Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – When the founding fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” it was preceded by “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” If they were truths and also self-evident, why were the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence from the moneyed class only (physicians, lawyers, merchants, plantations owners and land speculators), many of whom were slave-holders. Deepening the deception, all the signers considered women inferior to men intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually; consequently, the signers meant privileged white men only when they wrote “all men are created equal.”
Did they sign the Declaration on Independence with the intention of taking on the arduous effort of establishing an equal society for all?
My answer would be a solid no. After all, this country has had to fight its own civil war to end slavery nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence and to undergo unceasing civil rights struggles for people of color and for women throughout its 250-year history, with no end in sight.
Sojourner Truth, the eminent abolition and women’s rights champion, lived every cruelty of slavery and misogyny from being auctioned off and separated from her family at age 9, to whippings, deprivation and the selling off of her own children. At age 49 a divinely inspired vision set her forth into a life of “testifying of the hope that was in her.” Transcending her illiteracy, she became a famed speaker, with her amazing “mother wit” and the “most powerful African-American woman to consistently … link the oppression of slavery with the subjection of women.” With her prescient insight into Christian fundamentalism creating roadblocks for women’s equality then (and unrelentingly so today), she responded in her renowned Aint’ I a Woman speech in 1851 at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio:
“And that man back there in the black…That man in the black says that women can’t have as much rights as men because Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from?… From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.”
Women of all races worked passionately for women’s suffrage during 70 more years, until the deeply flawed 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, flawed because it prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex but not sex and race. Only over successive years did African-American, Native Americans, Asians American and Latina women gain the right to vote.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was first proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul founder of the National Women’s Party, which had identified more than 300 laws that exposed the rampant and degrading discrimination against women based on their sex, including employment, child custody, property and rape, to name a few. As proof of the intrangency of misogyny, the ERA has been one of the most controversial and challenged pieces of legislation in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the 1970s conservative Phyllis Schlafy denounced the ERA as “an assault on the family and on the role of women as wives and mothers.” In 1982 the ERA Amendment failed to meet its deadline requiring 38 states to ratify it.
Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the future of women’s equality took a step forward with women entering political office, participating more significantly in labor unions and the professions; and in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, meeting the requirement of three-quarters of the states’ ratification necessary for an Amendment to the Constitution to become law.
Finally, an American President could affirm in January 2025, what languished for more than 100 years: that the ERA, as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, is the law of the land. “We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,“ declared President Biden. However, the Archivist failed to certify and publish the Amendment guaranteeing women’s dignity and equality on the grounds that it did not meet a technical deadline.
But that technical deadline is meaningless and was never imposed on another amendment, according to the American Bar Association, confirming that the technical objections to the passage of the ERA are not consistent with Article 5 of the Constitution.
“Every other democracy in the world includes women” in their constitutions,” stated Gloria Steinem when speaking at Smith College in 2022. The consequences for US women and girls is that women are poorer than men because of ongoing pay inequity: women earn 82% of when men earn, with Black and Latina women earning only 59 cents and 51 cents for a white man’s earned dollar. Women lack paid parental leave, are victims of high rates of rape and all forms of violence against women; and have lost in many states the right to bodily autonomy and freedom escalating in the worst states to the sexual counterpart of the Fugitive Slave Act.
Image by Tung Lam from Pixabay
Those responsible for the failure of the ERA include the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, corporations benefiting from discriminatory wages, the fundamentalist Christian right, and traffickers in women and girls for prostitution (how did Jeffrey Epstein get away with his mortal sins for so long, be-friended by men along the political spectrum from disgraced Noam Chomsky to the liar Donald Trump?).
A strong majority of Americans support reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work, and ratification of the ERA would establish in law 21st century sex equality and dignity. May it launch aggressive prosecution of traffickers in women and girls for prostitution, of men who rape and sexually abuse women and girls.
Join and support former US Representative Carolyn Maloney’s ERA Now whose goal is to be ready for Congressional action in 2027 to affirm the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
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