In this op-ed, Kate Kelly, a human rights attorney at Equality Now, explains why the United States Constitution needs an Equal Rights Amendment.

The first woman to legally vote in an American election was a Utahan. In 1870, Seraph Young, grandniece of Mormon prophet and first governor of the Utah territory, Brigham Young, voted in a municipal election in Salt Lake City, well before 1920, when ratification of the 19th Amendment gave white women the right to vote in the U.S. Some speculate that Seraph was able to vote because Mormon leaders had rushed to grant women suffrage in the Utah territory to combat the national perception that Mormon women were oppressed, hoping it would help quash then-pending federal anti-polygamy legislation and give a boost to Utah’s bid for statehood. Of course, this move was not applicable to all women; for example, Native American women were not fully enfranchised in Utah until 1956, as a result of a ruling in Utah’s Supreme Court.

Mormon women then became actively engaged in the fight for suffrage on the national stage and started running for office at home. In 1896, after Utah became a state, voters elected the first-ever American female state senator. Martha Hughes Cannon ran for the Senate against her polygamist husband and won. The local Salt Lake Herald said of her victory, “She is the better man of the two.”

Contrary to its radical roots, in many measurable ways Utah is now the worst state in the nation for women, but there are still strong, defiant women agitating for change there. In January 2017, I helped plan the Salt Lake City Women’s March, and, despite a blizzard, it was one of the largest marches on the Capitol in Utah history. We had a clear mission: Like our feminist foremothers, we wanted a federal constitutional amendment, and we filled the Utah state Capitol with a boisterous refrain: “Ho, ho, hey hey! Ratify the ERA!”

The text of the substantive clause of the Equal Rights Amendment is so simple, it fits on a T-shirt: “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 was written in 1923 by fierce suffragist Alice Paul, and was passed by Congress at the height of the women’s liberation movement in 1972. Once passed by both houses, 38 states are required to ratify an amendment, but due to concerted national organizing efforts by anti-ERA groups, like the Eagle Forum and the Mormon Church, the ERA fell just three states short. The congressionally imposed ratification deadline expired in 1982, tragically close to the goal.

Though the robust national fight for ratification lost steam then, the lasting need for the ERA is clearer now than ever. Women have no anchor in the U.S. Constitution. When the U.S. Supreme Court reviews a case under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, laws that discriminate on the basis of gender do not get the highest level of judicial scrutiny. In effect, this means it’s easier to pass and keep sexist laws on the books. Ratifying the ERA would finally place women’s rights in the Constitution at the highest level, and could help protect all marginalized genders.

The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution were all white landholders, many of whom owned enslaved people, including black women, who they would forcibly “breed” for profit. It’s clear the “we the people” these men envisioned never included women. In fact, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia spoke with alarming candor in an interview published in 2011, when he said, “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.” Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.