by ©2018 Sarah Becker Ratification of the ERA “We shall never have equal rights until we take them,” attorney Belva Lockwood said, “nor respect until we command it.” Lockwood, the first female attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court was the Equal Rights Party’s second Presidential nominee, in 1884 and 1888. This month the Virginia legislature again considers ratification of the 1923, more accurately the 1972, Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment, Section 1: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Practically speaking, the decision belongs to the House of Delegates. “The law relating to married women makes the family a barony, a monarchy, a despotism, of which the husband is the baron, king or despot, and the wife the dependent, serf or slave,” The Washington Post wrote in 1896. “The English common law in all its harshness and inflexibility, brought by our forefathers across the sea to this country, had been but little modified by statute…By the common law the identity of the wife in relation to her civil status was almost entirely swallowed up in the personality of her husband…In but few of the States have the disabilities of women been entirely removed.” Enter Quaker suffragist and attorney Alice Paul, founder of the 1916 National Women’s Party. With the Party’s help the 19th Amendment, the women’s suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920; upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922. Slow going Virginia, home of the founding fathers’ Bill of Rights, did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1952. “To get the ‘male’ in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign [1868-1920],” Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the…