Drafting the ERA
Plans to create an Equal Rights Amendment began in May 1921, and its first introduction into a session of Congress would come in December 1923. In between, a contentious back-and-forth dialogue unfolded as the NWP attempted to negotiate with various legal advisors and potential allies. At first, Alice Paul (who was leading the writing process) sought help from the leaders of multiple prominent political organizations, such as the National Consumers’ League (NCL) and the League of Women Voters (LWV). These important figures were mostly protectionists, many of them having been personally involved in crafting special protective labor laws for women, and as such they voiced concerns that an ERA would lead to legal challenges to those protections. Paul was receptive to this feedback, and over the course of the spring and summer of 1921, every draft revision included a “saving clause” at the end, which exempted certain categories of sex-specific legislation from the preceding obligation of equal rights. However, no consensus could be reached on how to word this clause without entirely defanging the amendment, and as progress stalled, Paul increasingly came to see the protective laws as more harm than good, because they ultimately justified gender inequality and thus legal deprivations as well. At a party meeting that November, the NWP decided to continue drafting the amendment without the saving clause. The protectionists quickly coordinated their opposition to the still-developing ERA, and as a result, the first decade of the ERA’s life in Congress consisted of six committee hearings that overwhelmingly favored the opposition, and no further progress was made on that front.
