Julie C. Suk
LESS THAN A YEAR after the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women’s right to vote, a bold group of suffragists began drafting another amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). While it was considered revolutionary at the time, these women had a simple idea: that the Constitution should recognize men and women’s equal rights not only as voters, but as people and citizens. Most constitutions around the world have since agreed, declaring equality between women and men, but the United States has struggled. Indeed, the revolution those women called for became an evolution, and remains unfinished.
Women have been fighting for the ERA for almost a century now. As Article V of the Constitution lays out, two-thirds of Congress has to vote to adopt a new amendment and then three-fourths of the states have to ratify it. It took Congress almost forty-nine years to adopt the ERA in 1972, and the fight for ratification in the states took another forty-eight years, culminating in 2020 when Virginia became the crucial thirty-eighth state. And yet, even with all the ratifications completed, sex equality is still not being added to the Constitution, and a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the future of the ERA.