Three pieces of legislation were debated a few weeks ago at a low-key hearing of the Illinois House’s civil-law committee.
One bill would allow trusts for pets. Another would grant elderly victims of crimes the right to give depositions at home. Both proposals were sent to the full House with no objections, 18 to 0.
The third was a resolution to add the following sentence to the U.S. Constitution: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.” This declaration is popularly known as the Equal Rights Amendment.
On February 5, with little fanfare, the ERA was once again considered by Illinois legislators. The room was packed, but, for the most part, the opposing sides addressed each other in a cordial, even pleasing manner. A few committee members, all Democrats, spoke admiringly of the resolution. Its sponsor was committee member Lou Lang, a Democrat from the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Only one Republican stated his intention to vote “no.”
“Many years ago, the United States Congress in its wisdom sent to the states a proposal to amend the United States Constitution with the Equal Rights Amendment,” said Lang, as he introduced the resolution. “The Equal Rights Amendment is simple and profound. It simply says that we cannot discriminate against people on account of their gender.
“It doesn’t say anything about gay rights. It doesn’t say anything about abortion. It doesn’t say anything about women fighting in Iraq. It simply says that people shouldn’t be discriminated against based on their gender.”
Two opponents of the ERA stood before the committee. One represented the Eagle Forum, the Alton-based conservative political group founded in the early 1970s by Phyllis Schlafly. The other represented Concerned Women for America, one of the largest women’s organizations in the country. Both raised the very concerns Lang had anticipated.
No one in the audience spoke in favor of the resolution, but 12 people signed up as supporters on an attendance sheet; twice as many signed that sheet as opponents. When the committee finally considered the measure, two Republicans joined all ten Democrats in voting “yes.” Six committee members voted “no.” Now the Equal Rights Amendment is ready to go before the full Illinois House.
But this time its supporters are in no hurry for a vote. On April 2 they plan to hold a rally here. No one expects the kind of combat once fought over the ERA during the 1970s and early ’80s.
In 1976, the National Organization of Women targeted Illinois as a key state for ratification of the ERA, and Springfield became a pivotal battleground in a fierce culture war. Over the next six years, tens of thousands of activists descended on the city. Most were hopeful; some were angry. Blood was spilled on the marble floor of the capitol, and someone burned “ERA” onto the statehouse lawn with gasoline. Proponents even chained themselves to a railing outside of the Senate. One ERA lobbyist was convicted of offering a legislator $1,000 in exchange for a “yes” vote. Bribes weren’t unusual back then, but the lobbyist made the mistake of writing the offer down. She handed a note to the legislator, who read it and promptly turned her in.
In 1982, in the waning days of the ERA, seven women supporters fasted for 37 days, showing up daily in the capitol rotunda with Dick Gregory, who had joined them in their highly publicized hunger strike.
Those turbulent days still carry a lot of significance for the people who were there.
Gayle Guthrie is president of ERA-Illinois, an umbrella group of more than 40 organizations that includes the AFL-CIO, Illinois Bar Association, and the League of Women Voters. After graduating from Northwestern in the early ’70s, Guthrie became a commodities trader and budding ERA activist.
“As a young woman in business, I simply couldn’t understand how I could be told that I wasn’t capable of being in the Constitution, that I was still unequal,” she says.
Guthrie now teaches leadership skills and finance at Columbia College in Chicago, where she often relates ERA history to her women students.
“They are amazed and ask, ‘What we can do?’ ” she says. “We are still doing this for our daughters, for the next generation.”
She recalls that women who supported the ERA back then wore green clothing. Those who opposed it wore red. Both sides gathered in the public galleries of the House and Senate chambers.
“As the day went on, women wearing red went home to make dinner,” she says. Other women took their place. “You’d literally watch the gallery change color from red to green.”
Guthrie decided to wear red when she attended this month’s hearing of the civil-law committee: “No one gets to own a color I like.” She says the “discrepancy” largely went unnoticed. Only one reporter who was around in those days asked about her fashion statement.
Today Illinois’ pro- and anti-ERA forces are showing their colors once again, taking up a conflict that most had thought was resolved long ago. Each year between 1972 and ’82, the Illinois General Assembly declined to ratify the ERA. The U.S. Congress had refused to pass the amendment every year between 1923 and ’70, but then finally approved the measure in March of 1972. The ERA had seven years to acquire the approval of three-fourths of all states. By 1977, 35 of the necessary 38 states were already on board.
Congress then extended the deadline for ratification to June 30, 1982, and Illinois, the northern-most state not to approve the amendment, became a focal point. The 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, was ratified in just over a year, but the ERA met with more opposition than expected. In May of 1980, 100,000 ERA supporters rallied in Chicago’s Grant Park, led by the city’s mayor Jane Byrne, NOW president Eleanor Smeal, and honorary chair Betty Ford. The following month pro-ERA forces converged on Springfield.
In January of 1982, at the start of the amendment’s make-or-break year, Illinois NOW unsuccessfully tried to persuade Governor James Thompson, a nominal supporter, to take a more active role. Most efforts centered on getting the Illinois House to change a rule requiring a three-fifths vote to a simple majority. Then-Speaker of the House George Ryan refused, effectively blowing ERA out of the water–for good. One week after the ERA fell short of passing the Illinois House by just four votes, the deadline passed. Several attempts were made to reintroduce the ERA in Congress, but its time had apparently passed. There hasn’t been a serious effort to renew the ratification process since.
“George Ryan cheered and led and organized the defeat,” Guthrie says. “No question about it.”
If Ryan has been cast as the ERA’s executioner, others throughout that period–including Thompson, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, and state representative Emil Jones, now Senate president–also contributed to ERA’s defeat.
But perhaps no one is more associated with the death of the ERA than the self-described “housewife” from Alton.
In 1977, the Associated Press assembled a task force of Illinois bigwigs to identify the ten most powerful people in the state. That list, which cited some of the task force members, named nine men, including Illinois governors, Chicago’s mayor and two newspaper editors, and a few business executives. Number ten was the only woman: Phyllis Schlafly.
Schlafly–mother of six, Radcliffe grad, and a lawyer–was 52 when NOW targeted Illinois for passage of the ERA. Schlafly argued–and still believes–that the ERA would rob women of their worth as dignified mothers and females, distinctly different from men. Opponents claimed the guarantees it promised were already found in the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Schlafly believed the ERA would only further America’s slide into unfettered liberalism, paving the way for homosexual marriages, tax-funded abortions, drafting women into combat, and even shared public bathrooms.
Speaking from her office in St. Louis, where she now lives, Schlafly, 78, says her fears are still the same. She remains a busy champion of conservative causes. She’s spending her time these days on such issues as immigration (she favors strict limits and increased patrols at the Mexican border) and public education (she pushes phonics and the teaching of basic skills, especially reading). She continues to write a newspaper column and deliver a regular radio commentary, both of which are syndicated throughout the country. She is also promoting her 21st book, Feminist Fantasies, granting six interviews a day. She’s surprised by the recent resurrection of the ERA in Illinois, but she’s ready to wage another war if necessary.
“It was the major preoccupation of my life for ten years,” Schlafly says. “Do we want to go through all that again? This is not a significant threat in any state except Illinois. The ERA ought to be on a bumper sticker, not in the Constitution.”
When she heard the Illinois General Assembly was reintroducing an ERA resolution, she typed up a letter to her fellow Eagle Forum members, reiterating the old arguments and urging everyone to contact their legislators.
“The Illinois General Assembly debated and defeated ERA every year for ten years,” Schlafly wrote. “In all that time, the ERAers were never able to show that ERA would give any benefit to women. ERA is a fraud. Illinois has said NO to ERA. The United States has said NO to ERA. Let ERA rest in peace.”
State representative John Fritchey, a Democrat from Chicago, chairs the civil-law committee. His office recorded 78 phone calls against the ERA resolution and “two to three calls in favor, at the most,” according to a staffer.
Even if Schlafly believes the ERA’s chances of ratification are “absolutely none,” she has reason for concern. Lou Lang argues that Congress can extend the ratification process any time it wants. Many in the pro-ERA camp cite Amendment 27 to the U.S. Constitution, the so-called “Madison Amendment,” which prevents members of Congress from voting for a mid-term pay raise. James Madison introduced the proposal in the late 1700s, but it wasn’t ratified until 1992. This proves, ERA advocates argue, that Congress can let the ratification period go on indefinitely.
But Congress also set the original deadlines, and Schlafly says this Congress is unlikely to start the ratification process again. “Everybody knows this Congress is more pro-life,” she says.
The chasm separating the two sides remains wide and deep. Those who oppose the ERA continue to believe that adding sex to the list of federally protected classes would force states to follow the whims of a liberal social agenda. But those who support the amendment never cite such an agenda.
“All that women are asking for are that the rights our male counterparts have every morning when they land their feet on the floor be granted to us–that’s the whole thing in a nutshell,” says Emily Batton, a retired employee of the Illinois Commerce Commission and a former Marine from Raymond. Batton is currently a state coordinator for Illinois-ERA. “It’s not about the opposition and the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world.”
“In the State of Illinois today, as in the other 49 states, women are discriminated against,” Lang said at this month’s hearing. “They make 71 cents on the dollar, even in the year 2003. They are denied credit. They are denied housing. We all have constituents who have come in and tried to rent an apartment and the first question a landlord asks sometimes is ‘where’s your husband?’ or ‘where’s your cosigner?’ Men aren’t asked that question.”
Lang has introduced the ERA twice before. While the amendment got out of committee both times, he chose to not let it appear for a vote before the full House. He didn’t want to risk another defeat. He thinks the measure stands a better chance this session, with Democrats in the majority, but the chance is only slightly better. “I’ll be ready to call it when we have one of those days everybody is here,” he says. “It would do great damage to the cause if it fails. I only have a few votes to spare.”
Though Lang says there’s no question Congress can extend the ratification deadline, he acknowledges that the value of Illinois’ passage of ERA may only be symbolic.
“Even if I’m wrong and some court says it’s too late for ratification, it’s important for Illinois that the General Assembly make a public statement in support of equality for women,” he says. While women have made substantial gains in the last 20 years, he says, there’s still a long way to go. “It can’t be allowed that 52 percent of Americans make less doing the same job.”
Illinois has a tangled history with women’s rights. One hundred years ago women were prohibited from practicing law. But 50 years later Illinois became the first state to ratify the 19th amendment. Lang and others suggest our culture has changed enough to warrant greater expectations than symbolic gestures.
“There’s been a sea change,” says Guthrie. “We’re finding that people are saying ‘Of course ERA should be passed–it’s undebatable.’ “
Not taking into account the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2003.
