"For its advocates, the ERA was a device for allowing the Supreme Court to impose the principle of equality between the sexes on recalcitrant state legislators. For legislators, that was precisely the problem. They did not want their actions reviewed, much less reversed, by federal judges whom they did not even appoint." pages 4-5

      "The major women's organizations were able to persuade two-thirds of the states to approve women's suffrage in 1920. In the same year these organizations began to discuss an Equal Rights Amendment. Alice Paul and her militant National Women's Party had gained national notoriety by picketing the White House and staging hunger strikes for women's suffrage. Now the same group proposed a constitutional amendment, introduced in Congress in 1923, that read: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." " page 8

      "Why did the states stop ratifying in 1973? Why did public support in the unratified states begin to decline? The campaign against the ERA succeeded because it shifted debate away from equal rights and focused it on the possibility that the ERA might bring substantive changes in women's roles and behavior. In this era, the American public, though changing its outlook, still objected to any major changes in traditional roles of men and women. To the degree that the opposition could convince people that the ERA would bring about such changed, it eroded support for the ERA.

      Much of the apparent support for the Equal Rights Amendment in surveys came from a sympathetic response to the concept of "rights," not from a commitment to actual changes in women's roles." page 20

      "Yet, the explanation for these figures is quite simple: Americans can favor abstract rights even when they oppose substantive change." page 22

      "Few people derive their preferences deductively from general principles. Rather, they infer their principles from their particular preferences." page 26

      "The men and women of America approved the principle of equal rights only so long as it did not change much in practice." page 27

      "The tension between rights and substance was particularly strong from 1972 to 1982, because the Supreme Court had recently applied many principles enshrined in the Constitution of the United States in controversial ways." page 27

      "But unpopular Supreme Court decisions did take their toll on the ERA. Unlike other recent amendments to the Constitution, the ERA spelled out a broad statement of principle, in language much like that of the First, Fifth, or Fourteenth Amendments - those amendments on which the civil liberties of the nation largely rest. But many mainstream legislators had been burned too often by the Court's interpretation of the broad principles incorporated in those amendments." page 28

      "The framers of the Constitution meant to give intense, sizable minorities a near veto on constitutional amendments, and they succeeded. This raises a democratic paradox. We sometimes think of the rights-oriented amendments to the Constitution as having the function of protecting politically disadvantaged groups from the power of the majority. Yet the Constitution requires much more than a majority to pass these amendments. How, politically, can one persuade not only a majority but a supermajority to thwart its own will, or the will of future majorities? The only way to get the public to pass what amounts to a self-denying ordinance is to stress the principle involved in an amendment rather than the specific substantive ways it would prevent the majority from doing what it wants to do. Proponents almost managed to have the ERA ratified by using this strategy. But once debate shifted to its substantive effects, it was doomed." pages 34 - 35

      "Most men are brought up to expect such deference, at least unconsciously, and see women who refuse to provide it as "aggressive." " page 39

      "Liberal private organizations tat carry out a governmental purpose as being subject to the same restrictions as the government itself." page 40

      "The situation is analogous to that of private employees who are willing to fight for the right to say things their employer doesn't want said, because they believe that "the Constitution guarantees free speech, doesn't it?" The fact that the Constitution doesn't guarantee a job to those who exercise their right to free speech may make the First Amendment legally irrelevant in such cases, but it does not make it psychologically irrelevant." page 43

      "The fact that the ERA would have had no significant immediate tangible impact on most women's lives dramatically influenced the ways that both pro- and antiforces thought about and argued for the ERA." page 47

      "The fact that by the mid-1970a the ERA promised few immediate, tangible benefits for women was not, I believe, even in 1982, a strong reason against voting the ERA into the Constitution. As I argued earlier, the ERA undoubtedly would have encouraged legislators and judges over the long run to take the problems of women more seriously and to be more sensitive to the patterns of disadvantage that impair women's lives." page 59

      "By 1982, the Supreme Court had left the ERA only two important potential roles. First, the Amendment could have acted as a symbol of the nation's commitment to women's rights - a symbol that would probably have had important practical effects both in encouraging legislators and judges to take this mandate into account, and in encouraging citizens to bring civil suits demanding their rights. Second, the Amendment could have committed the American government to particular substantive applications of the general principle of equal rights that a majority of the still traditional, still ambivalent, still sexist American public would not have voted for in a referendum." page 60

      "Phyllis Schlafly's entire case against the ERA revolved around women's continuing need for male protection. As she put it, "Women want and need protection. Any male who is a man - or gentleman - will accept the responsibility of protecting women." Schlafly, following the Western custom since the Middle Ages, saw the powerful male protecting the defenseless female as the only alternative to treating women as chattel." page 69

      "The protectionist position led both men and women to expect women to be passive victims. Victims they became. As the NOW "Position Paper on the Registration and Drafting of Women in 1980" pointed out, in America in the 1980s,

One rape occurs every five minutes. One out of every four American married women is a victim of wife beating. . . . . When the word "protection" is used, we know it costs women a great deal.

      Feminists also suspected that public and legislative antipathy to women to combat derived less from concern for the lives of women (or even for the efficiency of the army) than from a cultural rejection of the idea that women should ever be aggressive or powerful." page 69 - 70

      "The very existence of full-time homemakers was incompatible with many goals of the women's movement, like sharing of political and economic power. Women can never hold half the economically and politically powerful positions in the country if a greater proportion of women than men withdraw from competition for those positions. More important, if even 10 percent of American women remain full-time homemakers, this will reinforce traditional views of what women ought to do and encourage other women to become full-time homemakers at least while their children are very young. . . . .

      Most feminists also had personal reasons for rejecting the notion that women should 'specialize' in housework and child care. The women who founded NOW were mostly professional women, and those who began "women's liberation" in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and SDS were usually college-educated community organizers. Very few of these women saw homemaking as their primary identity. . . .Because conventional images of marriage are permeated by scenes of male domination and female subordination, they concluded that married life would always be shaped by this legacy. An "egalitarian marriage" was thus a contradiction in terms. . . . In this analysis, if a married woman were to have any hope of developing self-respect or self-confidence, she would have to be at least as independent of her husband as he was of her. This meant having a job as interesting, as demanding, and as well paid as his, not being his unpaid housekeeper and babysitter." pages 100 - 101

      "Opponents of the ERA were acutely aware that its sponsors were generally opposed to homemaking as a career." page 104

      "Even if there had been nothing in feminist ideology to threaten a homemaker, and even if every feminist had kept silent about her anger at being forced to do more than half the housework, some homemakers would probably have suspected the ERA, simply because its sponsors billed it as an effort to improve the position of women who work outside the home. By the late 1970s, many full-time homemakers had come to see women who worked for pay as "the enemy," regardless of whether those women were feminists or not." page 105

      "Homemakers not only lost a lot of status in the course of the decade preceding the ERA struggle, they lost a number of their traditional protections as well. . . . .

      The old common-law contract between the sexes held that if a woman did the housework, raised the children, and obeyed her husband, he had to support her. As we have seen, this contract had little practical force, but the ERA would have undermined its symbolic force as well." page 108

      "The American brand of interest group politics has trouble creating what economists call "public goods." A public good is the kind of good - like national defense, clean air, or an open park - that, once available to anyone, will be available to everyone. An individual good, in contrast, can be divided up and distributed to those who are willing to pay for it. Because public goods cannot be sold to individuals on a fee-for-service basis, organizations that provide them have three choices. The most effective is to force individuals to contribute. [follows the example of union shops] . . . .

      If an organization has no effective means of coercion at its disposal, it can try to link the public good to an individual good. [follows the example of the AARP selling insurance and other benefits]. . . .

      Finally, an organization seeking to produce public goods can rely on moral exhortation. It can claim that people ought to spend their time and energy promoting a public good because it is right and will benefit many others. . . . . Organizations that depend on such devotion usually have a capricious, undependable membership." pages 118 - 119

      "The strength or weakness of a group's organizational base usually translates into political strength or weakness." page 120

      "A number of feminist lawyers believed after 1978 that the ERA was a lost cause in the states and a minimal addition to constitutional protections. They therefore placed little weight on the way their actions might affect the political fortunes of the ERA." page 132

      "STOP ERA was able to overcome some of the problems of participatory decentralization by accepting, at least in theory, a relatively hierarchical chain of command centering on one person - Phyllis Schlafly - without whom the opposition would probably not have been able to prevent ratification." page 133

      "Local ERA efforts could not generate their own, for example, the much desired "list of laws the ERA would change. " " page 138

      ". . . .although resources were limited, resources were not the main problem. The national pro-ERA organizations could have found the monetary resources and legal talent to produce up-to-date information on the practical effects of the ERA if they had been a high priority for them. it never became a priority because the meager results would almost certainly have hurt the cause more than they helped it. Without such a list, most activists remained convinced that the ERA would produce major substantive results." pages 141 - 142

      "For the opposition, as for the proponents, the ERA's main significance was symbolic." page 143

      "The same reporter spoke to a pro-ERA activist who recalled investigating a claim made by Mary Hober, a Wake Up vice-president, that women in a Bechtel /corporation mining camp in Montana were forced to use the same bathroom as men because of that state's ERA. According to the ERA activist,

I got letters from the company's lawyer and from the Human Rights Commission in Helena, Montana, saying that this never happened. Not only was there no common toilet at the camp, there weren't even any women at the camp. I showed Mary Hober one of the letters at a debate one night. She said she was interested and wanted a copy. Then the next day on radio she repeated the very same claim.

      "In debate, opponents frustrated speakers with their "homey" approach to issuers. Carol Bellamy, then a New York State senator, recalled on of the Wake Up leaders telling "the audience forty-seven terrible things the ERA would do, and when you answered the and proved her wrong, she'd say, "I'm just a housewife - how do I know?" Then she'd turn around and repeat them all over again." page 145

      "Why should activists whose avowed purpose was to pass or defeat a piece of legislation behave in ways that so many legislators regarded as foolish? One answer is that the alternative was very difficult and potentially costly. Predicting the substantive effects of the ERA was a difficult, time-consuming task, requiring a relatively dispassionate analysis of the issue. Those in a position to perform the task seldom knew exactly what the result would be, but they knew enough to see that dissemination such information to activists would be risky, since it would probably convince a lot of activists that they were wasting their time. The benefits of taking this risk were far fro obvious, since only a small minority of legislators seemed to care about the Amendment's likely effects.

      However, at a more fundamental level, activists' ignorance about the substantive effects of the ERA was probably an almost inevitable by-product of the way in which they were recruited to the struggle. Because the ERA was a public good, the struggle attracted volunteers with strong ideological preconceptions about its merits and demerits." page 147

      "The state legislators who voted down the Equal Rights Amendment in Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Illinois ran the gamut from an unbudgeable coterie of far-right bigots through what I have called "mainstream" conservative legislators, usually male, who were not opposed to "equal rights" in principle but were opposed to almost any major substantive change in either the position of women or in other aspects of American life." page 149

      "Nonetheless, state legislators are structurally better placed than almost anyone else to understand how their constituents' views apply to particular matters of policy. As a consequence, activists ought to listen to legislators more carefully than they usually do." page 150

      "In 1976, for example, less than 20 percent of the American public knew both whether the legislature in their own state had considered the ERA and, if so, whether the Amendment had passed or failed. . . . .

      The voters' ignorance was combined with their unwillingness to let the ERA influence their choices in statewide elections. . . . . .This combination of ignorance and apathy led many legislators to conclude that "the citizens don't give a hoot about the ERA." " page 153 - 154

      "Because the legislator's constituents were unlikely to vote for or against them on the basis of their stands on the ERA, constituent opinion on this issue was less important to them than the opinion of party leaders and major campaign contributors." page 154

      "Beyond party, legislators must look to the interests that contribute most to their election campaigns. Local business interests usually make the steadiest contributions to a legislator's reelection campaign fund, while unions and professional organizations contribute to a lesser degree." page 155

      "Probably the most important problem lay in the perception of legislators that the proponents' organizations were ephemeral while the opponents' organizations were enduring." page 158

      "In 1972, when the ERA first came to the states, there was no strong national organization dedicated solely, or even primarily to ratification. In most states, ERA supporters had no full-time lobbyist, though lobbyists from several groups did what they could without making the Amendment their primary concern." page 159

      "Inexperience within the legislature worked against the ERA s much as inexperience without." page 160

      "The overall effect of all this effort was that the mainstream legislator in the average wavering state could end this ten-year period caring as little for the ERA as when he began, not having learned much about what the ERA could actually do, still as opposed as ever to significant changes in men's and women's roles, aware as always of local business support for generally conservative politics, and increasingly conscious of the political potential of his right-wing fundamentalist constituents." page 163

      around page 173 long discussion about how organizations form - that their membership is self-selecting and therefore generally fairly homogenous (If someone doesn't like the organization they don't try to change it, they leave.)

      "Neither the media, the American public, nor most legislators were aware that most of the women who demonstrated against the ERA at state capitols around the country in the last years of the ERA struggle were fundamentalists brought by their pastors." page 175

      "Fundamentalist church women also provided the bulk of the activists who attended STOP ERA demonstrations in the other unratified states on which I was able to gather information.

      The organizational base in church groups that developed about halfway through the ERA campaign gave the opposition an advantage in perceived longevity, at least among legislators who were aware of it, because these groups were all local and relatively stable." page 176

      " . . . because the ratification campaign raised consciousness, helped women organize politically, and stimulated legislative and judicial action, that campaign was worth the effort put into it.

      Although the ERA provoked little informed debate or subtle debate regarding its own impact, it did foster discussion of women's issues more generally. . . . .In the ten years that the ERA was before the states, ways of life that had never been questioned became issues on which women took a stand. Personal transformations took place in the heartland, even as feminists on the East and West Coasts imagined that the "women's movement" had died. In the middle part of the country, political work for the ERA kept upsetting the old order.

      The ERA ratification campaign brought many women on the Left and the Right into active politics for the first time in their lives. . . .

      The attempt to put an ERA in the Constitution also produced important changes in political and judicial practice. . . .

      On the state level, the campaign's impact varied greatly from one state to another. In many states, adopting a state ERA, or sometimes even ratifying the federal ERA, led the legislators to review state laws and rewrite them in "gender-neutral" form.. . . .The process raised the legislators' consciousness of women's problems, and usually helped women in substantive ways as well." pages 188 - 189

      "The struggle over the ERA also coincided with, and probably helped cause, a marked increase both in the number of women deciding to run for legislative office and in the likelihood of their making "women's issues" prominent in their campaigns and on their legislative agendas." page 190

      "The campaign had costs, but they were not excessive. Because the ratification campaign lost, feminists perhaps lost some political credibility." page 190

      "The major lesson of this book, which applies not only to women's groups but to all volunteers who work for a political cause, is that the very structure of a voluntary organization tends to produce an inability to hear or understand what others are saying. . . . .

      This book has shown how volunteer activity encourages ideological purity and allows individuals to make choices for which they are not accountable. It also has shown how decisions by accretion accentuate the impact of unconscious assumptions." page 191

      "Committed activists also need to question their almost automatic rejection of the muddle thinking and compromises that characterize mainstream discussion of most issues. The muffled middle is often muddled, not because it is composed of morons, lunatics, or unprincipled opportunists but because it is composed of people trying to reconcile conflicting principles and commitments that are all quite legitimate." page 192

      "Since about 1980, as more women have experienced the results of gender-neutral legislation like no-fault divorce laws and joint custody, some feminists have begun to articulate a critique of egalitarianism that looks much like Marx's critique of bourgeois equality. They argue that in a society where one group holds most of the power, "neutral" laws usually benefit the powerful group." page 196

      "The political death of the ERA has in fact corresponded with a flowering in feminist thought. The renaissance had many causes. With the ERA struggle over, feminists may no longer have felt obliged to present a united front. . . ." page 197

      "While trying to rethink the question of what will really benefit women, feminists could turn, [politically, to more immediate, concrete matters: reforms in the divorce codes to provide better maintenance for divorced homemakers, adequate welfare for the many women who do not have enough income to support themselves and their children, good and affordable child care, stronger criminal assault laws, enforcement of existing equal pay laws, and protection for besieged abortion clinics, for example." page 197

      "As for the ERA itself, proponents have two choices. The first is to cleave to a pure, egalitarian ERA, and to create for it an uncompromising legislative history. . . .
      The second choice is to accept the Republican amendments to the ERA. . . .
      If the choice now is between no ERA and an ERA with amendments, purity seems to me better than compromise. In ten or twenty years, full equality for women may not seem so threatening." page 198

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