December 13, 2023, marked the one-hundred-year anniversary of the ERA’s first introduction in Congress. The time is therefore ripe for revisiting how women across generations have argued that gender equality might reshape and reimagine our democracy.
In contrast to narratives that begin with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and then propel us forward to the 1970s, this edited collection of primary texts comprehensively surveys women’s arguments about the ERA from its inception through the present day. Together and apart, these texts reveal the nuanced, complicated, and sometimes contradictory ways that women have contemplated the question of whether we need the ERA. As this next generation forges ahead to keep the ERA alive, we are left to wonder: Will women remain divided on the ERA? Will it take another century to see it enshrined in the U.S. Constitution? The ERA debate, nevertheless, persists