Back in 1981, I entered a walkathon in Carlisle to help raise money to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I hadn’t paid much attention to the issue, but over the past year, I’d seen how important it was.
“It’s still a man’s world, so the way to get a job is to please men,” an employment agency owner advised me. She got me a job as an administrative assistant to a private detective, but I soon discovered he really wanted a surrogate mother/maid.
Later I interviewed at a government agency and was too shocked to say or do anything when the supervisor said he expected to sleep with his assistant when they traveled. I sometimes wonder whether he found someone desperate enough to accept his terms.
In the past nine years and especially the past several weeks, it’s become increasingly clear that this is what to expect as Donald Trump, his Christian nationalist allies and his angry male fans take America back … to some distant oppressive time.
This is why Democrats are pushing for President Joe Biden to direct the national archivist to certify the ERA before he leaves office.
There would be legal challenges, but that’s no reason to hold back. Women need all the constitutional protection from sex discrimination that we can get.
What women are up against
The Supreme Court already has a strong MAGA majority. The GOP will take full control of Congress just after New Year’s Day. And we’re only five weeks away from the inauguration of Trump, who has taken his party’s contempt for women to new levels.
This year alone, he strode into the Republican National Convention to the song “It’s a Man’s Man’s World,” leveled all kinds of sexist slurs against Kamala Harris and declared that he’d “protect” women (which sounds a lot like restricting us) whether we like it or not.
Nevertheless, he not only won a resounding Electoral College victory but also edged out Harris in the popular vote at 49.9% to 48.4%.
Message received. A self-proclaimed groper/voyeur who was found liable for digital rape can still worm himself back into a position that, thanks to his Supreme Court, now comes with the privileges of a monarch.
Since then, Trump’s continued to rub our noses into the slime by nominating or hiring a slew of accused sexual assailants for important, taxpayer-funded jobs.
His misogynistic followers watched and learned. Hours before Trump was declared President-elect, white supremacist Nick Fuentes declared it’s “your body, my choice.” That toxic-bro distortion of the women’s movement’s call for bodily autonomy went viral.
It’s about more than reproductive rights, though. After the election, use of phrases like “Get back to the kitchen” and “Repeal the 19th (Amendment, which gave women the right to vote) also proliferated.
And at a Texas State University campus, a “Christian” demonstrator brandished a sign saying “Women are property.”
It’s easy to shrug this off as hate speech from a lunatic fringe, but many ideas that were once dismissed as wacky have woven their way into the GOP fabric. Who’d have thought even a decade ago that the Supreme Court would take an ax to abortion rights and to the separation of church and state, let alone that a major party would rally behind someone who incited a violent insurrection?
Why so long?
State after state, including ours, ratified the ERA in the early ‘70s, but men — and women – who liked the patriarchal status quo pushed back hard. When I marched in 1981, we were three votes short of ratification.
After Trump got into the White House the first time, “ERA supporters mobilized a renewed effort to achieve full ratification,” Smith College professor Carrie N. Baker wrote in Ms. They achieved their goal during that administration, with Nevada, Illinois and Virginia taking the amendment to the finish line.
Whether that happened too late is up for debate. Meanwhile, regressives keep trotting out the same tired arguments against enshrining equal rights for women.
A fun fact
Pennsylvania was the first state to amend its constitution to include an equal rights amendment. The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed it in two consecutive sessions with no dissenting votes. Nearly 63% of the voters approved it, including a comfortable majority in Schuylkill County.
And it all happened from November 1969 to May 1971.
If we’re taking our country back, that’s a worthwhile place to go.
Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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