The Unmaking of an Amendment

If we do not win in Florida, the effect on the balance of the states will be terrible.

--Midge Costanza, women's rights assistant to President Carter

Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment had long counted on Florida as one of the last three states needed to ratify the amendment. But they were in for a rude shock. Last week, after an emotional four-hour session, the Florida senate voted, 21-19, to defeat the ERA. Said a stunned ERA advocate: "I hope to God it isn't over."

But it just may be. Despite a promising start (in which 33 states ratified the amendment within three years after it was passed by the U.S. Senate in 1972), just two states--North Dakota and Indiana--have approved the amendment since February 1975. Only 38 are needed to make the ERA the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. But strong opposition exists in the remaining 15 states, and less than two years remains until March 22, 1979--the end of the seven years allowed for ratification by three-quarters of the states.

Homemade Bread. A major reason for the faltering pace of the ERA drive is the mixed reaction from those who might be expected to give strong support to an amendment guaranteeing the equality of women: females. A 1976 poll showed that while 59% of adult males supported the ERA, only 55% of the women favored it. The division among women has made it easier for state legislators, many of whom are older, conservative males, to vote their predilections--or, as one battle-weary activist put it, "their instincts." Some 62% of Florida voters favored the ERA, according to a survey by Jimmy Carter's pollster, Pat Caddell; yet even that margin was not sufficient to sway enough members of Florida's senate. Like legislators elsewhere, some were impressed more by the viewpoint espoused in the road-show tactics of Phyllis Schlafly, an Alton, Ill., housewife and an active Republican, who wrote the right-wing treatise on Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy, A Choice Not an Echo. Wearing long, formal dresses, members of her "Stop ERA" brigades have descended on legislators, bearing gifts of homemade bread "from the breadmakers to the breadwinners." Says Schlafly: "Women already enjoy superior rights." Her followers agree so strongly that they announced a boycott of Girl Scout cookies after the national Girl Scout organization endorsed the ERA earlier this year. ERA supporters have attempted to counter the Schlafly crusade by sending their own homemade cakes to the legislators.

But the most effective tactic of the opponents is the misleading rhetoric that they have used to cloud the issues. The 52 words of the amendment add up to a simple statement that equality of rights shall not be denied by government on the basis of sex. But in Florida, as elsewhere, opponents claimed that the ERA would force the legalization of homosexual marriage, end the support of wives by their husbands, and require use of the same public toilets by men and women. With scant effect, legal experts insist that the ERA requires none of these measures.

There are, of course, valid questions to be raised about the ERA'S impact. Among these: the status of women should the U.S. resume a military draft, the fate of laws that limit demands on the physical strength of women laborers, and the future of previously all-male sports like football at public schools. But in Florida, as in other states where the ERA has lost, the phantom issues, not the realities, carried the day. Complains the chairwoman of Georgia's ERA Council, Dotsie Holmes: "The legislators are all too willing to succumb to the hysterical group of women who go down to the statehouse screaming, 'Please don't make me equal!' " So successful was this kind of opposition in Florida that even last-minute telephone calls by Betty Ford, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were of no avail. Florida's former Miss America, Anita Bryant, took time out from her campaign against gays to oppose the ERA; she was more successful than Valerie Harper, television's Rhoda, who campaigned for the ERA.

Senator Lori Wilson, sponsor of the Florida ERA resolution, blamed defeat on the good old boy image in Southern life. The good old boy, she said, stubbornly fought against change, opposing to the last women's right to vote and black civil rights. As she spoke in the Florida senate of "the same old Southern trail which leads nowhere," sardonic cheering broke out in the gallery among ERA opponents, who were dressed in red. Pro-ERA women, dressed in green, were silent. Said Wilson: "I'm embarrassed for the South."

Indeed, Southern conservatism is now the major obstacle to passage of the amendment. Two-thirds of the states that have refused to ratify the ERA are in the South--which still proclaims the romantic ideal of womanhood, and where resentment continues to fester over civil rights laws and constitutional amendments passed almost a century ago. As the Rev. Bob Clark, a fundamentalist pastor, thundered during a Florida radio talk show: "Section 2 [of the ERA] says the Congress shall have the power to enforce the article. There's Big Daddy Fed again... When you start getting the Federal Government in on it, that's where the trouble begins."

Despite their discouraging defeat in Florida, ERA supporters are resolutely making plans for this year's campaign in South Carolina, where a senate vote is expected within several weeks. Yet ERA has lost in that state twice before, and local politicians believe the measure cannot clear both the house and senate during the current session. Looking further ahead, ERAmerica, the group coordinating the ratification drive, hopes to defeat key opponents during the 1978 state-legislature elections--a tactic that could produce some last-minute ratifications early in 1979. Sympathetic groups like the National Education Association have announced they will not schedule conventions in states that have not passed the ERA. Proclaims NOW Founder Betty Friedan: "I say to the women of America, we gotta stop being so ladylike." Florida legislators were quick to laugh off the threatened boycott of the state's tourist industry. As one state senator put it: "We got oceans, white sand, orange juice and Anita Bryant, and that's enough for me."

Rescinding Support. ERA'S chances are also clouded by a legal question that has not been answered. After approving the ERA, three states--Tennessee, Nebraska and Idaho--voted to rescind their support, and similar measures are awaiting action in six states. Legal experts disagree on whether the Congress or the courts will accept such rescissions. If they do, ERA would need ratification by at least six additional states, which would probably prove impossible to get.

However long the odds, supporters have pledged to continue their struggle. They are certain that time is on their side. It was only 58 years ago, they note, that the Florida senate refused to endorse what has since become the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. One of the main arguments against the amendment at that time: "No moral man would marry a woman who votes."

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