Housewives 1, Feminists 0: divided over women's rights, the two sides waged a battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.

• Author: Price, Sean
• Position: Times past

On June 30, 1982, Phyllis Schlafly threw one very big party. She and more than 1,400 other conservatives in Washington popped corks, sang songs, and danced on the grave of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

The clock had run out on having sexual equality spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. Schlafly, a conservative activist, wanted the world to know, saying the ERA "is dead now and forever in this century.... We won, and it really wasn't even close."

Her boast was only half right. The ERA actually failed by a close margin, just 3 states short of the 38 needed for ratification. It would have been the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, ensuring that "we the people" included both men and women in all legal matters.

Friend and foe alike credited Schlafly with stopping the ERA. Nobody could dispute that she had outdueled the feminists in their 10-year battle. Though the amendment failed, the high-profile fight led to changes seen today.

THE LIBERATION MOVEMENT

The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923, three years after women earned the right to vote. It lay dormant until the women's liberation movement was sparked in 1963 by Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan argued that for too long women had been confined to one ambition in life: being the perfect wife and mother.

They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights.... All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

Friedan and other feminists wanted to expand those ambitions, to be on equal footing with men. To do so, they launched the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 and demanded legal equality. They sought to prevent discrimination based on gender in areas including college admissions, sports participation, sexual harassment, and personal salaries (see "Dollar Divide," page 28). Their main tool was the ERA, which read:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

The ERA faced rigorous requirements before it could become law. Under the Constitution, any amendment must pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds vote. It must then be ratified by three fourths of the...