Movement Against Equal Rights Amendment
As a member of STOP ERA, Carol Anderson would not support the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Anderson chose this position because, as a housewife, Carol believed that her privileges were already protected by the law. Moreover, STOP ERA was an important movement opposing the ratification of ERA. Women were already protected by the laws of the time, according to the campaign, and making the ERA gender-neutral would rob women of their specific rights and benefits (Napikoski, 2021). Thus, Carol Anderson did not believe that she needed equal rights protection and legal authority to have the privileges that men in America had prior to the 1970s.
The 14th Amendment ensures that all people are afforded the same level of legal protection. The 14th Amendment has never been read to make sex a suspect categorization. The ERA would make sex a questionable categorization that would be subject to the strictest judicial examination. Without the ERA in the Constitution, the legislation and case law that have resulted in significant advancements in women’s rights since the mid-nineteenth century risk being disregarded, diminished, or even reversed. Discrimination on the basis of race or national origin is prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination on the grounds of sex, as well as race, was prohibited in hiring, promoting, and dismissing under the terms of this civil rights legislation. Thus, the Civil Rights Act focused primarily on the issue of ethnicity as opposed to gender or other quality of a person, unlike ERA. ERA had several benefits for women; under this legislation, women must be treated equally in all 50 states’ legal systems. The cons of ERA include a society without traditional gender roles and issues with filing for alimony and child custody.
Reference
Napikoski, L. (2021). Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign against women’s equality. ThoughtCo. Web.