
In 2022, women earned 82 cents on average for every dollar earned by men - a disparity almost unchanged over two decades.īut the battle in Congress is still breaking down along usual party lines. The compensation gap between men and women is just one of several areas that advocates say the ERA would shore up. "Those things seem foreign to me, but we'll look into them." "The department has a long history and a recent history of … hiring women, promoting women," the department's chief, John Donnelly, said last year. "And really, it's always time to uplift and to center the humanity and dignity of all people and we need that to be enshrined in the Constitution. in the midst of draconian, very dangerous and targeted attacks against women and the LGBTQ community," Pressley said.

"Especially now, it's important to reintroduce this. Wade's national guarantee to abortion access.

Some activists renewed their push to codify the ERA in light of the Supreme Court's decision last year overruling Roe v. "What I think it does is put the ball back in Congress' court, and that's where we've been playing for quite some time," said Zakiya Thomas, president and CEO of the ERA Coalition. Pressley told ABC News that it was the "only thing standing in our way."

Lawmakers and advocates backing the ERA now argue that Congress has the power to lift the deadline because they had the power to impose it in the first place. Illinois and Nevada sued to demand publication of the measure as the 28th Amendment but failed to show why the deadline that Congress set shouldn't be enforceable. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the congressional deadline on the ERA was legally binding, so the later three ratifications were not valid. Although lawmakers voted to extend the ratification deadline by an additional three years, no new states signed on amid a campaign by conservative activists led by Phyllis Schlafly to stop the amendment. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."īut after passing the House and Senate, the proposed amendment fell short of the three-fourths majority of states - 38 - needed to ratify it before a seven-year deadline set by Congress. The amendment states that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress. Ayanna Pressley, who is leading the effort in the House to ratify the ERA, told ABC News in a segment on "This Week" on Sunday.Ĭongress passed the ERA in 1972 with support from members of both parties, following efforts by leading female legislators like then-New York Rep.
Equal rights amendment ratification full#
"I'm dismayed that in 2023, we still have to fight to be seen as full citizens given the contributions of women as defenders of our democracy and all the contributions that we make to civic life, to culture, to our economy," Massachusetts Democratic Rep.
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The Equal Rights Amendment was first drafted and introduced in Congress in 1923 - and now, a century later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is working to at last enshrine its guarantees of gender equality in the Constitution.
