Amending Nature: The Equal Rights Amendment and Gendered Citizenship in America, 1920-1963
This study illuminates the ideological contours of the conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. Through a careful analysis of correspondence, public and private utterances, congressional testimonies, and several court cases this study unearths the dueling civic ideologies rooted in the struggle: emancipationism and protectionism. Emancipationists supported the ERA as the necessary conclusion to the Nineteenth Amendment. In short, emancipationists believed that the ERA fulfilled America’s political aspirations, as the amendment would ensure that men and women citizens enjoyed the same basic legal standard. In contrast, protectionists opposed the ERA as a threat to sex-based legal distinctions. From the protectionist perspective, American society rightly affirmed the separate roles of men and women citizens by differentiation in law. In the end, emancipationists and protectionists held different interpretations of the relationship between gender and citizenship. Emancipationists insisted that American political ideals upheld the right of men and women to participate as citizens on the same terms while protectionists maintained that true sexual equity demanded that the law be free to treat citizens differently on account of sex.[i]
This study forcefully contends that the original ERA conflict established America’s gendered citizenship. The Nineteenth Amendment profoundly changed women’s relationship to the state. Yet, disparities in men and women’s positions persist to this day, because protectionists modernized the justification for sex-based differential treatment. Put simply, protectionists constructed a new way of understanding American citizenship that upheld the equity of separate standards for men and women citizens. In sum, protectionists successfully refashioned full citizenship status to include sex-specific standards; however, their triumph also created dual meanings for American citizenship that negated the doctrine of universal rights and responsibilities.
An exploration of the competing civic ideologies embedded in the ERA struggle also reveals the amendment’s potential to transcend conventional categories of political ideology. Before the 1970s, both the emancipationist and protectionist positions included pronounced conservative and liberal variations.[ii] For instance, those who adhered to the emancipationist position ranged from liberals such as feminist Emma Guffey Miller to conservatives such as influential Republican politician George Wharton Pepper. As well, those that followed the protectionist line of reasoning included New Deal liberals such as Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, as well as influential conservatives such as Senator Robert Taft (R-OH). In addition, women’s organizations that followed the maternalist reform tradition, such as the League of Women Voters (LWV), the National Consumers’ League (NCL), and the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) embraced protectionism during this period.[iii] Thus, liberals and conservatives were not always in direct opposition to one another when it came to the question of complete constitutional equality for men and women citizens. Furthermore, the dynamics of the ERA conflict before the 1970s shows that support for and opposition to the ERA are not positions that should be accepted as fundamentally conservative or liberal. Above all, at its core, the ERA struggle is best understood as a battle between two different interpretations of American citizenship, and not as a typical political fight between conservatives and liberals.
This study contains two main sections. The first section emphasizes the historical significance of the Nineteenth Amendment.[iv] It starts by showing that before 1920 political and legal authorities envisioned women’s citizenship as conditional and dependent upon their husband’s status.[v] When American legislators eventually voted to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, they were fundamentally displacing this traditional understanding of American citizenship that had given men authority over women in law and in custom. This development created a period of constitutional uncertainty regarding women’s legal status. Ultimately, this uncertainty impelled several prominent men and women, such as Roscoe Pound and Alice Paul, to consider drafting an additional amendment to clarify women’s standing in the post-suffrage era. Yet, the arduous drafting process produced two very different interpretations of American citizenship: emancipationism and protectionism. Most Americans sided with the protectionist position in the 1920s and early 1930s, as protectionists effectively updated the justification for sex-specific legal treatment. Overall, as this section conveys, the Nineteenth Amendment opened the door to complete constitutional sexual equality, but the protectionists slammed that door shut.
The second half of this study analyzes the changing dynamics of the original ERA conflict. To begin, this section reveals that more Americans came to embrace emancipationism amongst the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the political upheaval of World War II. In short, these events helped emancipationists create a considerable drive towards complete constitutional equality for men and women citizens. Even so, protectionists regained the dominant position in the post-war era, as the period’s emphasis on the traditionally ordered family produced a ripe environment for protectionists to reassert themselves. By the early 1960s, protectionists had subdued the emancipationist impulse with a series of measures such as the Women’s Status Bill, the Hayden rider, and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Through these measures, protectionists successfully advanced the contention that their position provided men and women citizens with the appropriate level of equality, which preserved women’s traditional right to special protection.
–Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.
[i] Following the lead of scholars Jane Sherron De Hart and Donald Matthews, I use the term “sex” to refer to the general anatomical differences between male and female persons. Additionally, I use the term “gender” to refer to the stereotypical behavior or personality traits a society assigns to men and women. During the original ERA conflict, both protectionists and emancipationists generally held that men and women were naturally different. Still emancipationists insisted that the natural differences between men and women did not preclude them from being held to the same basic legal standard. In contrast, protectionists maintained that stability in American society necessitated sex-specific legal treatment. Even so, both groups did not separate gender from sex during the original conflict. To this point, both groups held that anatomical differences naturally resulted in disparities between men and women with regard to their personalities and behaviors. Consequently, this study predominantly uses the term “sex” to explicate the arguments of both groups, as it is the term that best represents the contemporary views on the relationship between men and women that dominated the original ERA conflict. See Jane Sherron De Hart and Donald Matthews, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 30-32; and Rebecca DeWolf, “Amending Nature: The Equal Rights Amendment and Gendered Citizenship in America, 1920-1963,” (PhD diss., American University, Washington D.C., 2014), 11-23.
[ii] To be sure, by the mid-1970s, the ERA conflict had evolved to reflect what we now understand to be conventional political positions: liberals demanded equality between men and women while conservatives supported sex-specific standards that adhered to traditional views of gender differences. This development is due to an ideological shift that arose in the late 1960s, which transformed how people conceptualized the relationship between sex (anatomical differences between male and female persons) and gender (the stereotypical personality and behavioral traits a society attaches to men and women). Put simply, many intellectuals and activists came to view gender differences as culturally based, and not biologically determined. Furthermore, this ideological break separated gender from sex such that the stereotypical behavioral traits generally assigned to men and women were subsequently envisioned as socially created concepts, and not as essential products of nature. Most importantly, this new definition of gender theoretically expanded the position of women beyond predetermined roles like caregiver and homemaker. Eventually, this change encouraged most liberals to back the ERA as a way to secure social benefits for the male or female parent primarily responsible for childcare. As more liberals embraced emancipationism, the conservative wing of the protectionist position grew to take over the anti-ERA campaign effort. Altogether, then, the new conceptualization of the relationship between sex and gender enhanced the liberal aspects of emancipationism and the conservative aspects of protectionism. See Rebecca DeWolf, “Amending Nature: The Equal Rights Amendment and Gendered Citizenship in America, 1920-1963,” (PhD diss., American University, Washington D.C., 2014), 416-434.
[iii] A potent maternalist impulse shaped the contours of the protectionist ideology. Maternalism flourished around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in sum, it upheld the essential nature of women’s domestic roles and strongly associated women with children’s interest. Above all, for maternalists, motherhood embodied womanhood. In particular, liberal maternalists used the language of motherhood to justify women’s involvement in reform politics. See Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Toward Defining Maternalism in U.S. History,” Journal of Women’s History 5, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 110-113; Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Policies of Welfare States (New York: Routledge: 1993); and Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 19-23.
[iv]In assessing the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment, many scholars suggest that federal womansuffrage not only failed to uplift the status of women, but also, ironically, led to a decline in women’s political activism. Overall, the traditional narrative suggests that even after the Nineteenth Amendment, the American social and political systemcontinued to sustain a civic hierarchy based on sex, such that men enjoyed more access than women to political, legal, and economic power. Even though scholars are right to pinpoint the ways in which sex discrimination persisted after the Nineteenth Amendment, (and even up to this day), the traditional emphasis on failure tends to minimize, and even devalue, the historical significance of the Nineteenth Amendment. In contrast, this study highlights the destabilizing potential of the Nineteenth Amendment and its effects on the nature of American citizenship. Works that follow the traditional narrative, include, William O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); William Henry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Paula C. Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620-48; and, Gretchen Ritter, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
[v] The original conception of full American citizenship not only venerated masculine strength, but also upheld the common law tradition of domestic relations, or the doctrine known as coverture. This doctrine essentially submerged a woman’s civil identity into her husband’s identity. In general, American political and legal authorities presumed that the majority of women married. Coverture, then, also signifies the legal process by which unmarried women (femmes soles) became married women (femmes coverts). If a woman remained unmarried, authorities assumed that she was dependent on male relatives for economic support and political representation. While mid-nineteenth-century reforms had provided women with more control over their earnings and property, elements of coverture remained influential parts of the American legal tradition up until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. See DeWolf, “Amending Nature,” 35-84.