Analysis Of The Pro-ERA Movement

Due to the pro-ERA’s fractured support organization in comparison to the anti-ERA’s, the pro-ERA campaign gained a radical image, was unable to provide compromises necessary for bipartisan support, and alienated potential support as time passed. With no single voice or image leading the pro-ERA movement, radical feminists that provided sensationalized news quickly became the leading icons of the ERA campaign because, as Lowenthal noted, the national ERA activists “allowed extremists to dictate the national discourse,” instead of streamlining a moderate campaign (Lowenthal 49). For example, radical feminist and ERA advocate, Ti-Grace Atkinson “provided reporters with provocative soundbites as ‘marriage means rape’ and ‘love has to be destroyed’”
NOW linked the ERA campaign to controversial topics including abortion and same-sex marriage, which many moderates disagreed with and therefore did not support the pro-ERA efforts (Critchlow and Stachecki 169). Scholar Catharine MacKinnon concluded that, in the end, “the ERA lost because its proponents did not play the conventional political game conventionally enough” and instead allowed a radical and controversial campaign to define the ERA (MacKinnon 761). According to anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, the conventional political game also consists of compromise, which the pro-ERA’s support organization failed to accommodate, for “the advocates were unwilling to compromise for anything less than a doctrinaire equality, and so, ERA went nowhere.” During efforts to pass the ERA in Congress, ERA advocates rejected compromises on a number of amendments that ranged from exempting women from military service to maintaining the responsibilities of fathers (Schlafly). Compromise on the text to be sent to states for ratification would have allowed for greater bipartisan support within state
For example, after the United Nations declared the year 1975 as International Woman’s Year, or IWY, the pro-ERA forces controlled the American IWY team to lead the organization of an IWY conference. They were only able to organize the conference to take place two years later in Houston, Texas, retitled the National Women’s Conference, or NWC. Participating states held delegate nominating conventions, at which state level factions of ERA supporters attempted to marginalize the ERA opposition. At the Kansas nominating convention, or the Kansas Women’s Weekend, participant Pearl Chindamo recalled that “anti-ERA women had their microphones turned off and were threatened with being thrown out of workshops,” (Lowenthal 46). Kansas women’s weekend participant Mrs. Dave Herring wrote that her “position has changed from one of neutrality to a strongly anti-ERA stance, mostly because of these tactics used by the pro-ERA people” in a 1978 letter to her U.S. Senator James B. Pearson (Lowenthal 48). As a result of such tactics, support for the ERA in non-ratifying states declined by twenty-seven percent between 1976 and 1980, according to political scientists Louis Bolce, Gerald De Maio, and Douglas Muzzio (Critchlow and