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Women's Rights Amendment Research Paper

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Women’s Rights and The Constitution At the mark of the Seneca Falls Convention’s 75th anniversary, 1923, Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that called for a constitutional amendment that specifies equal rights of citizenship for women. The ERA, however, took half of a century to be passed by Congress for ratification, and this passage to the state legislatures is reflective of the period’s strengthened political demands of the women’s movement. Inspired by the concurrent Civil Rights Movement, sparked and moved by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the National Organization for Women (NOW), and rendered by the real economic and political advancement of American women, the ERA was able to launch a serious nationwide discussion for itself in 1972. The most significant contributing factor to the galvanization of ERA can be attributed to the Civil Rights Movement: “Nothing so paved the way for a new era of activism for …show more content…

The fact that the Civil Rights Movement occurred about a century after the Civil War indicates the difficulty of battling social injustice and reinforcing legal remedies. In the United States, the central ground for battling legal mandates has rested on the Constitution, and the issues of social injustice are never completely resolved without consulting the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is essentially a constitutional provision of political rights that cater to civil liberties—fundamental rights outside the governmental regulation. And in 1868, the Fourteenth amendment was passed as to reinforce the Bill of Rights and act as “a vehicle for the applications of the Bill of Rights to the states.” It also explicitly stated, “all people born in the United States [are] citizens of the United States” and prohibited “states from denying person the equal protection of the

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