On Tuesday evening when the women of the Democrat Party appeared in the House of Representatives Chamber wearing white jackets as part of their ensembles, there was a piece of flair on just about every outfit that gave this writer pause. It was a button that simply read “ERA YES.”
This writer’s memory of the original ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, that passed both sides of Congress with supermajorities, and fell three states short of ratification by its ten year deadline, was the failure of passage. (I was a kid.) The darn thing died in 1982 thanks to a campaign spearheaded by a woman hailed among conservatives by the name of Phyllis Schlafly.
Mrs. Schlafly passed away during the 2016 presidential campaign at the end of a fight with cancer which she had endured for quite some time. Headlines screamed that summer of her removing a daughter from the board of her Eagle Forum which spawned a lot of unfounded speculation. (The truth is the daughter, Mrs. Schlafly’s primary caregiver within the family, wanted her mother to rest in her final months, and Phyllis being Phyllis wouldn’t do it.*) At the time, this writer did some research on the fight against the ERA, and came to the conclusion that the women of the United States had Phyllis Schlafly to thank for saving them from themselves.
Mrs. Schlafly’s primary concern in opposing the ERA was not to stop women from being who and what they were meant to be, she did go back to school to get a law degree after all, but to protect the American family. At the beginning of her fight in the early 1970s, Mrs. Schlafly predicted that with the passage and ratification of the ERA, several social changes would occur that would be detrimental to the future of the nation.

Why “STOP ERA”? Phyllis Schlafly traveled across the U.S. throughout the 1970s calling for opposition to the ERA because it would lead to the following, most of which pro-ERA lawyers argued were not actually real threats from the ERA:

• Homosexual marriages: traditional gender roles were, Schlafly argued, essential for preserving the family.
• Women in combat: women, Schlafly argued, would weaken the military’s combat strength, and serving in the military would violate traditional gender norms.
• Taxpayer-funded abortions: Schlafly, a … Catholic, ardently opposed abortion.
• Unisex bathrooms: one of the best-known of the arguments Schlafly promoted, this was likely meant to create fear of losing a safe space. Schlafly argued that the ERA would also remove laws that depended on gender to define a sex crime, and that it would weaken laws about rape.
• Elimination of Social Security benefits for widows: she believed women should not be in the paid workforce (though she herself was paid a salary) especially if they had young children, and so a Social Security benefit for women who had not earned their own benefits was essential to the mother’s ability to stay home.
• Hurt families: She argued that the ERA would abolish a husband’s legal responsibility to support his wife and family, and making child support, that it would alter child support and alimony laws to make them gender neutral. In general, she argued that it would undermine the authority of men over women, which she saw as the proper power relationship for well-functioning families.

Many of these claims about what the ERA would do are disputed by legal scholars. On the other hand, some of these results evolved after the 1970s to become public policy, accepted by a majority of the electorate.
The Eagle Forum and so-called states’ rights groups warn that the ERA would transfer a great deal of power from state to federal governments.

Amazing isn’t it, that many of her predictions came true whether the ERA passed or not.
All these years later, Mrs. Schlafly’s ability to think logically down stream, as it were, and sound the alarm on so many issues that the people of the United States have been fighting in recent years did inspire Bloomberg, at least, to admit she was correct.
So if she was correct, and the ERA would have been a disaster for American women frankly by putting us on the same legal footing as men (can be drafted into the military, etc.), and it was defeated by the deadline imposed by Congress in 1982, why were the women in white pushing support for the long ago departed?
Basically, because they don’t believe it is dead.
In recent years, two states, Illinois and Nevada, ratified the amendment despite its cadaverous state. That means that only one more state would be needed for final ratification if Congress would only lift the time limit of ten years required for the ERA’s passage.

After its passage by joint resolution of Congress, the amendment had until 1982 to be ratified by the required 38 states. The deadline passed, but as [Alaska Sen. Lisa] Murkowski and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) wrote in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, a renewed effort to ratify the amendment at the state level began about two years ago, and was buoyed in part by #MeToo.
Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, and Illinois did the same in 2018, meaning only one more state is needed to get to 38.
And, Murkowski and Cardin write, Congress could remove the deadline, allowing the amendment to become law if a 38th state joins in.
“Women should not be held back or provided less opportunity, respect or protections under the law because of their gender,” they write. “This is not a partisan issue but one of universal human rights. Gender equality should be an explicit, basic principle of our society.”

It looks like, now that Mrs. Schlafly and her ability to rally the troops and circle the wagons are gone, the women of the Democrat Party and the men who are too spineless to stand up to them are going to try to revive the corpse of the ERA regardless of the consequences.
The reality is that the Senate may well be the roadblock on this one as amending the original legislation would take a big vote, but rest assured, the other side of the aisle will keep pulling out all the failed ideas of the past as the generations go on and have no idea of why such measures were defeated and who is responsible for making such things come to pass.
* The six degrees of separation in Mrs. Schlafly’s hometown is really two, and this writer has information that was on the ground, but never reported about the family fight in question.