It’s time for the ERA to be ratified

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage as officially the law of the land, legal in all 50 states, deserves every celebration and tear of joy that we are seeing on TV and the Internet. President Obama stated that the Supreme Court’s decision was “a victory for America,” that “our nation was founded on a bedrock principle — that we are all created equal,” and that “today … we made our union a little more perfect.” 

I could not agree more. But there is one imperative step toward perfection that our nation as a whole has not yet taken: that women are equal to men. 

In March 2015, I wrote an article for Women’s Enews, in which I discussed the historical characterizations of women as “imperfect men” by such thinkers as Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. Shockingly, given the progress we have undeniably made in human rights writ large and today’s historic ruling, women are still “imperfect men” in this country as long as we deny them equal rights through a simple constitutional statement of equality.

{mosads}On June 24, 2015, academy-award winning actress Meryl Streep wrote a letter to all 535 members of Congress imploring them to take up again the Equal Rights Amendment, which remains three states short of ratification to become part of the Constitution. Streep’s letter called upon Congress “to stand up for equality — for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself — by actively supporting the Equal Rights Amendment.” Congress also received a copy of ERA Coalition President Jessica Neuwirth’s book Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for an Equal Rights Amendment is now.

In his majority opinion on behalf of himself and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the hope of gay and lesbian couples “is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

In his dissent (almost everywhere reported as “scathing”), Justice Antonin Scalia referred to the “strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval,” referring to their elitist educations and, for the most part, representative of more liberal parts of the country. In lumping them all together as “nine men and women,” he conveniently left out, and presumably is untroubled by the fact, that the court itself is “strikingly unrepresentative” of the country by its gender imbalance: six men, three women.

And yet, there are ways in which women are indeed given more attention than we might want. Two examples of this are unrealistic standards of beauty and, not an unrelated consequence to those standards, discrimination against older women.

As if women did not face enough pressure to diet, color their hair, be fashionable, battle wrinkles with every possible cream available, and strive to appear younger than springtime no matter what one’s age, the cover story of Time magazine (June 29) by Joel Stein explains where women and their bodies are headed, if we are not there yet, in “Nip. Tuck. Or Else: Why You’ll be Getting Cosmetic Procedures Even if You Don’t Really Want To.” Apparently, women “are going to have to do it … not because you hate yourself, fear aging, or are vain. You’re going to get a cosmetic procedure for the same reason you wear makeup: because every other woman is.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for people looking and feeling their best. But I would appreciate being allowed to decide what the bar is for myself and not be prodded or shamed by the media and the public into some rigid standard that, in my opinion, is often unrealistic.

In a provocative op-ed from June 19, “America Must Stop its Bias Against Older Women,” Dr. Evelyn Granieri, a Columbia University expert on geriatric medicine and public health policy related to the elderly, cites a range of sources, from her widely admired research on the disproportionate discrimination against older and elderly women to late-night TV hosts for whom older women provide a rich source of “humor,” and asks, “where is the outrage?” that older women are scrutinized, criticized and mocked for their looks and their age, and discriminated against even in geriatric care. Instead, she argues, let’s concentrate on and celebrate women for “their wisdom and talents.” Amen.   

Let’s put aside the ubiquitous and quite unwelcome — at least to many women — advice on all the plastic surgery and “freshening up” that we are being told we will feel obliged to seek, and focus on what really matters. Let’s hope that the next time women and “women’s issues” as a group grace the cover of Time magazine, it’s for something other than fat-melting and wrinkle-fighting. 

Instead, let’s build on the momentum of today’s “victory for America” and make the ratification of the ERA a reality. Women ask for no less than the “equal dignity in the eyes of the law” now to be enjoyed by gay and lesbian couples in any and all of our 50 states.

Grieve is Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.