Brian Laird on WNYC, now we continue our series 100 years of 100 things, our WNYC

Centennial series.

Today is thing number 74, 100 years of the Equal Rights Amendment. Broadly speaking,

as many of you know, the goal of the ERA is to enshrine equality for women in the Constitution.

According to the National Archives, quote, it seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women

in terms of divorce, property, employment,

and other matters. Now, the Equal Rights Amendment has not yet been adopted into the Constitution,

although some would argue that it has met the requirements to actually become the 28th Amendment,

joining me now to track the journey of the ERA over the last 100 years,

including why some actually consider it ratified, is Julie Suk, law professor at Fordham University,

an author of We the Women, the Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment. Julie, Professor

Suck, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to WN.N.Y.

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. So I gave a brief definition of the ERA,

but is there more that you'd like to add? Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, it's been a hundred

years since it was first introduced on the heels of the suffrage amendment, the 19th

Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which focused on not abridging the right to vote on account of

sex. So equality of rights under the law, non-abridged on account of sex, introduced in 1923,

meant removing all the distinctions that exist in the law that prevented women from working or serving on juries or basically having all the same rights that men had at the time.

By the time it got adopted by Congress in 1972, it had additional and different purposes.

That is, a lot of those legal disabilities that women

faced in 1923 had already been removed from the law. So in the 1970s, there was a continuing

process by which they wanted to remove other stereotypes about women and their capacities, particularly related to their reproductive capacities,

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