Equal Rights Amendment – 21 March 1975

Five years ago, a young couple got married in New Jersey. She was a school teacher, and after they were married, she went on with her job and earned $10,000 a year, which is roughly, for simplicity, let's say £4,000.

Her husband, describing himself as a consultant, self-employed, which could mean anything from a press agent, or a man dabbling in publicity for anybody who'd take him, a man hoping to come up with a better hair pin or a mousetrap. Anyway, there it is. A consultant. He made never much more than a thousand pounds a year. So, two years go by, and she's about to have a baby, in fact, she dies in childbirth. The baby survives and is now a healthy three-year-old. Now, under the Social Security law, the widow of a man who has fathered any children by her may claim and get something called Survivor's Benefits. This provision was enacted into the Social Security Act thirty-six years ago. However, here we had a widower with a child and suddenly five-sixths of the family's income has vanished. So he applied for Survivor's Benefits. What the courts gave him was money for the child, but none for himself. They told him, correctly, that the law allowed Survivor's Benefits for a widow but not for a widower. Well, he appealed to a district court – a federal court, since he argued his case on constitutional grounds, namely on the guarantee given in the constitution that every citizen shall receive the equal protection of the laws. The district court said he was right and the opposing lawyers eventually brought it up for final jurisdiction to the Supreme Court of the United States. And, a few days ago, the court ruled, and unanimously, that the widower has just as much right to Survivor's Benefits as a widow. And so it struck down the thirty-six-year-old provision of the Social Security Act.

There was a moment of jubilation among the founding members of a new and growing group called Male Liberationists, and, at first glance, it does seem as if the court was saying that it was time to assert the equality of men in those delicate matters, and maybe they are few and far between, where the law runs in favour of women. But that was not the argument of Justice Brennan, who wrote the opinion of the court. He gave it a pretty twist by making the argument turn on the right of women to be regarded as equal breadwinners. He said, the constitution will not tolerate – I ought to say it has very blandly tolerated till now – the constitution 'will not tolerate the assumption in the Social Security law that male workers' earnings are vital to the support of their families, while the earnings of a female wage earner do not significantly contribute to the family's support'. So, in granting the widower money to take care of himself, as well as the baby, the court maintained that it was, in effect, striking a blow for women's rights. By the same reasoning, some months or maybe a year ago, the court wrote another Gilbertian line. It's always been accepted by American courts that if a woman were called for jury duty, she could be excused simply on the grounds that she was a housewife, much too busy by the nature of her God-given or man-made profession to help in the execution of the laws. In our fuzzy, old-fashioned language, we used to say that women had the right not to serve on juries. Well, now this right is being refused in the same breath that the courts say that they're asserting a woman's right to be the equal of a man. In other words, since a man cannot say he won't serve because he has to cook breakfast or stoke the furnace, she has an equal right not to be excused. It's clear from these recent cases, I think, that from now on the courts are going to give some surprising turns to the word 'right'. In the armed services, for instance, women have long been members of the navy, the air force and the army (I'm not sure about the marines), but always in jobs that the male of the species thought of as typically feminine chores – housekeeping, secretarial work, driving cars for generals and the like. 

A few months ago, a woman in the navy protested this domestic definition of her service and applied to go aboard an aircraft carrier as a full-fledged member of the crew. Apparently, she is the only one and, so far, no unbearable tension has been reported among the fifteen hundred-odd males aboard, though many men aboard and ashore must remember the case of the two girls, a year or so ago, who joined a carrier as crew, married on board, got pregnant – I hope I've got the sequence right – and then wanted to stay afloat with their babies. I don't know how it came out but, for sure, the babies are being taken care of on dry land. Fire women, too, they're something new, though in the prissy usage of our day they're now called firepersons. Have you noticed, by the way, that 'person' as a suffix is always used for a female, when you'd think 'woman' would be clearer? We used to call female members of Congress congresswomen. Now they are congresspersons and if they get to be the chairman of a committee, they are not called chairwoman but chairperson. I'm afraid that this ridiculous habit is here to stay because the test of any idiom's ability to general acceptance is whether or not the television commentators and newsreaders can make it stick. I'm sorry to tell you that men, and I mean men who'd normally use the language, if not with distinction at least with directness, are now coming on and saying without the flicker of an eyelash, or the hint of a chuckle, such things as chairperson and I heard the other night 'charperson' when it was clear as a bell that the person being described was a charwoman, certainly not a charman.

Well, on Long Island a few months ago, there was a brief uproar when a woman joined the fire brigade of a town and it came to the attention of the wives of the firemen that, like the rest of the crew, she was required, from time to time, to be on call through the night. 'On call' means sleeping in the firehouse, bunking down alongside the men. The men insisted that she was not a nuisance, a regular sport who played poker as well as the rest of them, and added a merely decorative note to the watches of the night. The wives, however, raised a rumpus, evidently subscribing to H.L. Mencken's famous dictum that at the end of one millennium and over nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakeable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgement of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser. Well, the uproar has died down and the wives have had to take it, simply, imposing a few requirements on the part of their husbands, such as specifying what time they clock out to go home and, themselves, setting an alarm so as to be able to calculate the time it takes the good man to get from the firehouse to his hearth and home.

Some time ago, the Congress acted in favour of a crusade that has been waged in this country for just about fifty years, namely a new constitutional amendment. You know that since this country has a written constitution and the job of the Supreme Court is to interpret this famous eighteenth-century document in terms of today's way of life and since it was granted from the very beginning that the constitution wasn't perfect, and might, from time to time, require new clauses, amendments, so the procedure is this. Any amendment proposed must be taken up by the proper committees of Congress and, if it's reported out to the floors of both Houses, it is then voted on. The usual procedure follows whereby if Congress passes the amendment by a two-thirds majority in both houses, it then goes to the fifty legislatures of the states. It comes into force automatically when three-fourths of the legislatures approve it, that's to say, today, the moment that the thirty-eighth state says 'so be it'. Well, the pending constitutional amendment, which would be the tnwety-seventh in this nation's history, is known officially as the Equal Rights Amendment. ERA. And, popularly, as the Women's Rights Amendment. It's agreeably brief. It says, 'Equality of rights, under the law, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex'. You'd think, if only going back to the little windfall that the widower from New Jersey has inherited, you'd think that the fourteenth amendment would be enough since it was the one that the Supreme Court acted on behalf of the man left with a child, and it says that neither the United States nor any state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any persons within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. That amendment, incidentally, was adopted in 1868. But women, and not only fervent Women's Rightists have maintained, with a lot of justice, that for at least the century since the fourteenth amendment was passed, the laws have not given women 'the equal protection of the law'. And there ought to be a new amendment making their equality more specific. 

Well, so far, thirty-four states have passed it. Only four more to go, but the remaining sixteen states seem, at the moment, to be pretty adamant. And a few states that have already passed it are talking about cancelling their adoption once they've seen where it might lead them. For instance, states in the South and the West which do a roaring business in quick and easy divorces have realised that the equality amendment could be cited to give equal treatment to a divorced husband, and give him the right to what has always been regarded in this country as a woman's right – to alimony. And this stimulates votes from some unlikely quarters. From the Male Liberationists, for instance, who love the idea that aggrieved husbands might soon come to live off the fat of a female fortune, as the women have been doing for so long off men, both rich and poor. 

Down from the southern mountains the other day came the old battleaxe, former Senator Sam Ervin, who conducted the first Senate Watergate hearings. He calls the new amendment 'an evil measure'. You cannot, he says, put equal responsibility on men for being 'mother' to children. His point is the existing laws, especially the fourteenth, are enough and that if the laws about divorce, child support, property rights, and so on, are transferred from the states to the Congress, chaos, as Othello said, will come again. He faced an audience of women wearing badges saying, 'Equal Rights – Yes', but also in the audience was a large bunch of women wearing badges saying, 'Stop Equal Rights'. They cheered him in unison, however, when he recalled the debates in Congress over the amendment and sorrowfully confessed, 'I could have found more intelligence in the most demented ward in any mental institution than I found in my time in the United States Senate'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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