Equal Rights Amendment Pros And Cons

1674 Words7 Pages
Equal Rights Amendment For many generations, women seem to have had a major disadvantage in climbing the ladder of opportunity here in the United States. Some politicians have soiled their political career with the firm foundation of gender separation and sprinkled their seeds of propaganda into the minds of Americans nationwide. In an 1906 Life magazine article entitled “While there is Life there's Hope,” the editor explains that the “primary objection to woman suffrage is that it would add an enormous army of unqualified voters to the huge mass of them that vote now.” This army has stood its ground and fought not only for the right to vote but also for the right to fight. In 1977, female specific units were dispelled in the U.S. Army…show more content…
Forty-nine years later that proposal was brought to Congress. Before Congress voted on the issue, then President Richard Nixon endorsed the amendment. Needing a two-thirds majority vote, both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate quickly and overwhelmingly approved the amendment and pushed for its ratification in the state legislatures. However, all the state legislatures were not successful in ratifying and the Equal Rights Amendment died on the floor. Each year since 1982 the Equal Rights Amendment has been reintroduced into Congress and each year it is ignored. Some may consider this a failure for gender equality however, women are still equally protected under several other important pieces of legislation including the Fourteenth Amendment, Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Civil Rights Act of…show more content…
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that an individual cannot be discriminated based on race, religion sex, or natural origin. According to Supreme Court Justice William Reinquist, “the prohibition against discrimination based on sex was added to Title VII at the last minute on the floor of the House of Representatives” and in by doing so helped piece together one of the most important racial and gender documents in this nation's history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the most important pieces of legislation for women. Title VII is often cited in supreme court cases that highlight not only sexual discrimination but also sexual harassment. An important example is the Supreme Court case Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986): “Plaintiff Vinson claimed that she had submitted to the unwanted sexual advances of her supervisor in order to hold onto her job. Although her supervisor denied her charges and the bank he worked for disavowed any knowledge of misbehavior, her suit finally reached the Supreme Court after six years of litigation, where a unanimous Court determined that the creation of a “hostile work environment” through sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination”
Open Document