We reject the anti-family goals of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The American women do not want abortion.
They do not want lesbian privileges.
And they do not want universal child care in the hands of the government.
I just took on the whole feminist movement.
Young people may never have heard of the ERA.
And at the same time, some the issues that the ERA was meant to address, are still on our
lips today.
It’s delightful to know in the Constitution that all men are created equal.
But, hello.
Women are no longer Miss or Mrs. but Ms. Capital M., small S., period.
So many women are starting to work these days it’s being billed as the most significant
social development of the century.
As the role of women was changing in the 1970s, the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment
began in earnest.
As proposed it read: equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any state on account of sex.
The Equal Rights Amendment would strike down all state laws that discriminate against women,
in the home, in school and on the job.
People would say, 'well, why should women get equal pay?'
We were still fighting for even the concept that women should get equal pay.
They used to laugh at us, saying, 'women don’t want to be doctors.
They want to marry one.'
Right?
Eleanor Smeal helped lead the effort to pass the ERA.
The amendment didn’t directly address the wage gap, but she believed it would shape
more laws that did.
In almost every Congress since 1923, there has been proposed a Constitutional amendment
to guarantee equal rights for women.
Well today, it finally won approval.
Proclaiming once and for all that women have all the same rights as that other sex.
The agreement now goes to the states and must be ratified by 38 of them.
Oh, we were all very jubilant.
We were on the steps of the Senate, so excited.
It passed, it was going out to the states.
It was widely supported, among Democrats and Republicans, including President Nixon and
his wife Pat.
Nebraska today became the second state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
Minnesota and Oregon ratified…
Vermont…
In Connecticut…
Washington became the 29th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment today.
Surely, you know, this was just so obvious to be included in the Constitution that it
wouldn’t be a battle.
We’ll talk about all these things with Phyllis Schlafly.
Would you welcome Mrs. Schlafly.
Phyllis Schlafly became the public face of the anti-ERA campaign.
One of the first things that the Equal Rights Amendment would do is to invalidate the state laws that
make it the obligation of the husband to support his wife.
ERA was an amendment pushed by the feminists.
And I thought, 'well this is, this is absolutely crazy.'
I get fed up with the women’s liberationists running down motherhood and saying that it’s
a menial, degrading career and that the home is a prison from which women should be liberated
and brought out into this wonderful workforce.
She understood how to manipulate the media.
And the idea of framing herself as a wronged housewife, who’d kind of been flushed out
of, you know, the kitchen where she really wanted to be, was absolutely brilliant.
Why if you’re so shot with motherhood aren’t you staying home being a mother?
Everything I do, I do in the home.
I’m out about one day a week on a television program like this, and I think they’re capable
of getting their breakfast that morning without me.
She was the mother of six, an author and conservative Republican who’d run for Congress – and
lost – twice.
Phyllis Schlafly is someone who came out of the Goldwater movement, whose connection with
conservatives of all stripes, all over the country were matchless.
She had a rolodex like nobody’s business, probably as big as a beach ball.
Mrs. Schlafly, in a well organized and financed campaign has been flying around the country,
inspiring opposition groups such as this one in Dade County.
I think she’s probably the best political organizer we’ve seen in American history.
The anti-amendment mail started coming in.
One legislator got 50 letters in a day.
Opponents saw it as a sinister plot to subject women to the draft, unisex toilets and possible
loss of alimony.
Some said it smelled of communism.
Schlafly’s campaign slowed down the rate of ratification.
Several states even took back their votes.
Vote them out. Vote them out.
The debate raged in statehouses across the
country, but perhaps nowhere was it more contentious than in Illinois – Schlafly’s home state.
Well, it’s probably hard for you to realize how big it was media-wise and politically.
Thank you Mr. Speaker and members of the Congress.
It just consumed the Illinois legislature for 10 years.
I really got tired of going to Springfield.
But I went.
We were there every day.
And we so outnumbered our opposition.
And we had, you know, every major women’s group in the United States.
My responsibility was to be in charge of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The male legislators, particularly those in their 60s and 70s, just couldn’t accept
that a woman could be a lobbyist.
They would just presume that I was my boss’s secretary.
As a lobbyist for the Illinois Education Association, Paula Purdue observed Phyllis Schlafly up
close.
She would have 30 to 50 people a day with fresh bread and fresh pie.
Of course legislators all want to eat.
And, you know, when you get fresh pie everyday, it didn’t get old.
We brought a loaf of homemade bread to every legislator.
So the feminists looked upon that as a dirty trick.
While this whole thing was going on she literally earned a law degree in her spare time.
And it seemed she never ran out of arguments.
Women would have to be drafted, just like men and put in military combat, just like
men.
People would get in touch with her, you know, and say, you know, it wouldn’t do that.
She would say, oh, thank you so much.
And then she would just go to the next place and say exactly the same thing.
They want to give the homosexuals and the lesbians the same dignity as husbands and
wives.
ERA has nothing to do with abortion, it has nothing to do with homosexuality, but they
tie these emotional issues to it and it scares people.
By 1977, Schlafly’s anti-ERA campaign had aligned with Evangelical, Catholic and Mormon
faith groups.
In politics, everything is about coalitions and these groups are learning to work together.
By 1977, there really is no daylight between issues like the ERA, gay rights and abortion.
And the reason Phyllis Schlafly is such an important figure in this is, she’s able
to encompass all these threads, and bring them together.
I am informed that there are 15,000 inside and several thousand more who have, unfortunately,
were turned away.
The coalition gathered in Houston, Texas that November.
They did so because across town about 20,000 women were attending the first ever convention
promoting equality between the sexes.
This is the time that we will make women and men share equally in the greatness of America.
ERA, ERA, ERA!
And on that stage, you saw the First Lady of the United States, Rosalynn Carter, the
previous First Lady, Republican Betty Ford, this was a bipartisan group of people, and
they were all advocating very strongly for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Both parties in the 1970s still had liberal factions and conservative factions.
And one of the things that the ERA hastens is this sorting into Republican equals conservative
and Democrats equal liberal.
I know that you have the energy and the dedication to defeat this assault on the family, you
can turn back this tide all across the country.
If you stay with us, the Equal Rights Amendment will die.
As the 1980 presidential election approached, the emerging religious right threw its support
behind Ronald Reagan.
At the convention conservatives were seated as delegates on the platform committee.
Chairman John Tower barely had time to gavel the platform resolutions committee to order
this morning, before the single most controversial issue the committee must deal with surfaced:
the Equal Rights Amendment.
With Schlafly looking on, the party would step to the right.
They repositioned the party to be the party against abortion, and the party against gay
rights, and the party against the Equal Rights Amendment.
They voted to end the Republican party’s 40 years of support for the Equal Rights Amendment.
While retreating from the party’s past support for the ERA, the subcommittee endorsed a plank
that would strengthen the party’s opposition to legalized abortion.
Within two years of Reagan taking office, the final deadline expired.
35 states had ratified – three short of what was needed to change the Constitution.
It is June 30th and at midnight tonight the Equal Rights Amendment becomes, at least for
now, a lost cause.
It was a tremendous victory.
And of course we assumed that God was on our side.
The anti-ERA side won this particular battle, but I don’t think anyone would doubt who
won the war.
Women take it as a matter of course that there’s more to life than being someone’s wife.
That’s one of the biggest changes in world history.
We’ve reached a milestone.
First time, the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s
nominee.
Slowly but surely more and more women are getting elected.
And women are now in a higher position in corporations.
The fight goes on.
But we’re getting closer.
From reproductive rights to wages, the conversation continues.
I think that we have some very good laws on the books and they help us a great deal to
require equal pay for equal work.
And yet, we still don’t see equality in terms of the bottom line, in terms of wages.
Hill’s research shows that women’s wages rose steadily in the 1980s and 1990s as they
graduated from college and entered the workforce in record numbers.
But around 2000, progress stalled.
Today women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns.
Women are still making more of an investment in education than ever before, but we’re
not seeing their wages continue to rise.
In fact, they’re stagnant.
And then we see for Hispanic and black women, it’s a lot less.
What I learned with pain over time is how profound the economic resistance was to equal
pay.
I mean, people were making millions and millions of dollars, and still are, off paying female
human beings of all races quite unequally compared to white men.
That right there is enough to fight like hell for the Equal Rights Amendment.
For Illinois state legislator Heather Steans, the fight today is about righting a past wrong.
She re-introduced the ERA in the Illinois Senate.
I really think most of my colleagues couldn’t even believe that it would be an issue of
discussion at this point in time.
Why would anybody possibly hesitate to vote yes on that?
But we still had no votes.
The measure finally passed.
More than three decades after Phyllis Schlafly made the case against it.
I think American women are the most fortunate people on the face of the Earth.
We don’t need any legislation to say any more than that.