When the Equal Rights Amendment was first passed by Congress in 1972, Richard Nixon was president and All in the Family's Archie Bunker was telling his feisty wife Edith to stifle it. Over the course of the next ten years, an initial wave of enthusiasm led to ratification of the ERA by thirty-five states, just three short of the thirty-eight states needed by the 1982 deadline. Many of the arguments against the ERA that historically stood in the way of ratification have gone the way of bouffant hairdos and Bobby Riggs, and a new Coalition for the ERA was recently set up to bring the experience and wisdom of old-guard activists together with the energy and social media skills of a new-guard generation of women. In a series of short, accessible chapters looking at several key areas of sex discrimination recognized by the Supreme Court, Equal Means Equal tells the story of the legal cases that inform the need for an ERA, along with contemporary cases in which women's rights are compromised without the protection of an ERA. Covering topics ranging from pay equity and pregnancy discrimination to violence against women, Equal Means Equal makes abundantly clear that an ERA will improve the lives of real women living in America.

The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism provides a comprehensive examination of scholarly research and knowledge on a variety of aspects of women's collective activism in the United States, tracing both continuities and critical changes over time.

We are all living through modern constitutional history in the making, and Ordinary Equality helps teach about the past, present, and future of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) through the lives of the bold, fearless women and queer people who have helped shape the U.S. Constitution. Ordinary Equality digs into the fascinating and little-known history of the ERA and the lives of the incredible—and often overlooked—women and queer people who have helped shape the U.S. Constitution for more than 200 years. Based on author Kate Kelly’s acclaimed podcast of the same name, Ordinary Equality recounts a story centuries in the making. From before the Constitution was even drafted to the modern day, she examines how and why constitutional equality for women and Americans of all marginalized genders has been systematically undermined for the past 100-plus years, and then calls us all to join the current movement to put it back on the table and get it across the finish line. Kate Kelly provides a much-needed fresh perspective on the ERA for feminists of all ages, and this engaging, illustrated look at history, law, and activism is sure to inspire many to continue the fight. Individual chapters tell the stories of Molly Brant (Koñwatsi-tsiaiéñni / Degonwadonti), Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell, Pauli Murray, Martha Wright Griffiths, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Barbara Jordan, and Pat Spearman, and features other key players and concepts, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Title IX, Danica Roem, and many more.

Here is the story of the extraordinary Alice Paul, a leader in the long struggle for votes for women. Alice Paul made a significant impact on both the woman's suffrage movement—the long struggle for votes for women—to the "second wave," when women demanded full equality with men. After women won the vote in 1920, Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would make all the laws that discriminated against women unconstitutional. Passage of the ERA became the rallying cry of a new movement of young women in the 1960s and '70s. Paul saw another chance to advance women's rights when the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 began moving through Congress. She set in motion the "sex amendment," which remains a crucial legal tool for helping women fight discrimination in the workplace. A true "girl power" book for today's young women, the title includes archival images, an author's note, a bibliography, and source notes.

An account of the ramifications of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the divisions it created in the courts and Congress, and in the women's movement itself.Constitutional Orphan explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters, and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book then connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a thin conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the Congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth, and connects that with the NWP's perceived need for southern Congressional votes for the ERA. It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election; and then evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA, and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth could be used today to expand gender equality.

In this work, Jane Mansbridge's fresh insights uncover a significant democratic irony - the development of self-defeating, contradictory forces within a democratic movement in the course of its struggle to promote its version of the common good. Mansbridge's book is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice.