The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
The original Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923, just three years after women earned the right to vote. The core of the ERA (Section 1) is only 24 words long, and this one sentence would explicitly guarantee equal rights regardless of sex or gender and would affirm the nation’s core value of equal protection under the law.
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.
Section 2
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3
This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
In December 1978, as the battle over the ERA escalated, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a Statement on the Equal Rights Amendment. Read through the following excerpts from the Commission’s Report and, in your own words, identify the reasons it believed the U.S. needed a federal Equal Rights Amendment.
