Women's suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued strongly against the amendment as written. Stanton wrote in 1866:
"If the word 'male' be inserted [in this amendment] it will take a century to get it out again."
Stanton was off in her prediction by only two years: it wasn't until the Democratic Kennedy/Johnson administrations that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required equal pay for women and prohibited workplace discrimination against women by any company with more than twenty-four employees.
The Biden administration proposed updating the expiring Equal Pay Act of 1963 with the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2021, which passed the House on a 217-210 vote but is now blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
In the House vote, only one Republican voted "Yes"; every other Republican in the House voted "No" to reauthorizing and expanding equal economic rights for women, with the GOP providing all 210 of those "No" votes.
Men controlling and regulating women to maintain male supremacy in this country has a long history.
As I noted in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became Persons, the Supreme Court gave corporations powers of personhood and access to the Bill of Rights a full forty years before women gained the right to vote, and 90 years before women could sign a contract without a man's co-signature.
For the first century or so of our republic:
-
*A married woman was not allowed to make out a will; she was not allowed to own land or legally control anything else worthy of willing to another person.
-
*Any property she brought into the marriage became her husband's at the moment of marriage, and would only revert to her if he died and she did not remarry.
-
*But even then, she'd only get one-third of her husband's property, and what third that was and how she could use it were determined by a court-appointed male executor, who would supervise for the rest of her life (or until she remarried) how she used the third of her husband's estate she "inherited."
-
*When a widow died, the executor would either take the property for himself or else decide to whom it would pass: the woman had no say in the matter, because she had no right to sign a will.
-
*Women could not sue in a court of law, except by the weak procedures allowed to the mentally ill and children, supervised by men.
-
*If the man of a family household died, the executor would decide who would raise the wife's children, and in what religion: she had no right to make those decisions and no say in such matters.
-
*If the woman was poor, it was a virtual certainty that her children would be taken from her.
-
*It was impossible in the new United States of America for a married woman to have legal responsibility for her children, control of her own property, buy or sell land, or even obtain an ordinary license.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
