Legislative Campaign

During the late twentieth century, around 1965 to 1980 there was a trend of women attempting to get equal rights through legislation. The two most commonly known examples of this are the Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, and the attempted equal rights amendment.

Roe v. Wade

In 1970 twenty-one year old Norma McCorvey was pregnant and wanted an abortion, although they were illegal in Texas at the time. She was reffered to Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee instead. Wedding and Coffee were lawyers who for some time had been trying to put together a court case saying that the illegalization of abortions was against the constitution.

On March 3, 1970 Coffee filed a lawsuit stating that the Texas anti-abortion laws infringed upon, under the name Jane Roe, Norma McCorveys right to "safe and adequate medical advice pertaining to the decision of whether to bear children," as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The suit demanded the anti-abortion law be named unconstitutional, and therefore, not enforced. The defendant was the Texas district attorney named Henry Wade.

The lawsuit got taken all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme court ruled that the Texas anti-abortion laws "violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life." In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that the Texas laws were unconstitutional and therefore Jane Roe or any other woman had the right to have an abortion in the first trimester. The courts additionally, however, allowed states to decide on laws pertaining to second and third trimester abortions and at what point a woman was killing a child by having an abortion. This court ruling was significant because, much like Griswold v Connecticut which pertained to birth control, it gave women laws that directly helped them to make their own choices about their bodies.

The Equal Rights Amendment:

What was it?

-                     Officially, it said 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 and that Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article

-                     In practice, it would have accomplished several feats:

-                     Would prevent discrimination against women in the workplace, meaning that they could not be denied jobs because of their gender, and that their employers would be forced to pay them the same wages as their male counterparts

-                     Given women the Constitutional protection of all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to men (currently the only right specifically granted by the Constitution to women is the right to vote)

-                     It would have created a clearer and stricter federal judicial standard for deciding cases of sex discrimination

When was it?

            1921: Alice Paul first drafts The ERA

1923: two republican officials first present The ERA to Congress

1950: The ERA passes in Congress, but with a rider that nullifies its equal protection aspects (makes it meaningless)

1967: NOW (the National Organization for Women) pledges to fight for the ERA

1970: A Senate subcommittee begins hearings on the ERA

1971: the House of Representatives approve The ERA, without amendments.

1972: The ERA is approved, without amendments, by the Senate, with a seven year time limit set for its ratification (38 states must pass it in order for the amendment to become part of the Constitution)

1978: The seven years are up and the ERA has yet to build the necessary support, but Congress grants it an extension until 1982

1982: The ERA falls three states short of ratification.

1983: The ERA is proposed to Congress once again, but the House of Representatives falls six votes short of passing it.

1983-Present: NOW continues to fight for the ERA

Why didnt it pass?

-                     Republicans stopped supporting the ERA in 1980, and failed to include it in their official platform, but their presidential candidate (and the winner of that years election), Ronald Reagan, was actively against it

-                     Some women and womens organizations did not support it because they feared that by banning discrimination they would also be banning things like maternity leave, which protected women.

-                     Major business and insurance interests and those entities that benefit the most economically from sex discrimination lobbied against it, using their financial power.

-                     It would have invalidated men's legal power to use sex discrimination selectively when it was to their advantage to do so (made it illegal).
Some more traditional states, namely Illinois, passed laws requiring super majorities, three fourths of their legislatures, to pass the ERA.

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