Today in Herstory: National Woman’s Party Begins ERA Campaign (21 july 1923) STILL NOT DONE!

(STILL NOT RATIFIED 92 years later!!!


Today in Herstory: National Woman’s Party Begins ERA Campaign



July 21, 1923: The National Women’s Party’s campaign for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women and men has officially been kicked off! This was the second and final day of the N.W.P.’s convention, which has been celebrating the 75th anniversary of the women’s rights convention held here in Seneca Falls, New York, July 19-20, 1848.


Equal Rights (Lucretia Mott) Amendment author Alice Paul.

The true beginning of this new campaign actually dates back to February 16, 1921. At the National Woman’s Party’s first convention since the winning of the vote six months earlier, Nora Blatch Barney, granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called for “absolute equality” and the delegates enthusiastically endorsed turning that ideal into a legal guarantee as the group’s post-suffrage goal.
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A considerably more streamlined text was submitted to the convention today by the amendment’s author, Alice Paul, then unanimously approved: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Her resolution, as she read it from the pulpit of the local Presbyterian Church to the assembled delegates, said:
Whereas, only one point in the equal rights program of 1848, that of equal suffrage, has been completely attained; and whereas, the National Woman’s Party, as stated in its declaration of principles, is dedicated to the same equal rights program as that adopted on this spot seventy-five years ago, be it resolved, that in order to bring the complete equal rights ideal to the victory that was won for suffrage we undertake the following program: The securing of an amendment to the United States Constitution stating men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.

In speaking for the resolution, Alice Paul said:
We began the campaign for equal rights a year ago. In one State we obtained without difficulty a law establishing equal guardianship and in another State a law making women eligible for jury duty. If we keep on this way we will be here in another seventy-five years celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 convention. I think we ought to start immediately on another campaign similar to that which won suffrage. We should demand a Constitutional amendment of Congress and the President. We are not safe until we have equality guaranteed by the Federal Constitution.

We tie up this amendment to the 1848 movement. It is easier to get support for something with tradition behind it and which has grown respectable with age than for something new-born from the brain of the Woman’s Party. We are going to call this amendment the Lucretia Mott Amendment, because to Lucretia Mott more than to anyone else the feminist movement in the United States owed its start.

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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/07/21/today-in-herstory-national-womans-party-begins-era-campaign/