When the Founding Fathers proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” it was preceded by “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” If they were truths and self-evident, why were the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence from the moneyed class exclusively (physicians, lawyers, merchants, and plantations owners); many were slave-holders. Deepening the deception, the signers considered women inferior to men intellectually, emotionally, physically and spiritually; consequently, they meant privileged white men only when they wrote “all men are created equal.”
Did they sign the Declaration on Independence with the intention of taking on the arduous effort of establishing an equal society for all?
My answer is a solid no. After all, this country has had to fight its own civil war to end slavery nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence and to undergo unceasing civil rights struggles for people of color and for women throughout its 250-year history, with no end in sight.
Sojourner Truth, the eminent abolitionist and women’s rights champion, lived every cruelty of slavery and misogyny from being auctioned off apart from her family at age 9, to whippings, deprivation and the selling off of her own children. At age 49 a divinely inspired vision set her forth into a life of “testifying of the hope that was in her.” Transcending her illiteracy, she became a famed speaker, with her amazing “mother wit” and the “most powerful African-American woman to consistently … link the oppression of slavery with the subjection of women.” With her prescient insight into Christian fundamentalism creating roadblocks for women’s equality then (and unrelentingly so today), she responded in her renowned “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851 at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio:
“And that man back there in the black… That man in the black says that women can’t have as much rights as men because Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from?… From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.”
Women of all races worked passionately for women’s suffrage for 70 more years, until the deeply flawed 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex but not sex and race. Only over successive years did African-American, Native Americans, Asians American and Latina women gain the right to vote.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was first proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul founder of the National Women’s Party, which had identified more than 300 laws that exposed the degrading discrimination against women based on their sex, including employment, child custody, property, and rape, to name a few. As proof of the intrangency of misogyny, the ERA has been one of the most challenged pieces of legislation in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the 1970s, conservative Phyllis Schlafy denounced the ERA as “an assault on the family and on the role of women as wives and mothers.”
Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the future of women’s equality took a step forward with women entering political office, participating more significantly in labor unions and the professions. In 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, meeting the requirement of three-quarters of the states’ ratification necessary for an amendment to the Constitution to become law.
Finally, an American president could affirm in January 2025, what languished for more than 100 years: that the ERA, as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, is the law of the land. “We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,“ declared President Joe Biden. However, the archivist failed to certify and publish the Amendment guaranteeing women’s dignity and equality on the grounds that it didn’t meet a technical deadline.
But that technical deadline was never imposed on another amendment, according to the American Bar Association, confirming that the technical objections to the passage of the ERA are not consistent with Article 5 of the Constitution.
The consequences for U.S. women and girls is that women are poorer than men because of ongoing pay inequity: women earn 82% of what men earn, and Black and Latina women earning only 59 cents and 51 cents for a white man’s earned dollar. Women lack paid parental leave, are victims of high rates of rape and all forms of violence against women; and have lost in many states the right to bodily autonomy escalating in the worst states to the sexual counterpart of the Fugitive Slave Act.
Those responsible for the failure of the ERA include the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, corporations benefitting from discriminatory wages, the fundamentalist Christian right, and traffickers in women and girls for prostitution (how did Jeffrey Epstein get away with his mortal sins for so long, be-friended by men along the political spectrum from disgraced Noam Chomsky to liar Donald Trump).
A strong majority of Americans support reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work; and ratification of the ERA would establish in law 21st century sex equality and dignity. Join former US Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s ERA Now whose goal is to be ready for Congressional action in 2027 to affirm the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
Pat Hynes is a retired professor of environmental health and member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, an ardent feminist and advocate of environmental justice. She thanks her sister, Dr. Margaret Hynes, for her insightful editorial suggestions.