The crooked path from the ERA’s failure to Roe’s end

The overturning of Roe was the result of a process that started not in 2016, but more than 40 years ago. It failed to do so – revealing both the US’s misogyny and unwillingness to protect the civil rights of half of its citizens and the limits of second-wave, white women’s “universal” feminism. And this is exactly and precisely what we will lose if the Equal Rights Amendment is passed,” Schlafly said in a speech just weeks after the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision in March 1973. In 1977, Schlafly led a coalition of counter-protesters against the National Women’s Conference in Houston, calling it “the death knell of the women’s liberation movement.” Hers was a 15,000-person rally made up of mostly white families with young children, where the participants “unanimously passed resolutions against abortion, the proposed equal rights amendment and lesbian rights.” Schlafly had caught on to a key weakness in second-wave feminism that meant that her supporters faced little resistance. Falwell also said the ERA contained “ambiguous wording – ‘there shall be no discrimination on account of sex’ – that would mean that homosexual marriages could not be disallowed anywhere … and that I feel would be a repudiation of our conviction that the traditional family role is right.” There is nothing in the language of the ERA attacking the role of women as stay-at-home mothers, the role of fathers as patriarchal providers, or supporting the role of same-sex couples in parenting.