First proposed in 1923 and reintroduced in 1972 during the heyday of the Woman's Liberation movement, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) failed to pass the various tests mandatory for ratification (Schlafly, 2007). While claiming to benefit women, the ERA would actually, if ratified, have had negative effects on the lives of American women and would even have taken away some of the rights that women have gained over the course of American history. This essay will examine two of these arguments, advancing the idea that women's rights are sufficiently protected by the Constitution of the United States and relevant statutes at the federal and state levels.
As now constituted, the law of the country requires married men to support their wives and children and men who are fathers of children with women to whom they are not married to provide financial support for their children. If the ERA were passed, many of these statutes would have been vulnerable to judicial re-interpretation. While it is possible that fathers of minor, dependent children would have continued to be held responsible for a portion of their support, women undergoing a divorce could not have expected alimony from their husbands or had the right to sue a spouse who did not meet his financial obligations. This could have resulted in the greater impoverishment of divorced women, which in turn would have hampered their ability to care for their dependent children.
A second reason to oppose the ERA is that by giving women putatively "equal status" with their male counterparts, women could become equally likely to be sent into military combat positions for which they may or may not be suited and which they may or in which they may not wish to serve. While it is true that the United States no longer maintains a military draft and has an all-volunteer military, the draft could be reinstituted at any given time when national crises emerge. Should women have "equal ...