Pass the Equal Rights Amendment Now.
[ERA]. Pollitzer, Anita. “Pass the Equal Rights Amendment Now.” [Washington, D.C.: National Woman’s Party, 1937].
Broadside, 9 x 12”; both sides printed; light horizontal crease from folding.
Reprints Pollitzer’s arguments for an equal rights amendment, from the May 15, 1937 issue of Equal Rights, the organ of the National Woman’s Party. The verso reproduces the amendment itself, along with its history in Congress, and subscription information for Equal Rights. While suffrage leaflets and broadsides were widely distributed, ERA material is far scarcer due in part to the fact that the audience was limited by the efforts of activists like Florence Kelley, who opposed the ERA on the grounds that it detracted from their efforts to enact protective legislation for women and children.
Pollitzer here addresses those who oppose the ERA in favor of state legislation, sketching the history of the amendment process, explaining its benefits—speed, universality, and permanence—and detailing specific instances in recent history when the state-by-state reform method failed to advance the cause of female equality; in part:
There are over one thousand discriminations against women in the laws of this country today. They vary in every state. In no state do women have equal rights under law. Married women in almost one-half of the states are under disabilities limiting their power to contract or to carry on a business. In more than one-third of the states the rights of mothers over their children are inferior to the rights of fathers in some respects. In twenty-five states women are barred from jury service. There are grave differences in the rights of men and women to work at certain occupations and there are many inequalities against women’s right to earn…If equality is gained point by point—gains made by one legislature can be overturned by a succeeding legislature…The proposed Amendment states a principle. Our Constitution is the place for general principles…
Though she argues cogently and offers ample supporting evidence, she is most eloquent in quoting John Stuart Mill’s 1885 tract, “The Subjection of Women”:
The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
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