MAY 14, 2009 ISSUE
Steering Committee Forming For 2010 National ERA Conference
Pinky Hayden, the High Country’s former representative in the General Assembly, is calling for nominations for a steering committee to organize a national conference on the Equal Rights Amendment.
Pinky Hayden, the High Country’s former representative in the General Assembly, is calling for nominations for a steering committee to organize a national conference on the Equal Rights Amendment. Her goal is to hold the conference in Boone in 2010.
Hayden made the call at a recent meeting of the High Country American Association of University Women, where she talked of her experiences as this area’s first female representative in Raleigh from 1981 to 1985.
In 1982, the ERA came up for ratification. While the amendment passed the house, the then Lt. Gov. Green deliberately prevented a vote in the senate.
The Equal Rights Amendment 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.” Alice Paul, the architect of the final campaign for votes for women, launched the ERA in 1923.
The proposed 27th amendment to the constitution was sent to the states in 1972—but Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina had successfully helped to impose an arbitrary deadline of seven years for ratification.
Twenty-two states ratified in the first year, but opposition built up, ratification slowed and the ERA was still three states short at an extended deadline of June 30, 1982.
In recent years, questions have arisen about the legality of the ratification time-limit, Hayden said.
“In 2007, Sen. Kennedy introduced a resolution in the Senate, and it passed, that states that if three more states ratify and send [the ERA] to the Congress, with two-thirds vote it can go straight into the constitution.
“We are three states short of ratification, because now [the Democrats] have 60 votes in the Senate,” Hayden said.
“My goal is in the next year, the summer of 2010, we ought to have a second Seneca Falls Conference in Boone, North Carolina, because I want North Carolina to repent for its sins and be the next state to ratify.”
The Seneca Falls Convention, which took place in New York State in 1848, passed a resolution calling for votes for women. Revolutionary at the time, it took 72 years to become reality. Women were included in the legal definition of “persons” by the Supreme Court only in 1971.
Haydn said that the ERA “is before about 10 legislative bodies, but it hasn’t moved,” and that a conference could jump-start a push for ratification. She called for local women’s groups to propose names of people for a steering committee to organize the conference.
“It will take a full year of every women’s group in North Carolina working to make this happen,” she said.
The importance of the ERA is because “the main right [women don’t have] is [a prohibition on] sex discrimination,” Hayden said. “Every state has its own way of dealing with sex discrimination and until we have equal rights in the constitution we are not going to have continuity across states in how we deal with these issues.”
She added that “there are thousands of laws still on the books in many states that discriminate against women.”
For more information or to submit nominations to the steering committee, email the High Country American Association of University Women at barbaramccaughey@yahoo.com.
Community Interest
News & Notes
Events
Arts & Entertainment
