Often when we consider issues of national importance, we think in sweeping terms affecting millions of people over generations. But when it comes to finally enshrining equal rights for women in the Constitution of the United States, I wish our leaders would stop thinking this way and start thinking very personally.
In my family, I want my daughter Bella to grow up knowing she has the same rights as her brother Milo — and I want Milo to grow up knowing the exact same thing. Perhaps if our elected leaders started thinking like this, we would already have the constitutional equality that Americans have demanded.
More than 100 years ago, the women’s suffrage movement produced a constitutional amendment that would guarantee those rights: the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA simply and unequivocally states “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” It has met every single constitutional hurdle to be adopted as the 28th Amendment. Passed by Congress in 1972, it was sent to the states, buoyed by the work of pioneering women like Alice Paul and Shirley Chisolm. In 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, meeting the constitutional requirement that three-fourths of the states ratify an amendment to adopt it.
And yet, because of the failure of a handful of powerful men, equality for women is still not part of our governing document.
Stalled by an arbitrary deadline attached to it by Congress — a deadline that is not part of the amendment and on which the states did not vote — the ERA is stuck in a swamp of bad-faith bureaucracy. The Trump administration used this unconstitutional constraint to decline a request from the National Archives to publish the ERA as an Amendment in 2020. Since taking office in 2021, President Biden has failed to rectify this injustice.
If we look around our country, where the rights of women are being ripped away at every turn, this failure to act cannot be allowed to stand.
Since Virginia ratified the ERA more than four years ago, women have lost national reproductive rights, access to contraceptives is under attack, and even in vitro fertilization treatments have become politicized. Women are being chased out of their home states to receive life-saving healthcare, and face fear of prosecution when they return home. Without the protections of the Equal Rights Amendment, women are second-class citizens in America, subject to the hateful whims of sexist and vengeful politicians, with basic human rights dependent on where they happen to live in the country. This un-American dystopia defies every basic story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation.
President Biden has the authority to order the National Archives to publish the Equal Rights Amendment as part of the U.S. Constitution. He can and should exercise this authority well in advance of Election Day. That’s the message from over 120 artists who signed the Artists for the ERA letter. We refuse to sit down and shut up. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote, “Well behaved women rarely make history.” We and our allies are through behaving.
The Equal Rights Amendment is supported by 85 percent of Americans at a moment when division and polarization are at an all-time high. It has cleared each of the deliberately high bars set for it by the framers. It must now be recognized for what it is: the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
Our daughters deserve it. Our sons need to know it’s true. And if we’re to continue to be considered a nation with any moral authority, it has to happen now.
Alyssa Milano is an actor, producer, author and activist. She serves on the board of the Fund for Women’s Equality and the ERA Coalition, and is an organizer and co-signer of the Artists for the ERA letter.