‘We Refuse to Be Second-Class Citizens’: Why America Needs to Ratify the ERA Now

Gracie Griffin and Ava Massenet
·7 min read

In America, it can take a person a while to learn that she is a second-class citizen. As members of Gen Z, we learned what the word “pussy” meant when we heard it from the mouth of the man our country was about to elect president. We realized the extent to which the fight for gender equality was not yet won when we joined millions marching on Jan. 21, 2017, when we read the signs and heard the chants of generations of women furious and worried for our futures. We learned that our very organs are subject to legislation on June 24, 2022, when we were confronted with the heartbreaking news that Roe v. Wade had been overturned, taking away a right we had been born with: our control over what happens to our own bodies. Now, at 17 and 18, we are coming of age with a sense of paranoia, never knowing when something else is going to happen to take away another right, to further establish our second-class status.

Sadly, we’re autodidacts when it comes to the truth of gender injustice. Even growing up in liberal New York City and attending well-resourced schools, we still feel like the education surrounding women’s rights is treated like an afterthought. If covered at all, the topic tends to be framed within a historical context, suggesting that the struggle for gender equality is a thing of the past. As fundamental rights have increasingly become politicized and polarized issues, schools fear controversy and overlook or skim over topics like reproductive rights and lack of legal protections for marginalized groups. This non-education then silences women on such issues, as it is easier to accept — and harder to fight — an injustice of which you are not fully aware.

Seeking out a fuller education led us to the office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, where working as interns has given us a more clear understanding of the reality of the current fight for gender equality. More specifically, we’ve been introduced to Gillibrand’s ERA Now Resolution, a novel strategy to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Before working for Gillibrand, we might have assumed that the Constitution ensured equality based on sex. We would have been wrong. In fact, though the ERA was introduced in 1923 to declare that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” this seemingly obvious amendment has never been ratified. In 2024 — over one hundred years after it was proposed, and as we face the possibility of electing America’s first female president — this constitutional protection for women continues to be disputed. Facing this truth, we have joined Gillibrand in her push to ensure that men and women’s equality under the law is recognized by our government.

To appreciate the ERA’s present status, it’s essential to understand the constitutional amendment process. According to the Constitution, any amendment is required to receive a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate and then ratification by three-fourths of the states (the ratification process differs by state but usually requires approval by a majority of the state legislature). Following its introduction, the ERA was quickly approved by 30 state legislatures before progress slowed dramatically in the face of organized opposition. Then in 2017, amidst a wave of activism following the Women’s March, the amendment was ratified by Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and finally Virginia — the 38th and final state needed for the amendment to become law — in 2020.

This milestone, celebrated by many supporters, also came with controversy. The ERA included a ratification deadline of June 30, 1982. However — and this is pivotal — the 1982 deadline was established in the preamble of the amendment, not in the text itself, and was therefore not included in the language of the amendment ratified by the states. For context, amendments don’t automatically come with a ratification deadline; the 27th Amendment was proposed by James Madison in 1789 and did not become law for 203 years! Because the deadline for ratification of the ERA was included in the preamble, and not in the amendment itself (as opposed to the 18th Amendment, which did include a deadline in the text), it’s clear that the writers of the ERA did not intend for the time limit to play a decisive role in the validity of the amendment. Numerous constitutional law scholars back up this argument, which has become the basis for the ERA Now Resolution, in which Senator Gillibrand and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri assert that the ERA has cleared all necessary legal hurdles and direct the congressional Archivist to sign the legislation, enshrining it in our Constitution. On Aug. 6, the American Bar Association passed a resolution supporting ratification, a show of support Gillibrand called “incredibly important” in a statement. “It shows that constitutional law experts believe the ERA has satisfied all the constitutional requirements to be certified and published,” she announced.

Throughout our internship, we’ve considered the important implications that the ratification of the ERA could have. Namely, it has the potential to become the constitutional basis for guaranteeing reproductive rights nationally — establishing a legal framework to formally address the patchwork legislation around abortion access and gender inequity. Under the ERA, prohibiting someone’s right to reproductive healthcare would be gender discrimination, rendering prohibitions against abortion access — like the 1864 law anti-choice advocates have recently been trying to revive in Arizona — unconstitutional.

Technicalities and potential applications aside, it’s imperative that the ERA finally become law. Simply put, there is nothing in the Constitution of the United States of America — written and ratified when women could not even vote! — that explicitly grants equal rights to women. The ERA’s opponents point to the 14th Amendment, which states that the government may not “deny to any person… equal protection of the laws” (the famous Equal Protection Clause), and to cases such as Reed v. Reed and Frontiero v. Richardson, as evidence that women’s rights are indeed protected under “settled law.” However, this argument falls short. Given the Supreme Court’s willingness to do away with a half-century’s precedent of “settled law” around legal protections concerning reproductive healthcare in the Dobbs decision, forgive us if we are skeptical of “settled law” to protect our fundamental rights as women under this or any version of the Court. The late Justice Antonin Scalia even confirmed, when asked if the Constitution protects women’s equality, that “it doesn’t.” As we have recently seen, a change in the makeup of the Supreme Court — or any branch of government, for that matter — can swiftly destroy decades worth of progress.

As members of a generation of women just reaching adulthood, we understand that we cannot — as generations before us did — rely upon rhetorical assurances that the Constitution will be interpreted in a way that protects our rights. We see the advancements that women before us fought so hard to achieve being stripped away by an extremist political movement unconcerned with the will of the majority of Americans. After witnessing the erosion of our fundamental rights — and threats to further dismantle them — we see the ERA as an essential safeguard in establishing our claim to equal rights under the law.

The codification of women’s equality in the Constitution of the United States is long overdue. The ERA has already reached its ratification threshold. A simple signature is all we need to achieve the protection that we — and all women in the United States — so desperately need. Under the Constitution — as in practice — we refuse to remain second-class citizens.

More from Rolling Stone

Best of Rolling Stone

Latest Stories