One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment

Melody Lehn is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her research on women’s rhetoric has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and several edited collections in political communication and rhetorical history. Camille K. Lewis is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism (2007), is a scholarly attempt to stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.

Acknowledgments – Abbreviations – Introduction: A Rhetorical History of the Equal Rights Amendment Debate – Alice Paul: An Approaching Anniversary – Carrie Chapman Catt: I Am Opposed to the So-Called Blanket Equality Bill – Ethel M. Smith: The Trickery of Words – Crystal Eastman: Equality or Protection – Lavinia Lloyd Dock: The Health of the Race – Florence Kelley: Whose Rights Are to Be Equal? – Anita Pollitzer: The Principle of Liberty for Men and Women – Grace Hoffman White: All Women Must Wake Up – Edith Valet Cook: There Is No Single Formula for Equality – Jeannette Marks: On Account of Sex – Dorothy Kelso Funn: The Legislative Front: The Equal Rights Amendment – Mary Church Terrell: Why We Need the Equal Rights Amendment – Nora Barney: Those Great Pioneers of 1848 – Maida Springer Kemp: The Danger of This Generalization – Rebecca Stiles Taylor: The "Un-Equal" Rights Amendment – Caroline Katzenstein: Democracy Is Fighting for Its Very Life – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Phony Equal Rights Amendment Again – Dorothy Kenyon: There Is No Short Road to Freedom – Katharine St. George: Equality: Nothing More, Nothing Less – President’s Commission on the Status of Women: Women Under the Law – Betty Friedan: We Should Not Compromise: We Must Pioneer – Shirley Chisholm: Prejudice Against Women Is Still Acceptable – Aileen Hernandez: Gentlemen, Women Are Enraged – Betty Finegan: Nature Cannot Be Amended – Gladys O’Donnell: We Are Tired of Being the Silenced Majority – Sandra Day O’Connor: I Am Not Sure the Equal Rights Amendment Is Necessary – Pauli Murray: Equal Power and Responsibility for Women – Bella Abzug: The Price of Inequality Is High Indeed – Pat Nixon: Republican Support of Equal Opportunity – Addie Wyatt: I Was Opposed to ERA – Beneth Peters Jones: The Mini-Amendment with Maxi-Consequences – Lottie Beth Hobbs: Ladies! Have You Heard? – Barbara B. Smith: Receive the Gift Bestowed – Yolanda Orozco: La Chicana and "Women’s Liberation" – Virginia Ramey Mollenkott: The Bible and the Equal Rights Amendment – Barbara Jordan: Womankind – Phyllis Stewart Schlafly: The Power of the Positive Woman – Patsy Mink: The Cause of Justice and Sisterhood Will Triumph at Last – Elisabeth Elliot: Declaration of Dependence – Marta Sotomayor: La Década de la Mujer – Midge Costanza: There Is No Time Limit – Dorothy Height: Black Women Have a Right to Be Properly Informed – Sonia Johnson: The Patriarchal Panic – Rosalynn Carter: I Am Not Threatened by ERA – Maureen Fiedler: Reverence for Life Means Reverence for Equality – Ethel Krepps: The Legal Consequence of ERA on Indian Women – Gloria Steinem: We Must Ask Them – Antonia Handler Chayes: The ERA Will Strengthen National Defense – Irene Natividad: We Want to Create an All-Girls Network – Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I Remain an Advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment – Paige Comstock Cunningham: The Grand and General Language of ERA – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: To Be a Feminist Means To Be Pro-Life – Eagle Forum: Memo on the Equal Rights Amendment 2000 – Carolyn Maloney: Equal Justice Under the Law – Terry O’Neill: It’s Not Here – Tina Tchen: Supporting the Equal Rights Amendment – Pat Spearman: We All Must Persist – Michelle Quist: The Conservative Case for the Equal Rights Amendment – Valerie M. Hudson: Feminists Should Ask Tough Questions about ERA – Sylvia Garcia: It’s Time, Finally, to Adopt the Equal Rights Amendment – Jennifer Carroll Foy: Bring It On – Danica Roem and Kate Kelly: The ERA Can’t Be Defeated by Anti-Trans Scare Tactics – Vicky Hartzler: I Urge My Colleagues to Vote "No" – Nancy Pelosi: The Unfulfilled Promise – Ayanna Pressley: We Follow in Their Footsteps – Index.

“Comprehensive and sweeping, this book is a tremendous achievement. Through women’s debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, Lehn and Lewis expertly reconstruct a century of women’s self-definitions and advocacy. In these pages, we meet familiar and surprising figures whose arguments ground a deeper, richer understanding of equality: that basic American value whose meaning has been anything but simple. The book offers the timely reminder that women have been both unequal citizens and essential drivers of the democratic process. The questions explored here remain as pressing as ever: what do women need to live in America on their own terms, and what will it take for that nation to live up to its own founding ideals of equality and justice?”
—Katherine Turk, author of The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America