This week Illinois became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment, which calls for full legal equality for women, stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” needs only one more state to ratify it before it stands to enter the U.S. Constitution.

Wait, the ERA is still alive?

It’s a shocking development; one of second-wave feminism’s most crushing defeats, an issue which was given up for dead over 35 years ago, may be won within the next few years.

For decades, the women who pushed for the ERA were treated like jokes. You’d see them every so often at Democratic conventions (reviving the ERA has technically been part of the Democrats’ platform for decades) or hear interviews with them on podcasts—optimistic, ever-hopeful Boomers talking about how this might finally be their year.

The women who pushed for the ERA were treated like jokes.

I admit, I never believed them. Those women seemed permanently stuck in the ’70s when the ERA’s passage felt all but assured. In 1972, the amendment had rocketed through Congress. The only thing left, after its swift and decisive victory, was the ratification process, in which at least 38 out of 50 states had to re-affirm support for it. It seemed like a done deal. But during the ratification process, a groundswell of anti-feminist opposition managed to shift public opinion against the amendment and stop it dead in its tracks.

The loss seemed total and permanent. But here we are.

Why is it being revived now?

The fact that this happened in Illinois is a particularly important victory, since it was not only the birthplace of the amendment's most famous opponent, Phyllis Schlafly, but one of the staging grounds for the final ratification battle in 1982; the moment Illinois failed to ratify was, in some sense, the moment the ERA died. In recent years, however, the fight to revive the ERA has gained new ground with a surprise 2017 ratification in Nevada, and grassroots advocates have been pushing Illinois to rectify its historic mistake; in April of this year, the Chicago Tribune editorial board published an editorial formally endorsing the ERA. The state's female lawmakers (including some Republicans) have been enthusiastic about its passage: "I am appalled and embarrassed that the state of Illinois has not done this earlier,” Representative Stephanie Kifowit of Oswego has said, adding that she was “proud to be on this side of history.”

Can it really pass?

Granted, we can’t start setting off fireworks just yet. Nearly all of the states that have yet to ratify the amendment are in the deep South or the American southwest, and are bright red on most electoral maps. There’s potential in swing states or softening red states like Florida, Virginia, or even Georgia, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.



And even if advocates get the votes in that final state, the ERA has to overcome some unique barriers to passage. Unlike the vast majority of Constitutional amendments, the ERA was actually given a deadline for ratification, and it blew that deadline back in 1982. So even if one final state were to ratify, ERA advocates would then have to work on removing the deadline—legislation for which has been introduced in Nevada, which voted to ratify in 2017.

For the first time in decades, we can actually begin to ask what the ERA would change for American women.

Still, to be so close, after so long—the final battle for the ERA, in the spring and summer of 1982, happened while my mother was pregnant with me; like many millennial feminists, I’ve lived my whole life assuming the amendment was dead—is a strange feeling. For the first time in decades, we can actually begin to ask what the ERA would change for American women.

Does it still matter?

In a sense, the ERA’s passage is only possible because the ideas behind the ERA have already won. In the 1970s, mandating legal equality for men and women seemed radical and threatening; anti-feminists opponents like Phyllis Schlafly were able to warn, credibly, that it would change everything about American life.

But in 2018, the dread changes that Schlafly foresaw—in the words of ERA historian Jen Deaderick, she promised “shared bathrooms and homosexual marriage and women being drafted,” plus a futuristic dystopia in which middle-class women worked outside the home—have pretty much come to pass. 58.6 percent of women over 16 are currently in the labor force. Women serve in the military and marry other women. There is an ongoing political struggle over bathroom access—namely, whether trans people can legally use the bathrooms that match their gender—but it takes place on political terrain those ERA advocates never foresaw. (Note that the amendment still uses outdated language about “sex” rather than “gender.”) Unisex bathrooms haven’t been shocking since they were featured on Ally McBeal in the late ’90s.

The fundamental premise of the ERA, that men and women are deserving of equal treatment under the law, is so fundamentally unshocking that, in one poll, 80 percent of respondents said that they thought the Constitution already guaranteed equal protections. 94 percent supported the passage of the ERA.

But to say that most people support the ideas behind the ERA is not the same as saying that the United States is legally bound to enact those ideas. Nor is it to say that the ERA would be a “symbolic victory.” Sure, the amendment has come to seem like common sense but that does not mean women will never require explicit constitutional protection.

Questions of discrimination—like same-sex marriage, or legal abortion, or equal pay often come down to the Supreme Court. That Court currently has no instruction to rule against policies on the grounds that they discriminate against women. And, if Donald Trump continues to appoint justices, it is likely to become intensely conservative and anti-woman itself. Conservatives who are angling to overturn Roe v. Wade are backing on this, by proposing draconian abortion laws in the hopes that SCOTUS will have to rule on them. It would be reassuring, to say the least, if those justices were forced to rule that laws which discriminate against women’s healthcare are unconstitutional.

It’s probably not coincidental that the ERA’s revival has come after the upset of yet another second-wave goal—the election of a Democratic female president. Until November 10, 2016, everybody thought that would be Hillary Clinton; she was, as pundits assured us endlessly, “inevitable.” But nothing is inevitable. The upsurge of raw feminist energy we’ve seen ever since Clinton’s defeat, in the form of the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, seems to reflect a new understanding that women’s progress is never entirely assured. Backlash comes quick and hard, and things that seemed like a done deal—like the ERA once did—can be taken away from you in an instant.

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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