Constitution Day: The Equal Rights Amendment

Constitution Day is this Saturday, September 17th - the day that 39 members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 signed and thereby ratified our Constitution.

One of the great strengths that the founders build into this document was the recognition that it may need changing as the the nation changed. And so Article 5 of the Constitution lays out the rules through which the document could be altered through adding Amendments.

An earlier post dealt with the 19th Amendment, through which women won the right to vote. Today, we'll look at a proposed amendment that so far has been unsuccessful, the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA. Here's the text, courtesy of the National Organization for Women.

Equal Rights Amendment

Section 1. Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

"The Equal Rights Amendment was written in 1921 by suffragist Alice Paul. It has been introduced in Congress every session since 1923. It passed Congress in the above form in 1972, but was not ratified by the necessary thirty-eight states by the July 1982 deadline. It was ratified by thirty-five states."

Picture courtesy of: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-05-23/news/29595598_1_equal-rights-amendment-women-struggle-maloney

The biggest opportunity for the ERA came in 1972, when it passed Congress, and was given 9 years to secure ratification by 2/3rds of the states, and came up short. View the list of the states that ratified (and didn't ratify, Virginia). There are lots of resources online regarding the history of the ERA dating back to the 1920s, and plenty of organizations are still working towards ratification of the amendment.

There's a lot of ways to celebrate Constitution Day. Play the Which Founder Are You? quiz and post your results in the comments section! Check out material from McConnell Library on the ERA. And repost information on the ERA to your social networks to celebrate how great our Constitution is, and how it could still be improved.