Connections: Second-Class Citizens

The Equal Rights Amendment is only 24 words long: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Its point couldn’t be simpler: to provide women with all the rights now guaranteed by the Constitution to men. The only existing guarantee for women in the Constitution, which dates to 1787, is the right to vote, which became an amendment in 1920. 

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, grants equal protection to Americans regardless of race, religion, or national origin but, according to the Supreme Court, not gender. (What Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, thinks about women’s rights is not merely an academic matter.)

The E.R.A. movement has been around a long time. The amendment was actually passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification, but it fell three states short of the 38 required. In March of last year — 45 years after that Congressional high-water mark — Nevada became the 36th state to approve the amendment, and Illinois the 37th. Any significance was legally negligible, however, as the time allowance for ratification expired back in 1982. 

Carol Robles-Roman, co-president and C.E.O. of the ERACoalition, which is working to have the E.R.A. reintroduced in Congress and sent back to the states for ratification, spoke about all this to two dozen men and women at the home of Patti Kenner in East Hampton recently, alongside Gail Sheehy, a writer who has 17 books to her credit and too many top magazine articles to count, and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York City.  

We learned that Representative Maloney held an ad hoc hearing in Congress on the amendment after the Judiciary Committee of the House refused to sanction one. Given widespread and bipartisan support for women’s rights —  this is the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, after all — public consensus would seem to be in favor of the amendment. The Republican majority in the House, however, has turned deaf ears.

“At a time when #MeToo has become a rallying cry across the nation, when there are outcries in every corner of this country — for equal pay, equal opportunity, equal treatment, and an end to the casual culture of harassment and assault in practically every sector of society — we have opportunity as never before to make lasting change,” Ms. Maloney was quoted as saying.

For many readers of a certain age, “E.R.A.” probably sounds like a 1970s flashback. Can equality for women really still be up for debate? In recent polling, 94 percent of respondents said they would indeed support the E.R.A. becoming the law of the land — but 80 percent thought it already was! Many young women who were of voting age when Hillary Clinton ran for president apparently have no idea that they are less than equal in the eyes of the law. 

If you said they were second-class citizens, you wouldn’t be wrong. 

Women are also second class in the workplace. In 2012, female full-time workers made 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gap of 23 percent. The E.R.A. would make that illegal. Fixing the pay gap could have hugely positive effects on the economy as a whole: It has been estimated that the poverty rate for women would be reduced by half if women were paid the same as men for the same work.  

We have had our Constitution for 231 years, but are not yet equal. Can you even believe it?