When I was a teen in the ’70s, my mom, a divorcee, asked me, “Why are women’s feet smaller than men’s?” She’s a woman with a slightly twisted sense of humor and I didn’t even try to guess the punch line. “So they can stand closer to the kitchen sink,” she offered without missing a beat.
Of course, I laughed at her corny joke because, after all, I was a teenage guy and ’70s humor wasn’t quite as politically correct as it is today. She just sat there with a disapproving stare, you know, the look only moms can give.
I was taken aback to discover my mother had feminist thoughts. I teased her by saying, “Wow, mom, you’re a radical.”
I knew about the Women’s Liberation Movement, Ms. Magazine and the National Organization for Women, but up to this time, mom’s only visible sign of breaking norms was to occassionaly wear slacks.
The rest of the time, she was the typical devoted housewife and mother, wearing dresses every day, making sure meals were prepped and on the table when the hubby got home, etc.
I’m the oldest and only male among my siblings, which means I’m the big brother to five younger sisters. Mom proceeded to ask if I thought that my little sisters deserved more in life than to be barefoot and pregnant.
Being a single mother was most often beyond the limits of merely striving to survive. At many times, existence was hand-to-mouth, but mom didn’t complain much. She simply went about life, providing for us the best she could.
Mom was never really into the Feminist Movement during the ’60s. It was kind of a foreign, strange concept to the way she was raised. During her childhood, teens and early adulthood, Western women stayed “in their place,” which meant they mostly all tried to maintain the unrealistic middle American, June Cleaver, stay-at-home-housewife roles.
She was too young for the Rosie the Riveter, World War II brand of feminism, ignored first wave feminism in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and was too occupied with working low-paying jobs and raising six kids to concern herself with second wave (or radical) feminism through the ’60s and early ’70s.
The mindset for the uninformed, or the opposition to feminism, called anybody involved in the struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment militants or lesbians. I was among the former, although I didn’t burn my bra because I didn’t wear one. I would attend events, carry signs and shout with the rest of the radicals.
When House Joint Resolution No. 208, the ERA passed the U.S. Senate in 1972, there was guarded optimism that equality for women was within reach. But Article V rules of the Constitution put a seven-year limit on enacting an amendment and it must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
Any constitutional amendment can languish when thoughts and discussion leave the frontal lobe of democracy, and that’s what happened with 208 – it timed out.
In the years since the ERA slipped out of the priorities of most women’s libbers, it has been reintroduced in each of the ensuing Congresses. It surfaced again this year, when in March, it was re-introduced in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The Women’s Equality Amendment, formally named H.J. Res. 40 (the House version) and S.J. Res. 10 (the Senate version), will undoubtedly languish as their foremothers did. The language in the new and improved movement is nearly identical and relatively simple.
It asks for equal rights for women and men.
They will get shuffled from committee to committee until they are forgotten, as was 208.
The most redeeming aspect of the new introduction is that it has no expiration date on the package. History has proven that it will be set aside and forgotten, as has nearly every similar version since the ’20s, when the National Women’s Party dropped the original ERA in Congress’ laps.
My sisters are all career women, with families of their own. They have raised their children, and currently still are, to be feminist-minded, as our mother did when she finally made the shift from conservative to radical. I’ve raised my two sons to be socially sensitive to women’s needs.
Perhaps our children will one day be the new wave of feminists who realize how important equality for women, men, races and gender is by not letting the dream of the ERA be lost in committee.
Duke Rescola is a senior journalism major and the opinion editor for the Daily Forty-Niner.
