National Woman’s Party to Meet with President Coolidge over Equal Rights Amendment
A delegation of women in the National Woman’s Party on this day announced a scheduled meeting with President Calvin Coolidge for November 17 or 18 to discuss the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
The ERA was a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee equal treatment to women. The National Woman’s Party was organized on March 1, 1917, and led by Alice Paul, who drafted the ERA on July 21, 1923. The meeting with the president would coincide with a conference on women’s rights organized by the National Woman’s Party. The meeting with President Coolidge took place on the 17th, but the group did not succeed in convincing him to support the ERA.
As part of her efforts for woman’s suffrage and the ERA, Paul had founded the National Woman’s Party on March 3, 1917.
The ERA was introduced in virtually every session of Congress over the next 47 years. It came to a vote on a few occasions in the Senate, but never in the House of Representatives. It was finally approved by both houses of Congress on March 22, 1972, and sent to the states for ratification. After being ratified by many states, however, it encountered a conservative backlash and was not ratified.
Read: Christina A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928 (1986)
Learn more about the ERA: http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/
See a chronology of the National Woman’s Party history: http://www.loc.gov/collections/static/women-of-protest/images/detchron.pdf
View a chronology of the history of the ERA here
Visit the National Woman’s Party Museum in Washington, DC: http://www.sewallbelmont.org/