When Equality Knocks
The Equal Rights Amendment declared 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.” It had been introduced and rejected in every session of Congress since 1923, but finally, amid the momentum of the women’s movement and with bipartisan support, it managed to pass in both houses in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification.
Once the amendment passed, most Americans assumed state ratification was little more than a formality. It was 1972. Who could argue against equal rights for women in 1972? But the fight that followed revealed just how deep the fault line ran between the country’s public embrace of equality and its private resistance to change. Courts and workplace settings were slowly opening to women, but the home remained a flashpoint. To be fair, the amendment didn’t just ask Americans to accept legal equality; it called for a complete cultural overhaul of marriage, motherhood, and masculinity. Such a societal shift could never be settled by a congressional roll call or the crack of a judge’s gavel.
The House That Tradition Built
To its supporters, the ERA was a common-sense proposition. It offered a legal guarantee that people would be equal in the eyes of the law. No more loopholes for employers to exploit or patchwork protections to work around. Women could finally claim their rightful place as citizens without qualifiers.
But opponents didn’t see the ERA as the promise of equality for women, they saw it as a threat to the family. They warned it would dismantle traditional marriage, erode protections for housewives, and force them into roles they neither wanted nor were suited for. Their fears echoed through church groups, community meetings, and conservative rallies specifically organized to mobilize communities against equal rights activism. At the center of this growing movement was conservative Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly held a master’s degree in government from Harvard and was active in conservative circles in St. Louis at the time. She came to her leadership role against the ERA with a degree of national recognition thanks to the modest success of her self-published polemic against East Coast Republicans and an unsuccessful bid for Congress. In 1972, Schlafly founded The Eagle Forum and launched the STOP ERA campaign. “Stop Taking Our Privileges” brought the counter-feminism movement its most powerful voice. Schlafly effectively argued that the amendment would dismantle the traditional family, and strip women of their special protections in American society. The ERA, she warned, would lead to unisex bathrooms that put women’s safety at risk, to women being forced into military combat, and to the end of alimony payments and child custody advantages.
At the heart of Schlafly’s campaign was the idea that equality would destroy marriage and family as Americans knew it. She defended the family home as a site of privilege, not of confinement. A place where women were valued for what she saw as their natural contributions to marriage and motherhood and protected by the men in their lives. Schlafly argued that the ERA was not about equality, but rather an attack on womanhood, itself.²
This framing was powerful, and STOP’s messaging struck a chord with women — especially suburban, churchgoing women who already felt alienated by the radical language of second-wave feminism and threatened by the cultural change it represented. Schlafly offered them a cause that didn’t require them to burn their bras or abandon their families. STOP ERA didn’t ask women to change. It only asked them to protect what they already had.
Bedrooms and Ballots
STOP ERA’s messaging transformed the issue of equality from legal to cultural. In public debates and kitchen-table conversations, STOP ERA exploited public fears by framing the amendment as an intrusion into families and homes. They told a convincing story with the ERA as the villain that would strip protections from housewives and rob them of alimony and custody of their children in divorce. It wasn’t really true, but the message carried enormous emotional weight. Schlafly and her Eagle Forum convinced people that traditional family values must be protected from the dangers of equality. Supporters pushed back against the myths, reminding the public that the ERA was about dismantling structural inequality and that without it, courts would protect gender-based discrimination in jobs, education, and even credit access. But they struggled to counter the idea that legal equality meant sameness and that sameness would unravel the family.
Public anxiety culminated in 1975, when South Dakota passed a resolution to rescind its earlier ratification of the amendment. Several other states soon followed amid the backlash.³ The legal legitimacy of these reversals was unclear, but the political message was not: the tide had turned against the amendment. Despite massive lobbying efforts by organizations like the National Organization for Women and support from Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the amendment stalled well short of the 38 states needed for ratification.⁴
The ratification deadline expired in 1982, and the amendment was dead – at least for the time.
The Kitchen Counterargument
What made the backlash so devastating was how successfully ERA opponents reversed the narrative of home as a constraint for women and reframed it as the only place where women were properly valued. Schlafly, a mother of six and a formidable political organizer, became the face of this counterrevolution. While she insisted that gender equality would upend the natural order and, worse, devalue the contributions of women who chose to center their lives around family, Schlafly’s own life contradicted this message. She traveled the country giving political speeches, debated leading feminists on television, and was a self-published author who ran for Congress. Her political activism was public and obvious to even casual observers, yet she quickly corrected characterizations that she was politically ambitious and highlighted only her roles as a wife and mother. In spite of the hypocrisy, the contradiction did nothing to slow her down. Schlafly’s activism took her far from her own home, and while she was away, she often relied on her unmarried sister to mother her children and shoulder the housework – the very duties she claimed were a woman’s highest calling. In plain fact, she built a national profile by exploiting the anxieties of women who lacked the kind of privilege and resources she had at the ready. While it would seem that her double life would negatively affect her credibility, it did just the opposite. Her message was all the more persuasive to her base not in spite of, but because she could present herself as a wife and mother and wield the influence of a political operator.⁵
Change is difficult. For many Americans, particularly conservative white women, the kind of change that feminists were fighting for scared them. The call to transform their relationships and homes felt like an attack, not an opportunity. If equality meant learning new relationship dynamics and splitting chores and income down the middle, some wondered if it was worth the cost. The ERA would not only change the law; it would also change the way men and women built and managed relationships In the short run, equality meant more work would fall to women to renegotiate roles both at home and in public life.
Cracks in the Foundation
The failure of the ERA left gaping holes in the law. Without it, courts continued to interpret sex discrimination unevenly, leaving women at the mercy of unscrupulous employers and a capricious judiciary. Later court rulings, for example, held that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination under the constitution.⁶ and that hiring preferences that excluded women were similarly protected.⁷ Overall, the courts were unpredictable, but the message was clear that without an explicit and comprehensive constitutional guarantee, women would continue to arbitrarily be treated as second class citizens.
But the legal story only tells part of it, because despite its failings, the ERA forced Americans to wrestle with the meaning of equality in the courtroom as well as in the living room. Americans were suddenly confronted with uncomfortable questions about women’s ability to be full citizens without upending traditional family life and whether men could help with the dishes without compromising their masculinity. The amendment was only a single sentence long, but it carried enormous weight. On paper, it was a simple guarantee of equal treatment under the law, but in practice, equality was anything but simple. Supporters saw its breadth as a clear-cut and overdue matter of justice, but opponents imagined only the potential upheaval it would bring into their lives. Fear in the public imagination achieved precisely what STOP ERA had hoped — it prevented the amendment’s ratification. The ERA didn’t fail on the merits of its promise of equality; it failed because it was no match for the American attachment to the supposed virtues of the status quo.
In the Neighborhood of Progress
The debate over the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t end with the deadline in 1982, it just moved into different arenas to address evolving cultural shifts. At the center of each new conversation, though, was a familiar tension between public policy and private life and how best to navigate the divide.
One of the ERA’s most enduring lessons and what public backlash laid bare, is that changing laws is arguably the easiest part of societal growth. Changing minds is the much longer, more difficult path.
Notes
Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977), 84–87.
Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 202–5.
Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17–19.
Mary Frances Berry, Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 131–135.
Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 185.
Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974).
Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256 (1979).