How did we get here?

The history of the Equal Rights Amendment is long and complicated.

The suffragist Alice Paul wrote the first version and got it introduced in Congress in 1923 — meaning that when Congress gave its approval in 1972, it was a breakthrough already 50 years in the making. Thirty-five states ratified the amendment within five years of its passage.

But the anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly mobilized a quick and extraordinarily successful movement to stop the E.R.A., warning of disastrous consequences if traditional gender roles were eroded. Among other things, she argued that the amendment would force women to serve in combat and render single-sex bathrooms obsolete.

Congress extended the ratification deadline from 1979 to 1982, but no additional states signed on. (Three-fourths of the states — 38 out of 50 — must ratify an amendment to add it to the Constitution.)

For nearly four decades, it seemed that was the end of it. But in 2017, Nevada, which had rejected the amendment in 1977, brought it back from the dead. Illinois followed.

Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York, who has been pushing for ratification since she came to Congress in 1993, said President Trump’s election and the #MeToo movement had reignited the effort. Democratic victories also contributed: Nevada ratified the amendment the year after its legislature went blue, and if Virginia follows, it will be for the same reason.

For years, “I’ve been trying to get people who were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment to support it,” Ms. Maloney said in an interview on Wednesday. “And we finally have the conclusion that the only way you can ratify it is that you have to remove people from office that are stopping it.”