The ERA is still not law of the land. Let me rephrase that: The Equal Rights Amendment has never been passed into law. Can anyone believe this in the year 2020, the 21st century, our most equalizing and open-minded time to date in American history, this era of modern reasonable women-can-work-any-job (except U.S. President)? I’m … I’m … speechless.
Nevertheless. Perhaps given our post-feminist society—where men can stay home and raise the kids, where same sex couples can marry and adopt children, where the wife may earn more than her husband and no one cares, where women can apply for any job and run businesses and corporations—we’ve all just settled down and assumed women had the same rights as men under U.S. law. Isn’t sex discrimination illegal? The Equal Rights Amendment, which dates back in similar proposed legislation to the 1920s, would ensure women shall have equal rights anywhere in the U.S. Well, as the ERA’s most famous opponent Phyllis Shlafly would say, doesn’t the business world already provide this by now? Everyone supports equal rights for women. So why has the ERA been so damn hard to pass into law? Ladies, follow the men.
And by men, I mean our worldwide male-dominated cultures and societies since the beginning of time, our man-centered religions and education, our ancient family structures that dictate men are providers and women bear the children while cooking and cleaning simultaneously. With the realization that the ERA has remained in limbo for decades, we can clearly see this old worn-out sexist stereotype still exists among our equally old and worn-out congressmen and Mr. Man senators. Maybe since 2018 with the largest number of women to date voted into U.S. Congress, the ERA soon will be the law it should have been (and many Americans thought it already was especially by now).
The ERA mystique
Somewhere between the saying credited to our nation’s sexiest feminist, Gloria Steinem, the one that goes “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” and the equally deadpan depiction of marriage credited to the feminist movement’s founder Betty Friedan, that for women marriage is at best a “comfortable concentration camp,” lies the mystical entwinement of the sexes. Men used to be oblivious to women feeling any other way than happy and content being married and having children and raising them and tutoring them and driving them to their activities and cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping and sewing and running household errands and managing the home and yards. Whose life wouldn’t be fulfilled?
In 1972, I proclaimed myself a women’s libber. I was 10 years old and told everyone I knew. Mom didn’t mind, probably cheered me on. In my neighborhood, my mother was the only woman who worked. She was a teacher. She also grew up with nine brothers. Shoot, Carol Burnett performed skits as a loud-mouthed bossy women’s libber on her comedy show every Saturday night. Loretta Lynn sang The Pill, and I understood the sentiment: Women don’t want to be pregnant all their lives. Cher and Streisand and every woman in show biz proclaimed they, too, were women’s libbers on the Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin shows every weekday afternoon. Then there was TV’s Maude which Mom and I watched every Monday night. A women’s libber was the thing to be. We weren’t about to return to the old days of staying home with the children, not going to college, not having a career, not earning our own money, not feeling free.
Then something really strange happened in my family. We started going to church. Not just any church but a fundamentalist one. To a young women’s libber, a gal who had drive and ambition and wasn’t gonna let a man hold me back, the cultural whiplash was mind blowing. The church taught that women are to help and serve their husbands; their place in the home is to be a supportive silent adoring companion; they do, too, want to have children; they shouldn’t work or have a career if it interferes with the home and family. And the church used a lot of Bible to prove this way of life, of coupling, of family, of God’s intention.
But, I was a women’s libber. I had all these goals and plans. Getting married and having babies was not my priority at least until my late 20s or 30s. In sermons, the women’s lib movement would come up as a deal with the devil to break up the family home. What’s right is women should be married and should be mothers. This was the 1970s, and divorce was becoming very common. Were divorced women going against God if they worked, had to work, and maintain an apartment while raising their kid or kids? They usually had custody. The church had life figured out. Women in that predicament should pray for a husband. It was the only way she would be truly happy.
The church also taught that the National Organization for Women was anti-God and run by a bunch of lesbians. (Like that even mattered.) Feminists have no place in God’s church. Wow wee. This was gonna be a personal problem for little ol’ me, Ms. Independent.
Needless to say, the church supported Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, initiating the Reagan Revolution to return to a 1950s’ America of which I only knew from black-and-white TV reruns. As a young adult woman, I split and went to a secular college where the female professors were indeed feminists, and the older sisters enlightened us young women and men about how far back and how deeply entrenched the male hierarchy reached, even brainwashing females into living lives that were not their own. That was all I needed to hear. Live your own life. Speak your own mind. Think for yourself. I was restored to my women’s libber mindset. That was the real me. Still is.
Take it from here
The push to pass the ERA in the 1970s was the subject of a TV series called Mrs. America, with the theme song from the disco era, A Fifth of Beethoven, instead of the women’s movement’s actual theme song during the early ’70s, I am Woman. Guess that song couldn’t have been modernized by one of today’s female artists. Each episode focused on the most famous women who came to national prominence during the ERA fight, especially anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. She I remember. Conservatives and fundamentalists would have supported her wholeheartedly. Good woman, dutiful wife and together homemaker, at her heart she was just as much a women’s libber as the rest of us. She was blessed with help supervising her six kids and cooking and housecleaning. Mrs. Schlafly (and you better have called her that) went around the nation speaking against the ERA, claiming the amendment would destroy the family unit and the very fabric of American society. She linked the ERA and feminism to an ungodly communistic socialistic revolution that would make men and women totally equal (asexual?), where gender roles would be blurred, men would raise children, more women would not have children, and young women would be drafted to fight wars alongside men. None of this was the language or intent of the ERA, which premise is about equal pay for equal work and equal opportunity for jobs—something everyone believes in 2020, and we have for decades.
Mrs. Schlafly was a formidable opponent and had millions of supporters especially from the Moral Majority. The ’70s feminists were unprepared for the America I knew, mindsets that for women uphold traditional family values no matter what the circumstances like death of a husband, abuse or divorce. This is the America, and it’s most of the country, that Reagan knew and so does Trump. Mrs. Schlafly’s final book, released after her death, called on conservatives to consider supporting Trump. This enormous gap between traditionalists and feminists somehow continues to exist today no matter how … laughable. Many marriages end in divorce. Many women have children without marriage. Many men are OK with it. The law had to get involved to make deadbeat dads pay child support. The Reagan Revolution did one thing to tilt Americans toward accepting feminist ideals, however: Most women had to start working because the economy was so bad. The Leave it to Beaver family was in the past, and every woman (and man) in American knew it.
After all these decades, time in which I grew from a tomboy to a career woman to an aging though wiser female, the ERA may get a federal vote after the 2020 election if a Democrat is elected President and more Democrats are elected to the U.S. Senate. As it stands now, the current Senate has no intention of even entertaining the thought of passing the silly old ERA given all the nation’s other problems. But Americans, women and men, and our society have changed, permanently and at least for half of us for the better. There’s no putting Jeannie back in her bottle.