Virginia’s new state legislators will have a lot on their plate before they are up for re-election in 2021, but ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment should be the new Democratic majority’s first goal. Ratifying the ERA would be a powerful victory not only for the women’s rights movement but also for the entirety of the U.S. population, cementing many key institutional and cultural shifts toward sex equality in the United States. Activists across the country have been pushing for the ERA’s passage since 1923, and 2020 may be the year that the amendment finally joins the U.S. Constitution.
The ERA was ratified by Congress in 1972 after gaining traction nationally as a result of the 1960s civil rights movement and 1970s feminist movement. However, in order for the amendment to be added to the Constitution, 38 states must ratify the amendment, and only 35 states did so in the seven years following the amendment. 48 years later, states have shown a renewed interest in ratifying the ERA, and activists have targeted Virginia to be the 38th state to do so ever since Illinois ratified the amendment in 2018. With Virginians electing Democratic majorities to both the House of Delegates and State Senate in November, it seems only a matter of time until they ratify the amendment. Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D) told the Hill that the ratification of the amendment would be a “top priority” for the legislature, and it has bipartisan support in both houses.
Ratifying the ERA would accomplish one major institutional change: formally codifying women’s equality in the Constitution. The language put forth and ratified in the House of Representatives reads, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Its ratification would affirm that the rights protected by the Constitution apply to all Americans, regardless of their sex, and would bolster protections against sex discrimination. Sex would be considered a suspect classification in Constitutional law — similarly to how race is currently treated — meaning “governmental actions that treat males or females differently as a class would be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and would have to meet the highest level of justification,” according to the amendment’s website.
The ERA would also expand the powers of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments beyond their respective current domains, supporting sex equality in all areas of life. Ratifying the ERA would put pressure on lawmakers to increase the protections made available in Title VII and Title IX, which provide women legal recourse in non-workplace or education-based instances of sexual assault and harassment, by providing lawmakers with the legal framework for such protections’ basis. Furthermore, the amendment would help facilitate the passage of certain key parts of the Violence Against Women Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2000, giving individuals who are victims of gender-based violence the right to sue their assailants in federal court.
However, perhaps equally as important as the structural changes provided by the Equal Rights Amendment are the cultural changes that its passage would elicit. The ERA firmly rejects the toxic notion that women are subordinate to men and therefore do not deserve the same rights as men. The ERA puts men and women on the same level in the Constitution and would make sex equality one of the pillars of our government.
Despite the powerful cultural arguments in favor of the amendment, the biggest pushback against the amendment seems to be cultural as well. When the amendment passed Congress in 1972, the STOP ERA movement, organized to energize conservative Christian women to fight the amendment’s ratification, convinced “lawmakers that the amendment would force women to sign up for the draft, decriminalize rape, allow for same-sex marriages, give men permission not to support their families, and require Americans to use unisex toilets.” These types of false claims regarding the amendment accentuate how dangerous the ERA seems to defenders of traditional gender roles. The amendment challenges the deep-rooted patriarchy in American society, patriarchy that many men, and some women, wish to see preserved. However, in order to make progress, this societal norm must be challenged by public policy, and the ERA is the perfect opportunity to send the message that the United States is ready to explicitly support sex equality.
Even though ratifying the ERA would push the United Staters further toward sex equality, its ratification is not enough. The addition of the amendment would provide only the rough framework for real change to be enacted through powerful legislation that ensures economic equality, reproductive equality, and education equality. Also, the Equal Rights Amendment only protects against discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender. This key distinction would exclude transgender folks and other non-binary individuals who are consistently discriminated against by employers.
However, the amendment would still catalyze important progress in Constitutional law and would set the stage for more all-encompassing gender legislation for the future. The structural and cultural changes garnered by the ERA would benefit all U.S. citizens. Ratifying it should be a priority for Virginia lawmakers in 2020, as well as a national imperative when the time comes to formally ratify the amendment at the federal level.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Florida Memory Project