Equal Rights hold-up

Programme recording incomplete

In Raleigh, North Carolina, there was a moving scene the other evening that could affect... I was going to say one half of the population of the United States, but really the entire population. 

The upper house of the North Carolina state legislature, its parliament if you like, the North Carolina Senate, was in a tense and wordy session. For days, senators had been wising and mustering whatever gifts of eloquence God had given them, on two sides of an issue that more and more musters the energies, we'd been told, of American women. It's known throughout this country as ERA. The Equal Rights Amendment. This is a new amendment to the constitution. 

Now since 1790, there have been only 26 amendments to the original constitution which came into effect on 4 March 1789. The first 10 amendments are known as the Bill of Rights and after that people found that life had changed, or their view of life, enough to suggest the need for new principles to be added to the old charter. Such as, for instance, the way a president and vice president are chosen, the abolition of slavery, the setting up, alas, of an income tax, giving the vote to women – that came in, as in Britain, at the end of the First World War. And so on. 

Well, this new amendment that's proposed is popularly thought of as giving women equal rights. That is a simple, but crucial, mistake. And we'll go into it in a minute. This is how it reads: ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.’ That's it. An astonishingly clear statement to come out of Washington. It adds that Congress has the power to enforce it by new laws and that the amendment shall come into effect two years after it has been ratified. 

Now, ratified, that is quite a different step from being passed by the Congress. Congress passed this amendment in March 1972, the house had passed it, it went up to the Senate - we're talking now, of course, about the federal government – the United States' Senate passed it by the thumping vote of 84 to 8, five years ago. However, the approval of Congress, no matter how enthusiastic, is not enough to bring a constitutional amendment into force. It's a serious business. 

Once engraved in the constitution, it takes a Herculean procedure to blot it out. It takes, in fact, another constitutional amendment to repeal the one that the country decides was a mistake, and this... this has only happened once in 200 years. And those of you who are not absolute and devout teetotallers will recall that it took 14 years to wipe out a catastrophic mistake, the mistake which even teetotallers now concede as that of the 18th Amendment, the one that, from 1919 on, banned the making, the selling, the transporting of alcoholic liquors. The so-called Prohibition Amendment. What that amendment did, instead of converting the United States into a pure and sober nation, turned it into a paradise for gangsters and excited a couple of generations that might never have drunk much at all. Excited them into hankering for the forbidden fruit. 

Well, as I say, it took another amendment to get rid of it. The 21st Amendment. All right now. To... to bring a new amendment into force throughout the whole nation, first Congress passes it. And that was done, as I say, to the Equal Rights Amendment five years ago but then it cannot come into effect until the legislatures of three-quarters of the states also pass it. That means it will take 38 States to approve. So far 35 States have said yes. We need another three for ratification. And, on the face of it, that doesn't sound too difficult. But it is. 

During those four years – years, years – all the states have had the opportunity to debate and to vote on it and the states that were hot for it passed it long ago. But there are, as you see, at the moment, 15 hold-outs and according to the original proposers of the amendment, it's going to be very tough to squeeze three more 'Yes' votes out of the adamant 15. 

North Carolina was looked on by this administration as a crucial test. It had been stubbornly against the amendment since its passage and if it could get through North Carolina, President Carter felt, at least two other states would throw in the sponge. He and his wife put in telephone calls and urged the two United States' senators from North Carolina to do all they could to urge the men and women they knew in the North Carolina Senate. So on Tuesday, after an emotional session in which both sides cited powerful arguments – I hear some ladies demanding to know what arguments could possibly be brought against their having equal rights – but as I hinted earlier, the amendment doesn't say it's about equal rights for women, it's about equal rights for men and women, and if we can just hold it for a minute, I'll try to say why the difference is both crucial and, for some people of both sexes, excruciating. 

On Tuesday evening, then, it came to the vote in North Carolina and it was defeated by 26 votes to 24. The North Carolina Senate immediately did something grimmer still. They, quite legally, voted by 27 to 21 not to bring the issue up again for two more years. Several states, by the way, have first defeated the amendment, then worked up a lot of support for it, heard it all over again and voted to pass it. 

Now, the effect of this clinching second vote was to dispose of any prospect that North Carolina, for one, would ever pass the amendment because the constitution says a proposed amendment has seven years in which to be debated and ratified by the states. And if, by that time, the amendment still lacks a three-quarters approval by the states, then its congressional approval lapses. To get anything like it, the Congress would have to start all over again. Well, to prevent that happening, the Equal Rights Amendment must get the votes of 38 states by March 1979. North Carolina has voted not even to discuss it again till then. So, if three other states come through with their approval in the next two years, North Carolina, we must presume, will be one state that bows its head and reluctantly obeys. 

Now why should any person, let alone 15 States, hold out against the obvious equity of the new amendment? It's crystal clear. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any state, on account of sex. Not an account of belonging to the female sex, the new amendment means to give men also rights once exclusively possessed by women. A lot of comfortable American women are against the amendment on the grounds that, if it passes, they could be called on to give alimony to divorced husbands who are needier than they are. The amendment also would require overhauling the labour laws in a lot of states, laws which may not say but imply that only men can be hired for some jobs: trucking, mining, construction, for instance. And only women for others. 

A couple of years ago, a woman wanted to be a jockey and threatened court action on the grounds of an amendment to the constitution that's been there since 1868. The famous 18th says, 'All citizens born or naturalised in the United States shall enjoy the equal protection of the laws'. She won her case. But, so far, no races. 

In fact, many appeals, especially from women and minorities – blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans – which would probably come to court on the basis of the new Equal Rights Amendment, have been argued successfully on the basis of the old 14th's equal protection of the laws. Many lawyers who are in the state legislatures have opposed the new amendment on the grounds that it's already covered by the 14th. However, in a nation of lawyers – never less than half the Congress is made up of them – there is enough experience of the ingenuity of human beings and the whimsicality of judges to know that in some court cases you can drive a freight train through the gap between the equal protection of the laws and equality of rights on account of sex. 

The day after North Carolina voted, the United States Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to strike a blow for the male of the species which, I should imagine, a year or two from now would have appealed to the new Equal Rights Amendment if it gets into the constitution. The case had to do with a widower from New York. He's retired. His wife worked as a secretary for 25 years in the New York public school system. She died, whereupon, he applied for her benefits under the social security law. She'd paid in full, down all the years, all the social security taxes that are regularly 'nicked' from your salary. There is, he maintained, rarely any difficulty when a widow applies for her dead husband's benefits. Women are not required to show that they were financially dependent on the husband. I suppose we've always assumed it was so. But men, to get their wives' benefits after death, had to prove that since their retirement they were dependent on their wives. The Supreme Court ruled that it should be equally easy for men, as for women, to collect the benefits of the dead spouse. 

One of the odd, but interesting, things about this case was that the plaintiff, the widower, was represented in court by Women's Libbers, by Women's Rights' advocates. They argued that because it's harder for a widower of a woman wage earner to get her benefits, the law thereby gives a woman wage earner less protection for her surviving family than is given to the children say of a dead male wage earner. Which figures. The Supreme Court gave a narrow majority, only five to four but the consensus is that the women's liberation argument was decisive. 

Well, I leave you with the kind of IQ test or game to dream up situations in life, situations of work, leisure, love, play... in which the new Equal Rights Amendment would lift men from servitude as much as it would lift women. There must be a lot of such situations, otherwise I don't think a poll, just published, would come up with its astonishing result: over the whole nation, only 51 per cent of American women are in favour of the Equal Rights Amendment but 63 per cent of the men.

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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