The 96-year long fight for a Constitutional Amendment protecting the legal rights of women came to Camp Verde last week. At a meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 4, the Camp Verde Town Council joined in the century-long fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, passing a resolution urging the state legislature to make Arizona the 38th state to ratify the ERA.
“I think if Arizona did this it would just be amazing,” said Council Member Robin Whatley, who proposed the resolution by the council. “Flagstaff just passed a resolution last night. Cities and towns across Arizona are encouraging the state to do this.”
The council’s push comes after many had come before them. On July 21, 1923, Alice Paul, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement who had been instrumental in the long campaign for the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, spoke in front of a gathering of the National Women’s Party in Seneca Falls, New York.
The group was gathering to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the first Seneca Falls convention, which had jump-started the American women’s rights movement in 1848 with the publication of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document based on America’s Declaration of Independence, proclaiming for the first time “that all men and women are created equal.”
But Paul’s speech was not celebratory. Rather than resting on the laurels of a right for women finally enshrined in the Constitution, Paul used the occasion to begin a new fight, one that continues to this day. In 1923, Alice Paul was the first woman in America to call for the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment, enshrining into the US Constitution that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
“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,” Paul said in 1923. “If we had not concentrated on the 19th Amendment, we would be working today for suffrage. We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government.”
In 1972, both houses of Congress passed the ERA by two-thirds majorities, as necessary for ratification. In addition to the Senate and House of Representatives, two-thirds of US states [38 out of 50] also would have to approve the ERA for it to be enshrined in our founding document. 35 states got there in the 1970s, but an opposition campaign led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly ended the momentum, stopping the amendment from being made law before the Congress- imposed deadline of 1982.
“What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother,” Schlafly told People Magazine in 1975. She insisted that by making women equal under the law, the ERA would take women’s special place in American society, and lose the right to be supported by their husbands.
“I argue ERA strictly and solely on the rights women will lose because of it,” Schlafly said “The right to be provided with a home, to go to a single-sex college, and to stay home and be a mother will be lost.”
Some of the legal protections that would be guaranteed by the ERA have been won in the courts, but advocates have still maintained that a Constitutional amendment would be the best way to guarantee equal rights for women. In recent years, a movement to get the remaining three states to pass the ERA despite the deadline [which is of uncertain legality according to some Constitutional scholars] has popped up. In 2017, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and Illinois followed suit in 2018.
The 13 states that have not yet ratified the ERA are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. In Arizona, a push by Democrats in the state senate to vote on the amendment was quashed in March, and again in April. A campaign has started among municipal governments to pressure the state to act. The Arizona League of Cities and Towns passed a resolution in support on Aug. 22 in support of ERA, joining those municipalities around the state that had already done the same, such as Sedona in February.
“I think it needs to be done, personally,” Whatley said at Wednesday’s meeting. “Ninety-nine years ago we passed the 19th amendment. And we’re still trying to pass an Equal Rights Amendment. I just want our small voice to be heard at the state.”
