Alice Paul and the Ratification of the ERA

Alice Paul and the Ratification of the ERA

Introduction

ERA or the Equal Rights Amendment was commenced in Congress in the year 1923. It was written by Alice Paul which states that women and men should be given equal rights all over the United States and everywhere subject to its authority and control. However, the Equal Rights Amendment was once again introduced in 1972 and then passed by the Congress. Though, it never got to win over an adequate amount of states to be ratified by the 1982 cut-off date, and the ERA has been re-introduced to Congress once a year since then with no achievement.

Thesis Statement

In 1923, the proposal of Suffragist Alice Paul for ERA to the United States Constitution was introduced in Congress. The Equal Rights Amendment is revived during the 1960s women's movement; however the rivals manage to obstruct the way to ratification.

Discussion

Historical Background

The roots of the suffrage movement lie within the abolition movement. Two active women abolitionists, Mott and Stanton, were among the six women who traveled to London to attend a meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. Upon making the trans-Atlantic journey, the women arrived only to find that they could not be seated as delegates or speak at the convention because they were women. Mott and Stanton were struck by this blatant discrimination and began to ponder whether their own status was that much different from that of the slaves they sought to free. In an attempt to redress these differences, Mott and Stanton called a convention in 1848 in Stanton's hometown of Seneca Falls, New York, to petition for greater social and political rights for women. The people in attendance at this conference adopted a Declaration of Sentiments based on the U.S. Declaration of Independence naming the pervasive discrimination against women in all walks of life. They also passed a series of resolutions demanding the end to legal, economic and social discrimination against women. The only provision that failed to gather unanimous support was the call for woman suffrage, which, ironically, was soon to become the focal point and eventually the unifying cry of the first women's movement. The meeting at Seneca Falls led women across the country to hold similar meetings calling for equality. At one such meeting in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, a former slave and mother of five, Sojourner Truth, delivered her famous “Ain't I a Woman” speech, which called on women in the movement to recognize the intersectionality of gender and race in the women's rights and abolition movements.

Despite these efforts and those of the National Women's Loyal League and AERA, women did not win the right to vote in the wake of the Civil War. When the AERA endorsed first the Fourteenth Amendment, which interjected the word male into the Constitution for the first time, and then the Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically enfranchised former male slaves, Stanton and Anthony were furious and vowed to devote even more resources to ensuring the full ...