The 14th amendment - 5 October 1990

After about, oh, five or six years of reading and re-reading the same bed book or rather the same nine volumes of my favourite diarist, I've discovered a new sedative.

One of its advantages is it's so bulky and heavy that after about half an hour you fall asleep from sheer muscular exhaustion. This is an unexpected bonus to the fun and enlightenment I pick up from the text. It's nothing less than a bound volume of Punch, six months of the weekly issues.

I started a few months ago with January to June of 1919 and I intend to riffle through all the volumes that saw me out of my teens and into my 30s, the 20 years between the two great wars, when I was alive and sentient, during what Robert Graves, as the title of his splendid social history, called ominously, The Long Weekend.

Last night I found myself in April 1928 when my own interest in social history was confined to shocking my parents with a new pair of Oxford bags and enjoying the society of a girl who really knew how to Charleston. In April 1928 I came on a debate, two Parliamentary debates, two burning issues that were really inflaming the kingdom.

The first was a debate in the House of Lords on the Petroleum Amendments Bill. It was led by Lord Buckmaster, who assailed red and yellow petrol pumps of the most hideous kind that were, as he put it, disfiguring the countryside by oil advertisements. Lord Cecil went further than a resolution to confine them to the cities. He wanted petrol filling stations, these disgusting erections, to be abolished altogether. For the record, I ought to add, he didn't make it.

The second debate was in the House on something called the Representation of the People Bill and who do you suppose they were? Women, that's who. At that time, 1928, only 60 years ago, the only women who could vote were married or were women householders or university gradates. The new Bill would extend the vote to all women over 21, a move that Mr Churchill thought was unnatural.

One opponent had a theory about the preponderance of females over males in the population. It was usually attributed to the enormous casualties of the 1914-18 War, that Britain, 10 years later even, still suffered from two million surplus women.

His theory was that the higher an organism was developed in nature, that means Man, the harder it was to rear, harder than rearing lower primates, that means Woman. Up leapt the chief proponent of the Bill, the first woman Member of Parliament, a Virginian at that, Lady Astor. Not at all, she said, women's superior numbers were due to a fundamental law of nature, the survival of the fittest.

The Punch reporter commented that Lady Astor's ebullient feminism permeated the debate. She not only permeated, she dominated it, if you can allow the word dominate to apply to a woman. The opposition to the Bill, she said, was the diehards' swansong. She was right, the Bill passed.

All women over 21 were enfranchised and Nancy Astor's name passed into the history books along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Christabel Pankhurst, as a standard bearer in the long battle for women's equal rights. As usual we've forgotten, or never knew, the name of a New Zealand pioneer. New Zealand gave women a vote 35 years before Britain got around to it.

In the United States there is a long and honourable roll of embattled women who have tried and are still trying to make the phrase in the Constitution "the equal protection of the laws" apply to women in everything. You might say, looking at the famous Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution that the equal protection of women is already guaranteed.

It says – this was passed in 1868 – it's addressed to "all persons born or naturalised in the United States and citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".

I'd say that person means women too but evidently not all the courts have so judged. Consequently, in the early '70s the swelling feminist movement rose to propose a new amendment to the Constitution. It was very simple, it said – equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Well, it didn't go through.

A proposed amendment to the Constitution must be passed by a two-thirds majority of both Houses, which happened, but then ratified by three-quarters of the 50 state legislatures, which didn't. It fell short by a few states, through formidable objections.

Organised labour saw jobs that were always men's domain – bricklayers, railroad engineers, shop stewards – being open to women. Some states opposed the amendment by saying they meant to protect some inequalities that must remain. They didn't want to see an end to laws that compel a sinful or errant husband from supporting his ex-wife and their children. And there was, I recall, a heartfelt national response, and from women, to the cry of a lady witness before several state legislatures. Mothers, she warned, would be subject to the same draft as fathers. Can you see women going into combat carrying 40lb packs? Of course not, we said, ridiculous.

I commented at the time with what I regarded as a waggish aside. Wouldn't be an interesting twist, I wrote, if five, ten years from now, worthy women were in the marines and worthless men were getting alimony.

Well, it's 17 years since that comment, but for many years now, lots of men have been getting and enjoying alimony and the other evening we saw on the nightly news, a scene that 17 years ago could only have been the subject of a comic strip.

A marine captain in the blank horizon of Saudi Arabia, a very stalwart and attractive lady, certainly in the habit of carrying a 40lb pack. A combat soldier, squinting against the dust and the blinding sun and talking directly and affectionately to the rest of the family back in Iowa, which was keeping the home fires burning or rather the air conditioner purring.

Cut to her precious audience, two children, a small boy and a girl in the kitchen and father there finishing the supper dishes. Now, said the marine, you take care of your father and be good and do right, you understand? Yes mummy, they said. Yes ma'am, said the non-combatant husband.

Next night we saw three air force officers, two white, one black, on an airfield in Saudi Arabia, talking through the thunder of departing planes and the scudding arrival of fighters they were about to go over for repair and maintenance.

They wouldn't have chosen any other career. They thought it was their duty to be there. Thoughts of home, they agreed, got buried under the labour of working from dawn to dusk. At the very end, one of them, an upright, comely, blonde woman, suddenly mentioned that she hoped her 17-year-old son was behaving himself. Right on, ma.

The interesting thing to me about these exchanges is that these women are not noticeably rampant – or even couchant – feminists. New careers have opened up to them and they like it and now to the rosters of warriors for equal rights, there has been added a new name – Lisa Olson.

She's a sportswriter for a Boston paper – by now, incidentally, there are over 500 full-time women sportswriters in every sort of game in this country. Miss Olson writes about football and I mean American football, not soccer.

On an evening in September she went into the players' locker room for an interview. The players were all men, of course. I ought to say that since the 1970s the basketball and hockey managers have allowed women reporters equal access to men's locker rooms.

Baseball and football jibbed at first, but when a woman reporter was denied access to a locker room during the World Series, she sued in federal court and the judge ruled that those wise 50-odd 18th-Century men who wrote the Constitution had anticipated her humiliation. Her constitutional rights had been denied. In 1985 the Commissioner of Baseball ruled that all teams should allow equal access of women to locker rooms. It's now standard practice.

Well Lisa Olson, on that September evening, she was sitting interviewing a footballer when five of the team's members came by, stark naked and stood in front of her, mocking her, some said – jeering, said others. She said attempting sexual harassment or harassment, which is now a regular charge against employers who get flirtatious or affectionate or worse.

The incident has caused a hullabaloo throughout the sports world. Golf and tennis officials huffily point out that they observe the better policy of no access by male or female to locker rooms. Let the men, the women, shower, dress, undress, cheer or lament their performances in private.

But the courts have decided that equal rights does not mean the equal denial of rights, but the equal right to get your own interview, the chance of your own scoop, that's the rub. And it's hard to see how this gross bit of behaviour can be resolved inside the law.

"What do you expect of professional athletes," I asked one veteran woman reporter. "How can they grow up when they spend their lives perfecting childhood rhythms?"

One of those founding fathers, who was in on the writing of the Constitution, said that he was obliged to explain why America broke with Britain and set up its own government. He was obliged by something that the athletic managers might suggest to their teams and that the courts might somehow try to enforce as law.

Jefferson's reason? A decent respect for the opinions of mankind and, of course, womankind.

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