Equal Rights Act

Visit the ERA's website to learn more, donate, or check out their activist toolkit including postcards, social media posts that you can share, whitepapers and more.

After more than a generation of significant advances for women, do we still need the Equal Rights Amendment? Yes, we absolutely do.

Legal sex discrimination is not yet a thing of the past, and the progress of the past 60 years is not irreversible. Remaining gender inequities result more from individual behavior and social practices than from legal discrimination, but all can be positively influenced by a strong message when the U.S. Constitution declares zero tolerance for any form of sex discrimination.

The reasons why we need the ERA are at one level philosophical and symbolic, and at another level very specific and practical.

The first — and still the only — right that the U.S. Constitution specifically affirms equally for women and men is the right to vote.

Equal rights activist Alice Paul first introduced the ERA in 1923 to expand the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to both genders. She understood the importance of constitutional protections for all citizens when she argued, "We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government."