On Wednesday, Virginia became the 38th state to vote to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment — thus fulfilling the requirement that three-quarters of the states must approve an Amendment in order to add it to the U.S. Constitution. Since the Amendment was proposed a century ago, the U.S. has never been so close to enshrining the equality of all people, regardless of sex, in its bedrock legal document.
But that doesn’t mean the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will be added to the Constitution any time soon. There will likely be a long fight in the courts or in the U.S. legislature before that happens, as the legislators who originally passed the Amendment in 1972 set, and then extended, a time limit for ratification by the states. That deadline passed more than three decades ago.
Decades would pass before the Equal Rights Amendment would gain real momentum. By that point, both men and women had won protections in the workplace, and the women of the second-wave feminist movement — including some who had participated in the fight for civil rights in the 1960s — were pushing for equality in their jobs, universities and homes. The Equal Rights Amendment was written by Alice Paul (1885-1977), the founder of the National Woman’s Party.
Born to a New Jersey family of Quakers who highly valued education, Paul studied at colleges and universities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and earned an impressive number of degrees, including a Master’s and doctorate in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a law degree from Washington College of Law, and law Master’s and doctoral degrees from American University. But her life’s work really came into focus after she joined demonstrations for the British suffragist movement in the early 1900s. When she returned to the U.S. in 1910, she pushed American suffragists to try the confrontational techniques she’d seen applied in Britain, including civil disobedience.
Concerned that the National American Woman Suffrage Association was too moderate, in 1913 Paul and Lucy Burns formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which was later reconstituted as the National Woman’s Party, and employed more aggressive tactics. The group used parades, petitions, protests and pickets to push for the right to vote. In 1917, Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison for picketing the White House, and was force-fed after going on a prison hunger strike.
After women successfully won the right to vote in 1920, the National Woman’s Party turned its attention to the next steps. Jessica Neuwirth, a women’s rights lawyer and a founder of the ERA Coalition, a current-day campaign to pass the amendment, tells TIME that suffrage advocates saw their work as remedying the intentional omission of women from the U.S. Constitution.
Paul’s crusade in the 1920s was unsuccessful, but in the 1950s, Michigan Congresswoman Martha Griffiths took up the torch. A former judge elected to the House in 1954, Griffiths worked to have sex discrimination added to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and pushed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to double down on its enforcement of the Act. She also introduced the amendment on the House floor every year, but was unsuccessful until 1970, when Griffiths filed a discharge position that forced the legislation out of committee and led to the amendment being passed by the House. Although the Senate failed to pass it that legislative session, Griffiths reintroduced it the following year. It passed the House on Oct. 12, 1971 and the Senate on March 22, 1972. In passing the Equal Rights Amendment, Congress had set a seven-year deadline for ratification.
“Well, if you fast forward to 2019, without the Equal Rights Amendment having passed, we’re trying to figure out how to deal with bathrooms in a multi-gendered universe. And we’re trying to figure out, should in fact women be drafted if men are drafted?” says Condit. ”And while we were are unsettled as a culture about these new questions, they did not fail to emerge because we didn’t have an Equal Rights Amendment.”
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Condit notes that many of the states that failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment had few women in their state legislatures, and historically had poor records of protecting the rights of both women and people of color. Virginia legislators’ decision to approve the Equal Rights Amendment means that the Amendment has fulfilled the requirement for three-fourths of the states to ratify a Constitutional Amendment. However, the ERA still faces another major obstacle: a past Congress had set a deadline for the Amendment’s ratification.
Going forward, that means that Congress could potentially vote to eliminate the deadline, or it could be challenged in court. Although American women have made significant gains in equality since the 1970s — and certainly since the 1920s — advocates say that an Equal Rights Amendment could still have a profound effect on the law and on American society.
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