Carol Jenkins is co-president and CEO of The ERA Coalition , comprised of over 100 organizations across the country working for ratification of the ERA. A women's rights activist, author and award-winning documentary producer, Jenkins was also a pioneering African American television reporter -- an anchor and correspondent for WNBC TV in New York for nearly 25 years. The opinions expressed in this commentary are the author's own. Read more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) The Equal Rights Amendment isn't explicitly on Tuesday's ballot in Virginia, but it might as well be.

Once again, the state's voters hold the equal future of girls and women everywhere in their hands. Understanding that, Virginia ERA activists are receiving intense get-out-the vote support from people around the country and beyond.

On November 5, Virginians will vote and, according to polls, have a very good chance of electing many pro-ERA legislators

What would the ERA do? It would amend the US Constitution to include simply this : "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

Deliberately left out of the Constitution when it was written, women have paid the price in opportunities, rights and protections ever since.

Photos: History of the ERA The feminist activists of the 1960s, '70s and early '80s weren't the first to push for an Equal Rights Amendment. Suffragist leader Alice Paul, second from right, fought hard to pass the 19th Amendment -- which earned women the right to vote in 1920. She drafted the first ERA and introduced it to Congress in 1923. Hide Caption 1 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA In 1972, the House and Senate passed the ERA by the required two-thirds votes before sending it to state legislatures for ratification. Three-quarters of the states needed to ratify it, but the ERA fell three states short by its 1982 deadline. Hide Caption 2 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA Gloria Steinem was among the key forces behind the ERA effort in the '70s and '80s. Although it wasn't ratified, most men and women were pro-ERA, Steinem says. Hide Caption 3 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA President Richard Nixon endorsed the ERA after it was adopted with bipartisan support in both houses of Congress in 1972. Hide Caption 4 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA The face of ERA opposition, back in the day, was Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who founded the Eagle Forum. She died in 2016 but said a year earlier that efforts to revive the ERA were "a colossal waste of time." Hide Caption 5 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA Schlafly led protests against the ERA, including this one at the White House in 1977. The group, about 200 strong, was protesting then-first lady Rosalyn Carter's campaign for the ERA. Amendment supporters like Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, say their real enemy was never Schlafly but big business and insurance companies. Hide Caption 6 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy speaks at an ERA fundraising dinner in Washington in 1980. Kennedy spent more than three decades as a champion for the amendment in Congress. Hide Caption 7 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA Eleanor Smeal, then-president of the National Organization for Women, left, and first lady Betty Ford attend an ERA rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1981. Hide Caption 8 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA From left, Rep. Gwen Moore, Sen. Bob Menendez and Rep. Carolyn Maloney hold a news conference in 2010 outside the U.S. Capitol to call for passage of the ERA. The amendment has been introduced in nearly every session of Congress since 1923. Hide Caption 9 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA ERA supporters like to quote late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who told California Lawyer in a January 2011 issue, "Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't." Hide Caption 10 of 11 Photos: History of the ERA Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, seen here at an annual Women's History Month event at the US Capitol a few years ago, said this when she was asked how she would amend the Constitution: "If I could choose an amendment to add to this Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment." Hide Caption 11 of 11

At a recent conference on the future of the ERA at the University of Richmond Law School, I was asked what it was that brought me to the work of helping to ratify the ERA. I told the story of my feminist grandfather, a black, Lowndes County, Alabama, farmer with 15 children -- nine girls and six boys. In the 1930's and 40's, he determined to send all nine girls to college. The boys stayed to help him run the farm.

His decision to educate his daughters had a profound effect on the next four generations of our family, and counting. My 40 cousins and I all went to college and on to productive lives, as did our children, delivering a small army of doctors, lawyers, writers, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and a judge. A pretty good output for a tiny Alabama farm in one of the poorest counties in the country -- then and now.

I want a similarly fair and just future for every person in America.

I'm not sure that Billy Gardner of Lowndes County had any idea that Alice Paul, the feminist activist who succeeded in her effort to give women the vote in 1920, also wanted, in 1923, to amend the Constitution to include women. But he understood clearly that his daughters deserved equal footing in the world. They are both heroes to me.

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And that's what the ERA is about.

It has taken us almost 100 years to get this close to an Equal Rights Amendment. There are still hurdles to overcome, for sure, including bills in both the House and Senate now to remove the seven-year deadline Congress wrote into the amendment's preamble when the resolution for the ERA was proposed in 1972: it held that amendment would become effective if "within seven years" it were approved by three-quarters of state legislatures -- that is, 38 states.

But getting to that 38th state is huge. We're pulling for you, Virginia.