As the Virginia General Assembly prepared to vote on the Equal Rights Amendment on Wednesday, Democrat Jennifer Carroll Foy posed a question to her colleagues: “Which side of history do you want to be on? The world is watching—your mothers, your sisters, your daughters.” By day’s end, the body had decided: It approved the amendment, becoming the thirty-eighth state to do so, nearly 100 years after it was first introduced in Congress.

The language of the amendment is simple—“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”—but the movement to pass it has been a fraught, century-long story of advances, setbacks, and a complicated reckoning around the meaning of “equality” for women.

Through that struggle, though, the faces behind the ERA changed. The scope of whom it represented, or attempted to represent, was radically expanded. The campaign for the ERA in the early twentieth century failed to fully include poor women, working women, and women of color. In the 1970s, as the movement reignited and the coalition behind the ERA grew, it was still largely viewed as the territory of white, upper-middle-class women. But in 2020, the diverse coalition supporting the amendment—lawmakers like Carroll Foy, Hala Ayala, Jennifer McClellan, all women of color; and Danica Roem, the first openly trans person to be seated in a state legislature—brought new life and promise to its founding vision.

The first push for the ERA came as an outgrowth of the women’s suffrage movement, and it took with it that movement’s racist and classist exclusions. The woman behind the amendment, National Woman’s Party founder Alice Paul, wanted to direct the momentum of the franchise campaign to securing women’s equality at large in the Constitution. What she proposed in 1923—named after feminist activist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott—stated, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” But this phrasing threatened the many state-level laws guaranteeing women a minimum wage, eight-hour workdays, and safe working conditions. “Only the elite who did not have to work at all or professionals whose conditions of work were unique could possibly denigrate the benefits of labor legislation for women, thought [Women’s Trade Union League] officer Elisabeth Christman,” wrote the historian Nancy Cott. “A former glovemaker herself, she sputtered in fury … her wish to ‘put some of the equal righters in a boiler factory or to work at the conveyor belt in a highly speeded-up mass production industry.’”

Organizations like the American Federation of Labor and the Women’s Trade Union League feared the amendment would force poor women and families into starvation. As Melinda Scott, a United Textile Workers organizer, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1923: “The National Woman’s Party does not know what it is to work 10 or 12 hours a day in a factory; so they do not know what it means to lose an eight-hour day or nine-hour day law. The working women do know.”