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Virginia Ratifies The Equal Rights Amendment, Decades After The Deadline

LacklustreFriend

January 16, 2020

20 upvotes

/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates

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Post Information

Title	Virginia Ratifies The Equal Rights Amendment, Decades After The Deadline
Author	LacklustreFriend
Upvotes	20
Comments	15
Date	January 16, 2020 9:27 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/eph2qc/virginia_ratifies_the_equal_rights_amendment/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/virginia-ratifies-the-equal-rights-amendment.1064158 https://theredarchive.com/post/1064158

Comments

[–]LacklustreFriend[S] 8 points9 points10 points 6 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]serpentineeyelash 10 points11 points12 points 6 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

I was about to post a thread entitled "Why I support the US Equal Rights Amendment", but you beat me to it!

The ERA is very short and simple:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Sec. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Sec. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

I think the ERA can only be good for men's rights. It wouldn't change anything right away, but it should provide a constitutional foundation to legally challenge discrimination against men.

If you look at the history of the ERA, most of the arguments against it were from women concerned about losing special protections. Initially many working-class women saw it as a threat to protections for female workers. From the 1970s onwards, the ERA's main opponent was Phyllis Schafly's conservative women's campaign arguing it could end discrimination against men. A few relevant quotes from Wikipedia:

With wide, bipartisan support (including that of both major political parties, both houses of Congress, and Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter) the ERA seemed destined for ratification until Phyllis Schlafly mobilized conservative women in opposition. These women argued that the ERA would disadvantage housewives, cause women to be drafted into the military and to lose protections such as alimony, and eliminate the tendency for mothers to obtain custody over their children in divorce cases. [...]

One prominent female supporter was New York representative Shirley Chisholm... She also said that laws to protect women in the workforce from unsafe working conditions would be needed by men, too, and thus the ERA would help all people. [...]

Opponents of the ERA focused on traditional gender roles, such as how men do the fighting in wartime. They argued that the amendment would guarantee the possibility that women would be subject to conscription and be required to have military combat roles in future wars if it were passed... They appealed to married women by stressing that the amendment would invalidate protective laws such as alimony and eliminate the tendency for mothers to obtain custody over their children in divorce cases. It was suggested that single-sex bathrooms would be eliminated and same-sex couples would be able to get married if the amendment were passed. [...]

Political scientist Jane Mansbridge in her history of the ERA argues that the draft issue was the single most powerful argument used by Schlafly and the other opponents to defeat ERA. Mansbridge concluded, "Many people who followed the struggle over the ERA believed—rightly in my view—that the Amendment would have been ratified by 1975 or 1976 had it not been for Phyllis Schlafly's early and effective effort to organize potential opponents." Legal scholar Joan C. Williams maintained, "ERA was defeated when Schlafly turned it into a war among women over gender roles." [...]

The ERA has long been opposed by pro-life groups who believe it would be interpreted to allow legal abortion without limits and taxpayer funding for abortion.

All in all, the ERA would place more legal scrutiny on various special protections for women, potentially forcing the US government to either abolish them or extend them to men too.

[–]LacklustreFriend[S] 6 points7 points8 points 6 years ago* (2 children) | Copy Link

I'm a little bit skeptical when it comes to men's rights enforcement of the ERA. Laws are only as good as they are enforced, and there's a long history around the ERA and other laws being about women and ignoring men. Title IX in the US is another example, although in the last few years some men's groups have had success using Title IX. The issue is still the underlying social attitudes. The ERA has been about women and its enforcement would likely reflect that.

To be a bit more optimistic, if the ERA does become an amendment eventually, I do see clear men's rights case when it comes to MGM and I imagine it might be one of the earliest tests of a potential ERA.

Also the white-washing of the historical feminist opposition to the ERA in the Wikipedia article is so fustrating. It portays as the opposition largely be conservative in nature, ignoring the many feminist groups, including labour feminists and social feminists, who opposed it because it would mean abolishing special privileges women had under the law.

[–]serpentineeyelash 3 points4 points5 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]LacklustreFriend[S] 1 point2 points3 points 6 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

There's a large problem is that this thing is talked about or studied a lot - the same way the acts of terrorism by suffragettes (and the history of the suffragettes in general) has been white washed.

Here is a decent article discussing the 1920s feminist debate about the ERA, albeit from a feminist perspective.

I'll have to hunt down more about feminist opposition in the 50s, 60s, and 70s though. I know I've read about it before. The Hayden Rider was suggested in the 50s in part to appease the opposition of the labour and social feminists.

Edit: It seems like sociological and feminist scholars really don't like talking about feminist opposition to the ERA after the 30s. The can blame the 20s and 30s opposition to a 'rogue and flawed' part of the women's movement but it's harder to do in later decades. Most of the texts I've read just brush over the later feminist opposition to it.

[–]werubim 9 points10 points11 points 6 years ago (9 children) | Copy Link

[–]mtcapri 6 points7 points8 points 6 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

[–]werubim 3 points4 points5 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]mtcapri 3 points4 points5 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]LacklustreFriend[S] 6 points7 points8 points 6 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]werubim 4 points5 points6 points 6 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]mtcapri 3 points4 points5 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]LacklustreFriend[S] 6 points7 points8 points 6 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points6 points 6 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]genkernels 7 points8 points9 points 6 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

The Hayden rider seems to have not been part of the thing actually passed in congress. Here's the history and where I'm getting that idea.

Another source lists it out more clearly:

In the 92ndCongress, Representative Griffiths began the process anew in the House of Representatives when she introduced H.J.Res. 208, proposing an equal rights amendment. Chairman Celler continued to oppose it, but no longer blocked committee action. After subcommittee and full committee hearings, the House Judiciary Committee reported an amendment on July 14, but the resolution as reported included amendments concerning citizenship, labor standards, and the exemption of women from selective service that were unacceptable to ERA supporters. When H.J.Res. 208 came to the floor in early October, however, the House stripped out the committee amendments, and, on October 12, it approved the resolution by a bipartisan vote of 354 to 24.71 The Senate took up the House-passed amendment during the second session of the 92ndCongress, in March 1972. On March 14, the Judiciary Committee reported a clean version of H.J.Res. 208 after rejecting several amendments, including one adopted by the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and several others offered in the full committee. The resolution was called up on March 15, and immediately set aside.

The Senate began debate on the amendment on March 17, with Senator Birch Bay h of Indiana, a longtime ERA supporter, as floor manager. On the same day, President Richard Nixon released a letter to Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania reaffirming his endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment. After two days in which the Members debated the proposal, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina offered a series of amendments that, among other things, would have exempted women from compulsory military service and service in combat units in the U.S. Armed Forces, and preserved existing gender-specific state and federal legislation that extended special exemptions or protections to women. Over the course of two days, Senator Ervin’s amendments were serially considered and rejected, generally by wide margins. On March 22, the Senate approved the House version of the amendment, H.J.Res. 208, by a vote of 84 to 8, with strong bipartisan support.

So without. The version we're dealing with seems to have been passed clean. So this is something to support.