It all came down to Virginia.
After nearly four decades of tumult and setbacks, the long-dormant Equal Rights Amendment may finally be added to the United States Constitution, an event that hinged on politicians in Virginia. The Virginia House of Delegates voted to ratify the ERA on Wednesday; making Virginia the 38th and final state needed to seal the deal. While the vote will likely kick off a court battle over whether the amendment can be ratified at such a delay, Virginia’s decision is a game-changer that resurrects a long muted fight.
The ERA states, “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It’s a seemingly simple promise of protection for more than half of the United States population, but its legality has been in jeopardy for decades. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel released an opinion last week insisting that it’s too late to ratify the ERA, that the initial March 1979 expiration date originally set by Congress in 1972 is long gone, and therefore the amendment is “no longer pending before the States.” But ERA advocates insist that the expiration date was not part of the amendment itself, but the preamble, and that Congress can ignore such deadlines if it so chooses. Legal questions also loom regarding five states that rescinded their ratification of the ERA.
But Jennifer Carroll Foy, an attorney, public defender, and an elected member of the Virginia House of Delegates, won’t be deterred by the OLC’s opinion. She’s more interested in making sure people in Virginia and across the country understand why the ERA matters in 2020. The ERA hasn’t been a household name in generations, coming across as more of a ‘70s relic—akin to an avocado-colored kitchen—than an actual amendment of consequence. Foy wants to change that, especially in the eyes of black women and other women of color.
Foy believes this sentiment is misguided—that the ERA is not a white woman’s battle, and it cannot afford to be characterized as such as the fight for protections under the law rages on.
“African-American women are traumatized by sex discrimination, and they suffer through,” Foy said via phone. “So they ignore the remarks. They ignore the touches. They ignore these things. At the end of the day, it becomes a question of your humanity or going hungry, because people need jobs and retaliation is real.”
While there was certainly widespread support for the ERA from black people and organizations at the height of ERA mania—Shirley Chisholm was a vocal proponent—the specter of whiteness has tended to dominate the ERA movement: whether it was the white second-wave feminists who represented the fight for the ERA’s passage, or conservative women, like Phyllis Schlafly, whose successful campaign against the ERA helped anoint her white domesticity utopia. It sometimes appeared as though white women were using the ERA to enhance their own standing, whether they rallied for it or against it.
But optics aren’t everything, and Foy argues that black women in particular have the most to gain from the ERA’s passage.
“When you fill in these gaps with the Equal Rights Amendment to really help end sex discrimination, really get equal pay for equal work, I think it will raise black women in a way that we have not seen in generations,” Foy said.
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