Women won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Four years later, in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was proposed, stating simply, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
It took 49 years for it to be passed by Congress. As a proposed amendment to the Constitution, it was sent to the states for ratification. In the first year, 30 of the necessary 38 states ratified it. But the ratification process slowed, due in no small part to organized resistance, and by 1977, 35 states had approved it. President Jimmy Carter, a supporter of the ERA, extended the 1978 deadline to 1982. His opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan, had supported the amendment as the California governor, calling it “morally unassailable.”
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But by 1980, he’d changed his tune. That June, he called it divisive and suggested it be withdrawn from the Republican Party platform at that year’s convention. The move was met with protests in Chicago and in other cities, including Cleveland, where a group of about 50 people protested in front of Reagan’s campaign office on Euclid Avenue, also taking their concerns to the Cuyahoga County Republican headquarters next door. (Protesters made it a point to say they weren’t protesting the party, and then-County GOP chairman Robert Hughes said in the next day’s Plain Dealer that he supported the ERA.)
Reagan went on to defeat Carter in the 1980 election. The 1982 deadline passed without enough states ratifying the ERA. Though Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it in 2020, the ERA’s legality remains in dispute, and it has not been added to the constitution.
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