Voting for equal rights

Some years ago, the New Yorker, the magazine, had a cartoon that, like so many of the cartoons by James Thurber and Peter Arno – both of whom are long gone – became a classic. This one was drawn by one of the magazine's stable of old reliables, Whitney Darrow, a genial, bespectacled, gangling man with a small, bright, wide-eyed wife. For many years, he peppered the magazines with cartoons of a genial, bespectacled, gangling man making casual, but alarming remarks to a small, bright, wide-eyed woman.

I mention the charm of this genial couple, in life, I mean, because Darrow never drew a mean man or a mean couple and yet many of his subjects would, today, be thought obnoxious, if not downright offensive, by women especially. One of my favourites is, or maybe I'd better say used to be, was a scene in an office. Three or four girls, secretaries or apprentice secretaries are obediently taking notes from a brisk, bosomy manager of a woman. She's indicating a remarkable act being performed by a middle-aged male who is in hot pursuit of a girl secretary. They're whisking in something of a circle around his desk and the bosomy lady is saying, 'You'll notice, girls, that Priscilla always manages to keep the desk between them'.

Now this was the sort of thing that in reprint was thought suitable for framing and hanging in the offices of waggish executives. I'm pretty sure that today in any office it was hung, at least one of the female staff would register strong objections and might even bring suit, for its subject is the theme, the actual charge of a flock of suits being brought by female employees against their bosses all over the United States. The sexual harassment – or 'har-assment' – of women. There've been hearings before congressional committees, managers compelled to rehire complaining women and compensate them with back pay. Rumpuses in several universities, threats of rebellion among faculties. Damage suits brought by female pupils who contended that the blandishments of some male teacher went far beyond the instruction prescribed in the text book.

One girl I recall, in an eastern university, recently maintained that the C mark she was given for her lecturer's course was given entirely to her refusal to yield to his extra-curricula passion. The board of enquiry set up by the president of the university, no less, concluded to the great relief of the men on the faculty, that her C mark was due entirely to the simple fact that that's what her work entitled her to.

More recently still, on a Sunday evening investigative television programme that reaches about 30 million viewers, there was a whole feature about several miners who brought suit for sexual harassment and by miners I don't mean girls under age, I mean women underground complaining about being attacked in the dark of the West Virginia pits. Female coal miners, while still in a minority, are no more of a novelty these days than female jockeys. You may recall that a couple of years ago, the frail but indestructible Fred Astaire married a jockey.

And this brings vividly to mind a facetious remark of mine made four or five years ago when the campaign for equal rights for women was really getting under way. In fact, I just realise it's been over ten years since the crusade was strong enough to introduce into Congress yet another – a 27th – amendment to the constitution. Now the way to do this is straight but paved with 38 stumbling blocks. Let me explain!

Any proposed amendment to the Federal Constitution must first be passed by a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House. Then it goes to the legislatures of each of the 50 states and it must be ratified by three-quarters of them which, today, means by 38. Well, in the end, by the deadline which was June of this year, it fell short by three votes and five states which had been all for it, changed their minds. What monstrosity did the amendment propose? What awful threat to law and order?

Really the language of the amendment has a refreshing simplicity and directness that you don't usually find even in simple laws, regulating the regulations, governing the carry-over of voluntary tax exemptions not hitherto exempted in property evaluation, exemptions referred to in clause 16, paragraph 32, see above.

This is the text of the whole amendment: 'Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex'. There's nothing sinister about that surely? The Congress didn't think so and they passed it. But, as I say, as it was debated in the following ten years throughout the states from Alaska to Florida, it never made it. It died and what was not sufficiently noticed in the recent congressional elections, women, more than any other group, came down hard on the president's party and were responsible as much as anybody for the Republicans loss of 24 seats in the House.

Well, now why should such a fair, such a sensible and long overdue proposal be turned down? I remember maintaining once, in the teeth of some very hot breath from women listeners who didn't wait long enough to hear me out, that there really was no need for a special amendment about sexual equality before the law, since the 14th amendment – ratified in 1868 – says firmly that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Note that it doesn't say any man, not like the founding fathers who said 'all men are created equal' leaving women and, by the way, blacks of any gender, out of the pronouncement. No, it said 'any person'.

A happy bit of foresight, because the urge in our time to insist that women, too, are persons is so strong that no charity ball, no parent-teachers meeting, dares be run by a chairman. It is always now a chairperson.

Well, I was told by learned lawyers that my point about the 14th amendment was shrewd but irrelevant since the courts had never applied it in judging cases of sexual discrimination. So a new law binding on all the states was necessary. Why did it fail – and in the 1980s?

There was certainly a spate of dire warnings which appealed to morons, such as that in any war women would be drafted wholesale for guerrilla warfare, but there were canny and plausible arguments, too. This new amendment would have overruled existing laws in many states which protect women from unscrupulous husbands and harsh labour laws, tougher penalties against men and against women for physical assault, prohibitions against forcing women into occupations which may sound harmless enough but which are exhausting or in themselves actually discriminating, abolishing the, on the whole, more humane conditions under which women live in prisons and so on.

Looking into these things, I was surprised at one time to appreciate that if I lived in any one of certain states, I, too, would have voted against the ERA amendment. It was at that time that I committed the facetious remark I mentioned earlier. I said, 'Imagine, the day cannot be too far away when idle husbands will be living off alimony paid by working ex-wives and when women will find themselves, in a time of conscription, having to endure the impossibly tough training of the marines'.

Well, what do you know? That day is here. In a country in which more than half of all wives have outside work – 20 years ago it was about a third – it's now quite common for divorcing women to be paying out support to the feckless ex-husband if he has proved in the divorce action that he was, as we say, 'the innocent party'' and women are not only on active service in the army and navy, but also in the marines and not just as typists or filing clerks.

In this whole study the most interesting trend is, however, one which shows that male chauvinism may be cowering but has not yet expired. There's something called the National Commission on Working Women and its spokesman – spokesperson – is a woman. She says there's a lot of evidence to show that when women enter any job category or profession in droves, that occupation loses status. Men don't want it any more and the salaries drop. Since men are not doing it, there's no cause to insist on equality of pay and this seems to be especially true of insurance adjusters and examiners, bill collectors, real-estate agents and brokers, checkers, inspectors and production-line assemblers. The men move out and the usual salary for the job drops.

I'll end this deep study with one heartbreaking item that is not in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' story. It concerns the fact that practically all the books on the non-fiction bestseller list are what the publishers call 'non books' – not biographies or histories or such – but 'how to' books. How to survive the coming crash, how to keep your body in shape, how to plant delphiniums in midwinter. One of these, which went soaring to the top of the list is called 'How to Make Love to a Woman'. Amazing that this work appeared like a comet, blazing through the darkness of the blundering male – something that, frankly, was news to me and must have been to Adam – it was written by a 30-year-old lawyer with, as we say, a 22-year-old mate, a fashion model.

Well he came up the other day in Manhattan criminal court for – what do you think? – for punching his girlfriend in the face. 'For one second', he confessed, 'I lost control.' Something he'd warned us against when following his instructions on how to make love. His book is, in fact, very strong on telling men to show sensitivity to women.

He had to settle out of court for $30,000. A large sum. No more than was necessary, her lawyer said, to get her teeth fixed.

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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