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You are not equal.
I know it’s easy to think you are. T-shirts declare women’s power. Kids books talk about “rebel girls.” Corporations hashtag your girlboss-ness.
But you are not equal. Not in the Constitution. Not under the law. Not even according to practical metrics like wages and household chores. You earn less and work more. That’s just one of the reasons that for almost 100 years women have been trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
Jennifer Carroll Foy remembers the exact moment when she learned she wasn’t equal. Foy—a legislator in the Virginia House of Delegates—told me she was just a teen when she found out. She was in a high school Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps when a decision came down in United States v. Virginia, a landmark Supreme Court case that ruled 7-1 that the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) had to admit women.
At the time Foy had no idea that the VMI was one of the premier military institutions in America. But the battle over its gender policy gave rise to one of the first times she heard friends and classmates tell her she wasn’t equal. “Everyone, my friends, were saying women shouldn’t be admitted because they weren’t strong enough, weren’t good enough.”
The court forced the VMI to admit women. And the school grudgingly agreed, but only after considering going private to avoid the integration. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion, arguing that because the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—which guarantees equal protection under the law—doesn’t explicitly include the word women, then it doesn’t explicitly apply to women.
The equal protection portion of the 14th Amendment states:
Watching that decision on TV, hearing friends and classmates debate what the precise restrictions on her rights should be—that was the moment when Foy decided to go to the Virginia Military Institute. “I had a friend,” she said in an interview, “who told me he wanted to go with me to the VMI to watch me fail. He bet me a dollar I wouldn’t graduate.”
She didn’t fail. She graduated, even when all the men from her JROTC had dropped out. “I did everything those men did,” she said. “I put on that uniform. I fought with them. I graduated with them.”
Foy understands a battle. She’s worked as a public defender, and she campaigned for her seat in the Virginia House of Delegates pregnant with twins. She’s also a black woman in a world where black women are disadvantaged not just compared with white men but with white women—earning 50 cents to the white man’s dollar (less than white women do) and suffering from maternal deaths at a higher rate than white women.
The stakes of the Equal Rights Amendment are real to her, and so she took the fight to the House of Delegates. To pass a constitutional amendment, the effort needs to be ratified in 38 states. The ERA was first proposed in 1923, and the battle to see it implemented has taken every single one of the years since. Some states have rescinded their ratification. Others have pushed off the debate around it. Congress set an initial deadline for 1979 for ratification for the ERA. The deadline was extended to 1982. Of course, even that deadline has since passed, but whether those deadlines are enforceable or not is still a question. (The 27th Amendment, for example, was ratified almost two centuries after it was first passed.)
Even in the face of such headwinds, Virginia is now the 38th state to back the ERA, securing its ratification on January 15, 2020. The amendment states: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
With an unclear road ahead to formalize this much anticipated development, the passage of the ERA in Virginia is at the moment a symbolic victory. But it’s not an empty one.
The erosion of equal rights is happening under this administration. Recently, 207 Republican lawmakers signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the decision that legalized abortion nationwide. In some cases, Roe is all that stands between women and regressive laws like fetal-heartbeat bills and the continued effort to defund Planned Parenthood clinics. In Iowa, where I live, the governor announced her intention to pass an amendment to the state constitution that would prohibit abortion. There are also laws in Iowa that bar trans women from access to medically necessary surgery covered under Medicaid.
“Our rights,” said Foy, “should not hinge on an election.”
I don’t need to imagine a world in which women are not treated like equal citizens. I live in it. And it’s not hard to picture how it could get worse. Because it used to be worse. Last year my mother sent me a copy of the divorce decree from one of my relatives who dissolved her marriage in the 1940s. The decree forbade her to get remarried without the consent of a judge. My mom can remember a time when women couldn’t get home loans or open up lines of credit without their husband’s consent. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood warned us of a near future in which women have no rights to their bodies at all. I can see that world too.
What I can’t imagine is a world where we are equal. I can’t imagine the world of the ERA, because it’s hard to see past the profound inequality we live with day by day. I asked Foy what that world would look like. She tells me it’s intersectional, that it hinges on the inclusion of trans women and women of color.
I still have a hard time thinking about what that means. What would it mean for me to make just as much as the men around me? What would it mean for the women I know not to face discrimination in doctors’ offices and their places of work? I don’t know. I have broad outlines, but I can’t understand the ramifications.
It’s like that parable about the fish where one fish asks the other, “How’s the water?” And the other fish responds, “What’s water?”
When you’ve been swimming in it your whole life, it’s hard to see the thing itself.
What Foy and activists and politicians like her are pushing for is a hope for something better. It’s a vision that insists we don’t have to be grateful for what we have—we deserve more, we deserve to be protected. That this world of equality is worth whatever it takes to get there.
Lyz Lenz is a writer based in Iowa. Her writing has appeared in Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and the Washington Post. Her book God Land was published in August 2019. Follow her on Twitter @lyzl.
