Republican Support for the ERA

The Equal Rights Amendment was originally drafted by suffragist Alice Paul, a women’s rights leader born in New Jersey who lived in New York and later in Washington, DC. She and other suffragists worked tirelessly on the ERA from the Sewell Belmont House in Washington DC immediately after the Suffrage Amendment was enshrined into the Constitution in August 1920.  The Sewell Belmont House is now a national monument surrounded by the Hart Senate Office Building.

Paul as the head of the National Women’s Party believed that the Nineteenth Amendment on suffrage would not ensure that women and men were treated equally under the law unless the Constitution explicitly prohibited sex discrimination.

Section One of the current ERA is modeled after the 19th Amendment and reads:   Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Sixty Years of Republican Support

  • In 1923, Daniel Anthony, a Republican congressman from Kansas and the nephew of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, introduced an Equal Rights Amendment; subsequent versions were introduced until 1971 when the House passed the ERA by 2/3rd vote followed by the Senate in 1972.
  • President Eisenhower publicly supported the Equal Rights Amendment, even going as far as to ask Congress to pass it in 1958, making him the first president to do so.
  • The Republican Party included support of the ERA in its platform beginning in 1940, renewing the plank every four years until 1980. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford all supported the ERA. President Roosevelt did not and President Truman supported the “concepts” of an equality amendment.
  • As the House Republican Minority Leader in 1970, Gerald Ford was instrumental in lining up signatures for a discharge petition that would require moving the ERA from the Judiciary Committee to the House floor for a vote. 
  • The 1970 discharge petition was introduced by Michigan Democrat Representative Martha Griffiths, a close colleague of Ford, at a time when both supported a bipartisan approach to passing legislation.
  • At the time, Representative Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York, was the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and refused to hold a hearing on the ERA for over 30 years.
  • With the support of Ford and other Republicans, the ERA discharge petition was signed by the needed number of representatives in 1970, and the Amendment was then passed in the next Congressional session by the House in 1971 and by the Senate in 1972 by the required two-thirds vote. 
  • During the 1970s’ successful ratification efforts, now President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford played a major role in efforts to put the ERA into the Constitution.
  • As First Lady of the United States, Betty Ford took her responsibilities and opportunities seriously. She carved out a role for herself that included advocating for the issues she cared about including breast cancer, alcohol and drug treatment and the ratification of the ERA.
  • White House photographer David Hume Kennerly took an iconic photograph of Mrs. Ford wearing a huge ERA button with her fingers crossed in early 1975, about nine months after she became first lady.
  • Linn’s Stamp News, an American weekly magazine for stamp collectors, recently went back to look at the correspondence at the time and recounted:
  • Congress had passed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would explicitly ban discrimination on the basis of sex and sent it to the states for ratification.
  • Audaciously, Betty Ford announced her support for the amendment and launched a public campaign to try to win its passage.
  • Within a few weeks, the White House mailbox at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., received more than 10,000 letters regarding the first lady’s stance. Of those, 7,645 were in favor of the ERA, and 3,165 were opposed.
  • After leaving the White House in January 1977, Betty Ford continued to make ratification of the ERA a priority. She supported the newly formed coalition ERAmerica; spoke at the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas; and worked for an extension of the ratification time limit in 1979, an arbitrary time limit set by Congress and later changed by Congress to June 30, 1982.

National Republican Support Shifts in the 1980’s

  • In 1980, as Ronald Reagan was nominated, the Republican platform dropped the ERA due to extremist pressure from the Party’s far right organizations and from businesses now fearful of the economic impact of the ERA. As Governor, Reagan expressed support the Equal Rights Amendment.
  • Betty Ford continued to fight for the ERA. She served as honorary co-chair of the NOW ERA Countdown Campaign with actor Alan Alda during the final year before the arbitrary time limit passed. Numerous Hollywood film celebrities and Broadway stars supported the ERA. They aired a television ad asking people to Help Pass ERA – including George Burns, Jean Stapleton, Mary Tyler Moore, Glenn Close and Meryl Streep along with dozens more. 
  • As Alan Alda said at the Washington, DC rally in front of the White House in 1982, “I don’t accept the ERA vote as a loss; we simply haven’t won yet.” This sentiment is shared by ERA supporters today and will be until the amendment is enshrined into the Constitution.

During the ERA campaigns of the 1980’s, many women shifted to the Democratic Party and away from the Republicans as the gender gap was reported in 1982 elections after the then ERA time limit passed and Republican opposition was made public.

Thirty-eight States Ratify by 2020

In 1992, the 27th Amendment on congressional compensation that first passed Congress in 1789 was ratified and enshrined into the Constitution 203 years after it was introduced.  This gave momentum to an ERA three state strategy focusing on states that had not yet ratified the ERA.  

In the mid 2010’s, Republican elected officials played a role in helping to secure the final three states needed to reach the three-fourths (38) needed for ratification. 

ERA supporters engaged in state legislative races and some ran for state House and Senate seats to secure support for ratification in state legislatures.  Nevada ratified the ERA In 2017, followed by Illinois in 2018. In 2020, Virginia ratified the Equal Rights Amendment and became the needed 38th state to meet the requirements of Article V of the Constitution.

Since the ERA was fully-ratified in 2020, bi-partisan legislatures of ratifying states, including California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, and Minnesota have passed resolutions affirming that the Equal Rights Amendment is valid as the 28th Amendment and that it should be certified and published as part of the Constitution.

Sources: National Women’s History Museum, Library of Congress, Eisenhower Library, Alice Paul Center, Civiced.org, National Archives, Linn’s Stamp News, University of South Carolina, Republican National Committee, Washington Post