By Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Alumna of Cornell University, Class of 1950
Dear Editor:
I was surprised and disappointed that in your July 9 issue, in an
Opinion article entitled “Fixing the Constitution,” where ten scholars, half of
them women, proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, not one of them
suggested the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the amendment drafted by Alice
Paul, the legendary suffragist and feminist, whom I knew.
That amendment provides: Equality of rights under the law
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account
of sex.
On its website at http://www.
Without the ERA, the Constitution does not explicitly
guarantee that the rights it protects are held equally by all citizens
without regard to sex. The first – and still the only – right specifically
affirmed as equal for women and men is the right to vote.
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The equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th
Amendment was first applied to sex discrimination only in 1971, and it has
never been interpreted to grant equal rights on the basis of sex in the
uniform and inclusive way that the ERA would.
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The ERA would provide a clearer judicial standard for
deciding cases of sex discrimination, since federal and state courts (some
working with state ERAs, some without) still reflect confusion and
inconsistency in dealing with such claims. It would also clarify sex
discrimination jurisprudence and 40 years of precedent for Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia, who claimed in an interview reported in the January
2011 California Lawyer that the Constitution, specifically the 14th
Amendment, does not protect against sex discrimination.
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The ERA would provide a strong legal defense against a
rollback of the significant advances in women’s rights made in the past 50
years. Without it, Congress can weaken or replace existing laws on women’s
rights, and judicial precedents on issues of gender equality can be eroded or
ignored by reactionary courts responding to a conservative political agenda.
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Without the ERA, women regularly and men occasionally have
to fight long, expensive, and difficult legal battles in an effort to prove
that their rights are equal to those of the other sex.
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The ERA would improve the United States’ human rights
standing in the world community. The governing documents of many other
countries affirm legal gender equality, however imperfect the global
implementation of that ideal may be.
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It is high time this country ratified the ERA and let its women,
who constitute over half its population, know that they have rights equal to
those of the male minority in this country. I call upon President Barack Obama
to use his bully pulpit to state that ratification of the ERA is a priority for
his administration and to exhort state legislatures to ratify the amendment and
fix our Constitution.
Sonia Pressman Fuentes
Cofounder of NOW (National Organization for Women)
Cofounder of NOW (National Organization for Women)
Former longtime member of the Board of Trustees of the National
Woman’s Party, founded by Alice Paul
website: http://www.erraticimpact.com/
website: http://www.erraticimpact.com/
