by ©2021 Sarah Becker Ratification ERA – 2021 Sometimes fate has a way of writing a new chapter. In truth, the ongoing fight for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA] has left me fatigued. But now—with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation—for reason of sexual misconduct—the arrival of New York State’s first female Governor, the AFL-CIO’s first female President—the political worm has turned. On March 17, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives again passed the Equal Rights Amendment. My only question: By what date will Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin [D-IL], Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-NY] deliver an affirmative vote? The American Heritage dictionary defines chauvinism as the “prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own group.” The Oxford American Dictionary defines chauvinism as “excessive or prejudiced support or loyalty;” a male chauvinist as a “man showing excessive loyalty to men and prejudice against women.” The New Jersey constitution “granted the right to vote to ‘all free inhabitants’ thus enfranchising women until 1807: when a new state constitution restricted suffrage to males.” The U.S. Census Bureau defined the term free inhabitant in 1790. “Assistant marshals listed the name of each head of household, and asked the following questions: The number of free White males aged under 16 years, of 16 years and upward; Number of free White females; Number of other free persons, and Number of slaves. Free inhabitants were not listed individually until 1850. In one of the colonial era’s few examples of women’s suffrage, Lady Deborah Moody was permitted to vote in a Long Island town meeting in 1655. Of greater interest—to me at least—was the women’s literacy measure. “The determination was made on the basis of women’s ability to sign their names to documents with either an ‘X’ or a written signature. Massachusetts’ illiteracy…
by Sarah Becker Copyright ©2021 Sarah Becker Celebrating Women’s History Month “I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the people on the wrong side in our nation—the extreme rightists of our nation, have often used time more effectively than the people of good will,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1967 in The Future of Integration . “And it may well be that this generation has to repent, not merely for the vitriolic words and violent action of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say ‘wait on time.’” After more than 110 years, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue has been removed from the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. If Virginia’s Lost Cause advocates are riled others are quietly rejoicing. March is Women’s History Month and the Commonwealth has chosen to honor sixteen year-old, black student activist Barbara Rose Johns (1935-1991) instead. “It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for students themselves to do something about it,” Johns explained. “There wasn’t any fear. I just thought—this is your moment. Seize it!” Barbara Johns 1951 “plan was daring, even risky: Convince the entire all-black student body to walk out of [Farmville, Virginia’s, Robert Russa Moton High School] and not return until the government gave them a bigger, better building—one like the white students had,” The New York Times noted in 2019. “The case Johns would join, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, would not only have the largest group of plaintiffs; it would also be the only one that was led by students.” The Davis case was one of five consolidated cases known as Brown…
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…