“The Time Was Right to Generate Some Heat”: California’s ERA Ratification and Women’s Policy Activism Western Association of Political Scientists San Diego, CA April 18 - 20, 2019 Doreen J. Mattingly, Professor and Chair Department of Women’s Studies, San Diego State University
[email protected] 1 “The Time Was Right to Generate Some Heat”: California’s ERA Ratification and Women’s Policy Activism Abstract In California, the 1972 campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States constitution pitted amendment supporters against labor leaders trying to protect women- only protective labor laws. The seven-month struggle campaign in California resulted in a vote for ratification and motivated several years of legislative activity on women’s issues. Most scholarship about ERA ratification in the US in the 1970s examines the reasons the amendment failed; this paper takes a different tack by investigating a state where the ERA was successful. The ERA campaign was a key element in the embrace of women’s issues by the state’s Democratic Party. This paper also provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between labor feminists and equal rights feminists, two groups that were opposed during the ratification campaign, but were frequent allies on women’s issues before and after 1972. Introduction Through the 1970s, women’s groups tried unsuccessfully to achieve the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have instituted an explicit constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination. On March 22, 1972, the US Congress passed the ERA and sent it to the states for ratification, and in 1982 the ERA failed, three states short of the 38 needed to add the amendment to the constitution.1 After a long battle, California became the twenty-second state to ratify the amendment on November 13, 1972.