For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alice Paul, you need to go watch
Iron Jawed Angels real quick.
Done? Awesome. Welcome back. So, after helping to lead the suffragist movement in the United States, Alice Paul turned her attention to other issues of equality. During the course of her work, she scribed the original text of what came to be known as the Equal Rights Amendment. "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." The amendment has since been reworded, but it remains 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.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
After decades of campaigning, the amendment passed the U.S. Congress. It was sent to the states for ratification. Thirty states have ratified it, meaning we need eight more states to agree to it before it can become the law of the land.
Check out the list. Maybe your congressperson needs to hear from you. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.
Some of our favorite
celebrities and politicians have made statements about the ERA, just in case you didn't love them enough as it is.
Meryl Streep
The inimitable Meryl wrote a letter to each member of Congress last month, urging them to revive the Equal Rights Amendment. "I am writing to ask you to stand up for equality - for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself - by actively supporting the Equal Rights Amendment."
Jackie Speier
The Democratic Representative from California says, "The time is ripe to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Seventy percent of people polled think that we already have an ERA in the Constitution and they're shocked to find we don't have one."
Chelsea Handler
"You wouldn't think that in 2015, in the United States, women still need to fight for legal equality, but here we are."
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"If I could choose an amendment to add to the Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment. I think we have achieved that through legislation, but legislation can be repealed, it can be altered. So I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion – that women and men are persons of equal stature – I’d like them to see that is a basic principle of our society.”
Patricia Arquette
"It is time for women. Equal means equal. And the truth is, the older women get, the less money they make. It's inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries when we don't have equal rights for women in America. And we don't because when they wrote the Constitution, they didn't intend it for women. So even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women."
