From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, May 23rd.

A hundred 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.C. 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,

...