The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time. In 1972, it passed both houses of Congress and went to the state legislatures for ratification. The ERA failed to receive the requisite number of ratifications before the final deadline mandated by Congress of June 30, 1982 expired, and so it was not adopted, largely because Phyllis Schlafly mobilized conservatives to oppose ERA.
Read more about Equal Rights Amendment: Text, Three-state Strategy, Subsequent Congressional Action
Famous quotes containing the words equal rights, equal, rights and/or amendment:
“The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself: “That is not what I meant by freedom—it is only ‘social progress.’””
—Helene Deutsch (1884–1982)
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values—an identification which alone makes it possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)