Synopsis
Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the equal rights of women belonged in the Constitution. She stood on the shoulders of brilliant women who persisted across generations to change the Constitution. We the Women tells their stories, showing what’s at stake in the current battle for the Equal Rights Amendment.
The year 2020 marks the centennial the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. But have we come far enough?
After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, revolutionary women demanded full equality beyond suffrage, by proposing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Congress took almost fifty years to adopt it in 1972, and the states took almost as long to ratify it. In January 2020, Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the amendment.
Why did the ERA take so long? Is it too late to add it to the Constitution? And what could it do for women?
A leading legal scholar tells the story of the ERA through the voices of the bold women lawmakers who created it. They faced opposition and subterfuge at every turn, but they kept the ERA alive. And, despite significant victories by women lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the achievements of gender equality have fallen short, especially for working mothers and women of color. Julie Suk excavates the ERA’s past to guide its future, explaining how the ERA can address hot-button issues such as pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay.
The rise of movements like the Women’s March and #MeToo have ignited women across the country. Unstoppable women are winning elections, challenging male abuses of power, and changing the law to support working families. Can they add the ERA to the Constitution and improve American democracy?
We the Women shows how the founding mothers of the ERA and the forgotten mothers of all our children have transformed our living Constitution for the better.
About the Author
Julie C. Suk is a a professor of sociology, political science, and liberal Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she also serves as the academic dean overseeing the Graduate Center’s interdisciplinary master’s programs. She is also the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and has been a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome. She has a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she studied on a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and a D.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, where she held a Marshall Scholarship.
Suk is a frequent commentator in the media on legal issues affecting women, including, most recently, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, PBS, CBS, and other media outlets. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles about women and the law.
She lives in New York City.
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