: the Senate voted in mid-afternoon in Washington, when it was still midday in the islands, and both state chambers approved shortly after noon.

Which party was the first to put the Equal Rights Amendment in its platform, in 1940, before dropping support in 1980?

Republicans were the amendment's main base until the late 1960s, backed by middle-class women, while many Northern Democrats sided with labor unions that feared losing protective laws.

Which former First Lady long opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, fearing women workers would lose protections?

Eleanor Roosevelt softened in the early 1960s, telling supporters they could have the amendment if they wanted it, yet she never went so far as to endorse it.

Which suffragist, jailed in 1917 for picketing the White House, wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923?

Alice Paul kept at it for half a century: in 1943 she rewrote the amendment into the wording that Congress finally passed in 1972.

Which 2020 miniseries cast Cate Blanchett as the leader of the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment?

Mrs. America earned ten Emmy nominations, and Uzo Aduba won for her supporting role. Blanchett was also one of the executive producers.

Which state became the 38th to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in 2020, decades after the deadline had passed?

Virginia voted yes after Democrats won both chambers of its legislature in 2019. A year earlier the measure had died in the House of Delegates on a 50–50 tie.

Which president, three days before leaving office, declared the Equal Rights Amendment to be the law of the land?

Joe Biden's January 2025 statement said enough states had ratified, but the declaration had no formal effect and the amendment was not added to the Constitution.

What did Equal Rights Amendment opponents warn women would face, in what one scholar called their strongest argument?

The military draft was the opponents' most powerful issue, political scientist Jane Mansbridge concluded. The Senate had voted down a clause that would have exempted women from conscription.

Which future Supreme Court justice made the case for the Equal Rights Amendment in a 1973 bar association journal?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg later changed tack: in 2020 she said supporters should start over, asking how late ratifications could count if states that changed their minds did not.

What share of state legislatures must ratify a proposal such as the Equal Rights Amendment?

Three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 states, is the bar every constitutional amendment must clear, and this one stalled at 35 when its extended deadline ran out in June 1982.

What time limit, first tried with Prohibition, did Congress give states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment?

Seven years ran out on March 22, 1979, with the amendment still short, so Congress voted to move the deadline to June 30, 1982. No further state ratified in the extra time.

Work on the Equal Rights Amendment began shortly after which amendment guaranteed American women the vote?

The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, and suffragists who believed the vote alone would not bring equality announced their next campaign the following year.

The 1923 version of the Equal Rights Amendment was named for which Quaker abolitionist and women's rights pioneer?

Lucretia Mott had died in 1880, and the amendment's backers used her name to tie their new campaign to an earlier generation of antislavery and suffrage activists.

In 1923 the Equal Rights Amendment was rewritten in which New York town, site of an 1848 women's rights convention?

Seneca Falls gave the campaign a symbolic stage: the new wording was presented there 75 years after the first women's rights convention met in the same town.

The Kansas congressman who co-introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 was a nephew of which suffragist?

Susan B. Anthony had died in 1906, but her nephew Daniel Read Anthony Jr. sat in the House for more than two decades and brought the amendment's first version there.

Which lawmaker, the first Black woman elected to Congress, argued for the Equal Rights Amendment in a 1970 speech?

Shirley Chisholm argued that laws shielding women from unsafe working conditions were needed by men too, so the amendment would help everyone. Two years later she ran for president.

Which co-founder of Ms. magazine testified for the Equal Rights Amendment before a Senate committee in 1970?

Gloria Steinem later blamed the insurance industry for the amendment's defeat and insisted its best-known opponent had not changed a single vote.

Which group, co-founded by Betty Friedan in 1966, endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment the following year?

The National Organization for Women adopted the amendment at its 1967 conference, and the stand cost it the backing of union members whose leaders still opposed it.

Which president signed the Equal Rights Amendment deadline extension, a step no amendment legally requires?

Jimmy Carter signed as a precaution because the extension had passed with only simple majorities, and he noted that a 1798 Supreme Court ruling gave presidents no part in amending.

Which Michigan congresswoman forced the Equal Rights Amendment onto the House floor in 1970 after years in committee?

Martha Griffiths, later called the mother of the amendment, had already used her influence to help add sex to the job-discrimination ban in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Which senator, author of two earlier amendments and Title IX, wrote the Senate's Equal Rights Amendment text?

Birch Bayh is the only person since the Founding Fathers to write more than one constitutional amendment, on presidential succession and the voting age, yet this third one fell short.

Which senator, later chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, proposed a failed change to the Equal Rights Amendment?

Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat who liked to call himself a country lawyer, saw his change voted down before the Senate approved the amendment 84 to 8.

Which House Judiciary chairman long refused to consider the Equal Rights Amendment, then lost a 1972 primary over it?

Emanuel Celler, then the most senior member of the House, lost by 635 votes to a challenger who ran against his opposition to feminism and the amendment.

Which state restarted the Equal Rights Amendment drive in 2017, becoming the first to ratify in 40 years?

Nevada completed its vote on March 22, 2017, 45 years to the day after Congress sent the amendment to the states.

In which state did Equal Rights Amendment supporters fast and chain themselves to the Senate chamber in 1982?

Illinois demanded a three-fifths majority for constitutional amendments, so a 102–71 vote in favor in its House in 1980 still fell five votes short.

Which state became the 35th and last to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment before the deadline, in 1977?

Indiana's vote in January 1977 was the first ratification in almost two years, and no other state followed for four decades.

What did Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky each vote to do after ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment?

Each voted to rescind their approval, yet the Constitution is silent on whether a state can take a ratification back. Similar reversals in the 1860s were simply not counted.

What word did the final letter of STOP stand for in the STOP ERA campaign's name?

Privileges, in the campaign's telling, included a dependent wife's Social Security benefits and separate restrooms, all of which it claimed the amendment would sweep away.

Which group, known for its Silent Sentinels pickets, launched the Equal Rights Amendment drive in 1921?

The National Woman's Party wanted equality in all regards, even at the cost of women-only labor protections such as shorter hours, which set it against other women's groups for decades.

Which amendment, ratified 202 years after it was proposed, inspired the drive to revive the Equal Rights Amendment?

The 27th Amendment, on congressional pay, was rescued by a Texas student whose paper arguing it could still be ratified earned a C. Unlike the ERA, it carried no deadline.

Sonia Johnson was excommunicated in 1979 for her Equal Rights Amendment activism by leaders of which denomination?

The LDS Church opposed the amendment, and Johnson, a member who criticized that stance in public, went on to run for president in 1984.

Which Kansas senator, later Herbert Hoover's vice president, first introduced an Equal Rights Amendment in Congress?

Charles Curtis, an enrolled citizen of the Kaw Nation, went on to become the first Native American vice president, taking office in 1929.

Which lawyer, a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, co-wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923?

Crystal Eastman also co-founded the radical magazine The Liberator with her brother Max, and she died in 1928, decades before the amendment reached the states.

Which Arizona senator's 1950 rider would have kept special legal protections for women in the Equal Rights Amendment?

Carl Hayden's rider passed the Senate with the amendment in 1950 and again in 1953, but supporters said it defeated the whole purpose and the House never approved it.

Which group, founded by suffragists in 1920, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment for decades over labor protections?

The League of Women Voters grew out of the main suffrage association, yet it long feared the amendment would wipe out laws protecting women workers, and it backed it only in 1972.

Lacking an Equal Rights Amendment, sex-based laws get which standard of Supreme Court review, weaker than race cases?

Intermediate scrutiny dates from Craig v. Boren in 1976, a challenge to an Oklahoma law that let women buy low-alcohol beer at 18 while men had to wait until 21.

What mock ceremony did New Orleans supporters hold for the Equal Rights Amendment after its deadline passed in 1982?

A jazz funeral was held for the amendment in July 1982, soon after the extended deadline lapsed with ratifications stuck at 35 states.

Which federal official certifies new amendments and declined in 2020 to publish the Equal Rights Amendment?

The Archivist of the United States followed a 2020 Justice Department opinion that the deadline had expired, and states that ratified late lost a lawsuit to force certification.

Which part of the Constitution sets out the amendment process that the Equal Rights Amendment had to follow?

Article V offers two routes for proposing an amendment, yet all 33 ever sent to the states, this one included, started in Congress and not at a convention.