Democrats are attempting to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in Arizona

Democrats at the Arizona Legislature are attempting to make our state the latest to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

It’s an effort that goes back to the 1920s, passed Congress in the 1970s and stalled in the years after that. In order to become the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it would need to be ratified by 38 states.

That happened just a few years ago when Virginia ratified it in 2020. But there is still legal opposition to the official adoption to the ERA.

Mako Ward joined The Show to explain where it stands now — and what efforts to continue to pass it still mean today. Ward is an assistant professor of African American and Women and Gender Studies in Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation.

Full conversation

MAKO WARD: I think the ERA was and continues to be part of the long history of civil rights in the United States. It was first drafted in 1923 by suffragist Alice Paul. And Paul and other suffragists, other women's rights activists, really believed that the right to vote, which was the 19th, is the 19th Amendment that passed in 1920, that the right to vote was just the first step.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

WARD: And there needed to be full legal equality under the law that required constitutional protection, right. And it wasn't until 1972, after the amendment passed with the two-thirds majority in both chambers of the Congress, that it was sent to the states. And 30 states chose to ratify the legislation. And by 1978, 35 states had ratified the legislation.

And that was just shy of the required 38, 38 states need to ratify.

GILGER: Going way back in American history here, the 38 states. But something kind of shifted as the states were kind of tasked with this final step of ratifying it, right.

WARD: Right. So in 1979, Congress set a deadline for the states to finally ratify. But what we know to be true is that there's no deadline stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. But to the point Congress set a deadline, 1979, President Jimmy Carter extended that deadline to 1982. And it was between 2007 and 2020 that the additional three states ratified the amendment, bringing us to the threshold in 2020, it was Virginia.

So the 38-state threshold for the ERA to become a constitutional amendment passed.

GILGER: It's almost a 100-year process right there.

WARD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

GILGER: But it's still not in place because of various legal challenges. Where does it stand today?

WARD: So I think the political issue right now is that the congressional deadline and the extension have passed. And so there's that contention. So in 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, they ruled that the congressional deadline was legally binding.

GILGER: Sure.

WARD: So that's the sort of really specific pie that's holding things up. The other interesting piece to this is the role of the U.S. archivist. And the U.S. archivist functions to certify that the amendment is part of the Constitution. Yeah, the archivist, it's a non-partisan appointed position. Last March, our current president fired then archivist, Dr. Colleen Shogan, and appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the acting archivist. So that move can be interpreted as inevitably turning the position into a more partisan, heated political position.

GILGER: So various reasons why the ERA is still not official constitutional law in the United States of America in 2026. What would it mean at this point if it were to pass these legal thresholds, actually, you know, become a part of the Constitution to you? What would it mean, you think, in the course of women's rights history in this era.

WARD: It just, it resonates beyond these sort of congressional and constitutional technicalities. It would enshrine a constitutional guarantee of gender equality, something that is not explicitly present in our original Constitution. It would also guarantee equal rights under the law for all persons, regardless of sex. So my earlier point about the ERA being part of a longer civil rights history, I do think it's really important to reframe our conversations.

While the ERA is rooted in the movement for women's rights in the U.S., what we know to be true about that movement is that it has always historically been intersectional, meaning it has always had points of relationality and connection to the civil rights movement. And so I choose to sort of frame these moves towards equal protection under the law, whether it's around gender or around racial identity or other forms of difference.

These are all part of a longer history of civil rights in the United States. And so to guarantee equal rights under the law, regardless of sex, means that we would expand constitutional protections for not only women, but members of the LGBTQIA community, specifically people who identify as non-binary or transgender.

GILGER: Right. So the question of identifying equal rights for gender is very different than it was, you know, in the '70s or in the 1920s when this was originally conceived. I wonder what you think that says about the broader conversation about what women's rights or the quote unquote women's rights movement even means in America today.

WARD: I think that the broader political climate really shows why the ERA is needed, right. The use of the power of the political sphere and the power of Congress to, for example, roll back funding for health care, to criminalize miscarriage care, to restrict voting access. What we are witnessing is the misuse of one of, at this point, I would argue, all branches of government in order to curtail or limit access to rights and curtail and limit the ability for all people residing here in the United States to receive protection under the Constitution.

So the ERA, I think, is one additional step among many towards ensuring that the U.S. Constitution does its job, which is protect the bodies and the bodily autonomy of all people here in the United States.

GILGER: It's so interesting because I think you're, that's the reason it's so political today, right. Like conservatives will say this is not about women's rights, it's about abortion or LGBTQ rights or things that are not explicitly said here. And it sounds like you agree it is.

WARD: I would argue that it is about the equal protection of all people under the law, under the greatest law of the land, which is the U.S. Constitution.

GILGER: Right. So that's interesting because a lot of the argument about this right now will say we just don't need this anymore. Like there are lots of other laws that protect women's rights. Like, this is unnecessary.

WARD: Right.

GILGER: So what would you like to see happen at this moment, like Arizona and local kind of Democratic leaders here making an effort to ratify the ERA, even though, you know, the 38 states have done it. Is that just symbolic to you? Do you think it would mean something?

WARD: I think we're at a point where it's both and you know, as states continue the momentum towards ratifying the ERA, because I do think it is, it is more than symbolic. It is a structural demonstration that state legislatures have the power to protect their citizens' rights and to protect the civil and equal rights of their citizenry.

But it also requires a move on the part of Congress to make a decision about whether or not they have the power to create deadlines.

GILGER: Right.

WARD: So last year, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced, or I should say reintroduced, a joint resolution to remove this arbitrary deadline that was imposed on the ERA. So it is a both. And the kind of organizing that's happening at the state level needs to continue to, because it demonstrates the power of the states.

But we also need Congress to do its job, which is to, in this case, create a kind of boundary around its own powers and its own ability to adequately and ethically interpret the U.S. Constitution through the passage of law.