When the 19th Amendment was added to the Constitution, making it illegal to deny women the right to vote based on their sex, lawyer and suffragist Crystal Eastman was hungry to take things even further. 

“Now at last,” she wrote, “we can begin.” 

Inspired by Lucretia Mott’s suggestion at the historic Seneca Falls Convention that women deserved “equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce,” Eastman and suffrage leader Alice Paul authored the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Paul’s final edit on the language offered a concise vision for women’s constitutional equality that endures today: a future in which “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and Congress has the responsibility to make sure of it. 

In a 2011 interview, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia infamously declared that women were not protected from discrimination by the Constitution. “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex,” he told California Lawyer. “The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

The ERA’s meaning has transformed over time, but women in the “current society” — and generations of activists before them — have worked steadily to make such cavalier dismissals of women’s equality inadmissable in U.S. law and in the lives of everyday Americans by advocating for the ERA. The amendment would force discriminatory laws off the books and provide a Constitutional mandate for policies advancing parity and improving the lives of women and girls.

“They’ve given us a great blueprint: to organize, to mobilize, to legislate, to resist, as if lives depend on it — because they do.”

First introduced in Congress in 1923, the ERA wasn’t approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification until 1972. Another half-century later, despite having met the requirements for ratification in the Constitution, the ERA still hasn’t been officially added to the Constitution as the 28th amendment. Now, a diverse coalition of women have come together to wage an intersectional fight for gender equality, taking inspiration from their feminist foremothers. 

“The fact that it hasn’t happened isn’t in any way a reflection of a lack of stamina, or innovation, on their part,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), a Congressional leader in the fight for certification of the ERA, asserted to NWHM. “They’ve given us a great blueprint: to organize, to mobilize, to legislate, to resist, as if lives depend on it — because they do.”

Read the full story via the National Women’s History Museum.