Making Amends

I have always been in favor of equal rights for women (although I admit that, in my lifetime, it has sometimes been unsettling to see women police, and women doing other work which was hitherto mainly or entirely the preserve of men.) It is sad to think of how many gifted women, in former times, have had to live in their husbands’ shadows. 

A good example was Abigail, the wife of the then-future president John Adams, who, in 1776, while he was off making laws for the new country, wrote to him saying: “I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Wouldn’t you think that, long before now, her wishes would have been fully embodied in our national law?

There is such a law, in the form of an amendment to the Constitution. And, incredible as this seems, it has been under consideration since 1923! Its wording is almost absurdly brief and simple. All it says is:

“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’s known as the Equal Rights Amendment – the ERA. 

It was actually passed by both houses of Congress in 1971, and was endorsed by President Nixon, and ratified by no less than 35 States – which was only three short of the number needed to put it in the Constitution. Yet to this day, it has never become law. The details are sickening. Some States ratified it, then changed their minds and de-ratified it. 

The struggle is still going on. There’s been endless arguing about deadlines. And if you add in all the more recent controversies about such matters as gay, lesbian, and trans-sexual rights – which hardly anybody in 1923, or even in 1971, thought would become major national issues, it makes you wonder how anything really important ever actually does become law in this country.

People will tell you that this debacle just goes to show that a constitutional amendment is the hardest law to get passed, and that once it is passed and is in the Constitution, it’s the hardest law to get changed, or taken out. Yet less than 100 years ago, there was an amendment to the Constitution which passed overwhelmingly in a few months. And 13 years later, it was repealed by another amendment, with even bigger majorities!  

Of course, I mean the Prohibition Amendment.

I’m fond of the Prohibition story – and not only because the Repeal Amendment happened to become law in the very month in which I was born – December 1933. When I was still an undergraduate at the University of London, I chose to specialize in American History. And there were three topics which particularly interested me, because they seemed so bizarre, and so hard for an outsider such as me to understand. Fortunately, I was eventually able to explore all three in detail. 

One was slavery. How could it ever have existed at all in a country which from its beginnings had always called itself “The Land of the Free”? Another was the phenomenon of the mass automobile. How had the motor car, which began as a rich man’s play-thing, when horses, trains, and bicycles were totally in the ascendant, taken over a whole country so completely in such a relatively short space of time? (My own family had never even had a car!) 

And the third of these grand social mysteries was Prohibition. How on Earth could such a strange idea ever have become a national law to begin with? And how could a whole country change its mind about it so fast and so completely?   

One of my favorite quotations on this subject was uttered by Senator Morris Sheppard from Texas, who had actually helped write the Prohibition Law, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which went into force in 1920. Ten years later, in 1930, when there was already a great surge of anti-Prohibition sentiment, and just three years before that law was actually repealed, he declared that “There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.” 

So, remember that hummingbird – and don’t give up on the E.R.A.!