One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment; An Anthology, 1923-2023

December 13, 2023, marked the one-hundred-year anniversary of the ERA’s first introduction in Congress. The time is therefore ripe for revisiting how women across generations have argued that gender equality might reshape and reimagine our democracy.

In contrast to narratives that begin with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and then propel us forward to the 1970s, this edited collection of primary texts comprehensively surveys women’s arguments about the ERA from its inception through the present day. Together and apart, these texts reveal the nuanced, complicated, and sometimes contradictory ways that women have contemplated the question of whether we need the ERA. As this next generation forges ahead to keep the ERA alive, we are left to wonder: Will women remain divided on the ERA? Will it take another century to see it enshrined in the U.S. Constitution? The ERA debate, nevertheless, persists.

Melody Lehn is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her research on women’s rhetoric has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and several edited collections in political communication and rhetorical history.

Camille K. Lewis is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Furman University. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism (2007), is a scholarly attempt to stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. The story of that publication is available at The KB Journal.