Great Depression, New Deal, and WWII
The status of the ERA changed little throughout the 1920s, but the economic and social upheavals wrought by the Great Depression radically altered the political landscape for the amendment and its advocates. Early on, many people blamed women entering the workforce for causing the job shortage, and many public and private employers implemented policies that pushed women out of their employment, especially married women. Frustrated by the inability of protective laws to prevent the loss of their livelihoods, more women began to look for alternative ways to fight the discrimination that they faced. This led to increasing interest in the NWP, who often showed up to protest these policies as part of their new economic campaign that they began in the mid-1930s in order to increase awareness and gather support against this wave of scapegoating. When the New Deal instituted national labor regulations that only made distinctions along industry lines, the issue of special labor regulations for women became more or less a moot point. Furthermore, when the entry of the US into WWII brought both an influx of women into industrial labor, and the introduction into the public psyche of an iconic working woman as a cultural touchstone, there was a sharp shift away from questioning whether or not women were generally physically capable of doing more traditionally masculine lines of work. These factors all contributed to a small but growing support for the ERA over this period, and notably, from a more diverse pool of advocates, including multiple trade unions, as well as the NACW — represented personally by its first president, Mary Church Terrell, at congressional hearings in 1945 and 1948. This momentum eventually faltered under the weight of post-war conservatism, but these early decades of struggle laid important groundwork for the much more successful and inclusive movement that would follow it in the Civil Rights Era.
