The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; ERA Expires

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. The Equal Rights Amendment officially dies at midnight tonight when the time for its ratification expires. Despite desperate last-ditch efforts from hunger strikes to sit-ins, ERA ended three states short of the number required to amend the Constitution. In Washington and other cities today the winners celebrated while the losers threatened to rise again. ERA's leading opponent, Phyllis Schlafly, is the hostess tonight at a Washington dinner to honor 1,000 people who opposed the amendment. Outside the White House, pro-ERA demonstrators today staged a rally of protest. Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, blamed ERA's failure on the Republican Party. The National Women's Political Caucus formally withdrew its boycott of conventions in states which have failed to ratify. But the Caucus vowed to defeat what they called "a dirty dozen" male legislators who had helped block the amendment. Tonight, why did ERA fail, and what does the women's movement do now? Jim Lehrer is off tonight. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Washington. Charlayne?

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Robin, the countdown for the ERA actually started in 1923 when it was first introduced in Congress. Then as now it was a simple one-sentence amendment that would have added to the Constitution these words: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." The amendment was finally passed overwhelmingly by Congress in 1972. The next phase involves ratification by threefourths of the states, and for a while at least, the picture was rosy. Some 34 states quickly approved, but in no time after that the momentum was stalled by growing opposition. As a result, no state has voted to ratify the amendment since 1977, and a few states actually attempted to rescind their earlier votes in favor. We begin tonight's program with a perspective on how and why that happened. It comes from freelance reporter Carol Felsenthal, who has covered the feminist movement and has also written a biography of Phyllis Schlafly. Ms. Felsenthal's most recent article on the ERA is in the current issue of Chicago magazine. Ms. Felsenthal, why do you think the ERA failed?

CAROL FELSENTHAL: There are many, many reasons, but I think probably the most basic was a real failure on the part of the proponents of ERA to lobby at the local level. They did a lot of press conferences, a lot of rallies, a lot of big parades, which looked good on the 10 o'clock news, but didn't do much to influence those legislators, and also a disdain for those mostly men in the state capitals who, after all, were going to be the ones voting yes or no on ERA. They did all sorts of things to infuriate and antagonize those people.

HUNTER-GAULT: Like what?

Ms. FELSENTHAL: Well, the most recent example is after a -- or the most striking example is after a defeat in North Carolina, some feminists in that state sent envelopes of chicken manure to legislators who had voted against. Of course, in Illinois, my home state, we had a hunger strike. We had 15 women who called themselves the chain gang who chained themselves to the Senate rail, who wrote in animal blood the name of legislators who they felt had blocked the passage of ERA. And I could go on and on on that for the next 15 minutes.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Eleanor Smeal said that they had been actually double-crossed by some of the male legislators who had said they supported the amendment and then changed their vote.

Ms. FELSENTHAL: Well, what I have found in my research on ERA is that the opposition and the support for ERA has been rather consistent. There haven't been too many betrayals or too many changes of votes. In Illinois there were a couple. There was one very crucial change of a pro-ERA senator who said he would vote "present" on the issue until the hunger strikers stopped their strike because he felt that that was a blackmail tactic, and he said on the Senate floor, "What's going to be next? Are they going to -- is a group going to threaten to slit their wrists if we don't pass a particular appropriations bill?" But in general I don't -- I think that people come out during election for or against ERA, and they have been fairly consistent in that support.

HUNTER-GAULT: You mentioned the tactics of the pro-ERA people. You wrote in your article that the anti-ERA people were baking bread and sending jams and jellies to the legislators. How much of it was Phyllis Schlafly and her movement and her tactics, and how much of it do you think was self-defeating, as you just explained?

Ms. FELSENTHAL: Well, Phyllis Schlafly has a brilliant public relations mind, and certainly the bread and the jam were great tactics, and they did get a lot of attention. But beyond that, because the pro-ERA people had a lot of PR-type tactics, too, but beyond that, Phyllis Schlafly had her local women writing to their legislators. These were people who lived in the district of these men who were making up their mind whether to vote for or against. And these legislators knew that those women would be voting for them in the next election. And they were telephoning them; they were sending the telegrams. They were trying to influence them, whereas the pro-ERA people had all sorts of celebrities and just plain folks coming in from out town. And, as legislator after legislator told me during interviews, "I don't care what Alan Alda thinks about ERA. I don't care what Betty Ford thinks. These people are not going to vote for me in the next election." There was a big rally in 1980 in Chicago, and the press pointed out there that most of the people who showed up -- 50,000 or so -- were from out of state. Those people don't make a difference to the guys in Springfield.

HUNTER-GAULT: Just very briefly, do you think the movement was broad-based enough in its makeup and in its thrust?

Ms. FELSENTHAL: I think that, yes, that the pro-ERA movement was broad-based, but that point never got across to the legislators because the tactics were to have the celebrities and the first ladies and the presidents and the people who were the spokesmen who tended not to get those housewives watching television or their husbands to identify with them, and it was just a failure of image, really, more than anything else.

HUNTER-GAULT: So, in a word, the pro-ERA people weretheir own worst enemies, in your view?

Ms. FELSENTHAL: Exactly, yes.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: One of the leading forces in the battle for ERA has been the National Women's Political Caucus.Its president is Kathy Wilson. Were you your own worst enemies, Ms. Wilson?

KATHY WILSON: It's nice to know that the opposition was so well-behaved throughout the last 10 years.I think the reason the Equal Rights Amendment was not ratified -- and it is the strong feeling of my organization that worked in the states, that lobbied their legislators in the districts in which they lived for a 10-year period --

MacNEIL: That did the things we've just heard Ms. Felsenthal say you didn't do?

Ms. WILSON: Well, what I was going to say was our feeling is that the ERA did not ratify because there were a small contingent of legislators from rural America, basically, who were opposed to the amendment, who were categorically opposed to equal rights for women. And they were opposed to equal rights long before Phyllis Schlafly came along in the movement. And we feel that too much emphasis was put upon lobbying the legislators; not enough was put in the field. Our organization has approached the issue electorally for 10 years. I am delighted that most women's organizations now believe that real power is elective power, and that legislators will only come around to -- we will only achieve equality when legislators get around to legislating it.

MacNEIL: Well, what about Ms. Felsenthal's point about the tactics? Too many parades, too many celebrities, not getting to the housewives watching television and identifying with them?

Ms. WILSON: I think in the first few years of our fight to ratify, we probably alienated some homemakers, but I think we've worked very hard to explain --

MacNEIL: Why do you think you alienated them?

Ms. WILSON: Oh, I think there were some careless comments on the part of feminist leaders, some that, you know, you don't want to be just a housewife. And I think --

MacNEIL: Made women feel guilty if they weren't out marching --

Ms. WILSON: I think some women saw ratification of this amendment as a hostile repudiation to their lifestyle. And we think nothing could be farther from the truth. But I think what we've come around to the conclusion is that we need to do less marching and more grassroots politics. We are really going to be approaching the '82 elections, the '84 elections with grassroots politicking. We are going to be recruiting candidates to run against the rural legislators who were staunchly entrenched. We were able, we found, to elect a majority of pro-ERA legislators.We were not able to elect a majority that would buck the leadership in those states -- the leadership of the rural legislators.

MacNEIL: These dirty dozen state legislators that you announced today you're going to go after, presumably some of them are those key people you mentioned you thought had blocked you. Is that just out of revenge, or is there some practical motive in mind?

Ms. WILSON: Well, it's practical politics. I mean, if women are going to be represented in the way that they should, they need better representation. And in many cases that means feminist women. Women comprise only 12% of the state legislatures right now, and yet we comprise 53% of the population, and we just feel that what has become painfully apparent in this ratification battle is that 12% women serving in the state legislatures is not enough to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment. So we plan on concentrating more time and effort in recruiting candidacies in the rural districts where, quite frankly, the opportunities for emerging leadership, new leadership, are more limited.

MacNEIL: Give me a short list of the things your organization is now going to fight for electorally and legislatively when you haven't got an ERA to fight for.

Ms. WILSON: Well, we are going to be putting a disproportionate amount of our time and energy in working in the states to elect women candidates who are pro-ERA, who support the 1973 Supreme Court decision giving a woman the right to choose, who supports funding of child care --

MacNEIL: That's abortion, you mean?To choose an abortion?

Ms. WILSON: Yes. There are broad basic issues, but the Equal Rights Amendment is our non-negotiable issue, and while we've made a lot of gains legislatively, electorally, I think an awful lot of women in this country feel that there's just no substitute for permanent constitutional equality in this country -- a legislation that cannot be repealed, cannot be denied. And we don't think we're asking too much.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. After the Independence Day recess, there will be moves in both houses of Congress to reintroduce ERA and to propose other laws to end specific kinds of perceived discrimination. One person involved in these moves is Democratic Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York. Ms. Ferraro heads a special task force for women's issues on the House Democratic Caucus. Ms. Ferraro, first of all, why do you think ERA died?

Rep. GERALDINE FERRARO: Well, I kind of would agree that the support was not broad-based enough. I recall about eight years ago when I was practicing law, I was out at the beach and Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a neighbor of mine, and she found out I was a lawyer, and she said, "You know, you'd be terrific. You should get yourself involved in the ERA," and all the rest of this stuff. And I went home and I said to my husband, "Why should I get involved? It doesn't really affect me," And I think a lot of women felt that way and still feel that way. I think that --

MacNEIL: Was it the style and tone of the leaders or the way they were identified, or was it just the tactics they were using?

Rep. FERRARO: It might have been both.I think that the people who are involved are extremely articulate bright women who know the issues, and I think perhaps the housewives in Glendale and Middle Village who were the district I represent felt disenfranchised by the whole thing, that it just really was nothing that pertained to them.I think that's part of the problem -- was part of the problem.It is very easy for someone who was not involved, as was Kathy and Ellie and all those people who are doing so much to try to get the ERA ratified -- it is very easy for me to sit back and say, "They should have done. . ." Hopefully that's the direction that we will move in for the next decade.

MacNEIL: You're going to be one of those reintroducing the Equal Rights Amendment after the recess. Are you doing that just as a symbolic gesture to keep it going, or do you think it's really important?

Rep. FERRARO: Oh, no, no. I think it's important. It will be reintroduced on July 14th at 1:30. It will be done in the House and the Senate simultaneously. It will be reintroduced in the same language as it is now, but it will give us an opportunity to have a breather, to take a very close look at it, to notify the world that it is not going to go away, and that if it's not this Congress -- and it won't be this Congress --

MacNEIL: Does it stand any chance in thisHouse?

Rep. FERRARO: Not in this Congress. It's a very conservative -- philosophically conservative House, and of course you have a Republican Senate. And, of course, you remember the man in the White House has come out opposed to the legislation. So I don't think it'll pass in this Congress, and I don't think it will pass in the next Congress. I think, however, we will have an opportunity for additional hearings on it, and we will take a look at the language, and I think it'll give us a little bit of a breather, an opportunity to get together and see what is the best strategy for getting that legislation through the House and through to the state legislatures.

MacNEIL: Now, what issues in terms of legislation, where you see discrimination against women, and you think can be corrected by laws, are you going to devote yourself to, apart from the ERA?

Rep. FERRARO: Well, we already have some legislation that's already been introduced in this Congress. It's called the Economic Equity Act, and it is a 110-page document, a bill, and it deals with discrimination in pensions -- private, military, civil service pensions; it has a section on tax credit for displaced homemakers, for day-care. It deals with those types of issues, but let me tell you that that is a first step. It is not an all-encompassing thing that is all of a sudden going to give economic equity to the women of this nation. It merely goes to various statutes and attempts to correct the inequities as they exist now. It does not -- it does not replace the Equal Rights Amendment. And let me just make that perfectly clear. We're doing this piece by piece, and I have to tell you that this act has been in; it is before the various committees to get hearings on each piece of it, to get it moving. It is a very tedious process, and to do it law by law, state by state. As Barbara McCloskey said, "Can you imagine if Abraham Lincoln had gotten the Emancipation Proclamation signed, and he said, 'I'll do it, but only plantation by plantation.'" It is not going to work. We really need the Equal Rights Amendment.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you.Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: One of the major forces behind the defeat of the ERA, as indicated, was Phyllis Schlafly and her national Stop ERA Committee. Elaine Donnelly is the national media chairman of that committee. She is in Washington along with the 1,000 other invited guests to attend the Schlafly party. Ms. Donnelly, now that you've won, does this mean the end of your organization?

ELAINE DONNELLY: No, if there is another attempt to enter a new ERA, then we will deal with that. I don't think they would even get out of the Judiciary Committee with such an amendment if it has the same language as this present ERA. The issues involved here -- I think people still don't understand. ERA would have prevented the federal or state governments to have any laws that differentiate between men and women or any laws that benefit women. And the issue that -- one of the biggest issue in this whole program so far hasn't even been mentioned -- the idea that in fact the -- the idea that nobody debates or disputes, that if the ERA had been ratified, we couldn't have a draft, a registration for a draft, or even send anyone to combat duty in a future war unless young women were involved also. Now, the majority of American people do not support that. Congress had a chance to so legislate and they decided not to. The Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to exempt women, and that's the way the majority of people want it.

HUNTER-GAULT: So in your view, you're going to hang in there on this issue because you believe that Ms. Wilson and her colleagues and people who think like her are going to hang in there, too.

Ms. DONNELLY: Well, Charlayne, it's a dead issue, really. It's not a matter of our hanging in there; it's a matter of their hanging on long after their party has been over. They really didn't even come close.

HUNTER-GAULT: Right. Aside from the issue of the ERA, then, what is on your agenda for your organization?

Ms. DONNELLY: Well, we would like to see an end to the bitterness. I think the ERA proponents have been very much out of the mainstream for a long time. They are pushing an agenda which the majority of women do not support; they will have to come to terms with that. They will have to realize that not all women think alike about issues such as drafting women.We will have to agree to disagree. The Economic Equity Act has some good ideas in it; one of them in particular that we are in favor of is eliminating a disparity with regard to individual retirement accounts to help the single-income family to get the same tax benefit as a two-income family. But these kinds of issues have nothing to do with sex discrimination. The law is sex-neutral.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, the issues that the Congresswoman delineated as a part of that Economic Equity Act, like discriminations in pensions and day-care and all that, you would support that?

Ms. DONNELLY: Not all of them. There's one in particular that I'm concerned about, and I have personal experience with. In Michigan they made the auto insurance laws sex-neutral, and the insurance rates for some classes of young women drivers went up by as much as 195% because they have been forced to subsidize the higher accident rate of the young men. Now, that's unfair to the young women, and yet it was done in the name of equal rights. That's the kind of thing we won't put up with.

HUNTER-GAULT: Right. What about electing more women to office?

Ms. DONNELLY: Oh, we are going to elect women to Congress, state legislatures. I think the Women's Political Caucus is forgetting that we, because we are the winning side, we have certainly learned a lot in the last 10 years. And we're going to take what we've learned and march into the state legislatures and Congress and any other area of politics that we choose to because we are free to do that.

HUNTER-GAULT: But the women that you're talking about electing to office are not the same women that they are talking about?

Ms. DONNELLY: That's right. You know, there are two women's movements today. There are the so-called feminist women's movement, and there are those women who believe in womens rights with reasonable differentiations to help women in the areas that they need help. Older women, divorced women would have been hurt seriously if ERA had been passed because many laws that benefitted them would have been eliminated. We're going to go to bat and fight for them just as we have in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.

HUNTER-GAULT: Congresswoman Ferraro mentioned among the things that they would be doing would be taking a look at the language of the ERA, which suggested that there might be some room for compromise or rewording. Are there any circumstances in which you would support an Equal Rights Amendment -- rewording or otherwise?

Ms. DONNELLY: Well, I believe she just said that they would support the same language, and every prominent pro-ERA person I know insists they want the same language. For that reason, a new ERA would be defeated for the same reasons this one was. Back in 1972, when Senator Sam Ervin tried to put protective amendments that would have prevented some of these harmful things like involving women in the draft and combat duty, every one of those amendments was stricken. Now, if there is a roll call on similar amendments in this year, 1982, then the opposition against ERA is going to get even stronger because the clarity will be there. People will understand exactly what the hidden agenda is with this Equal Rights Amendment. And I must add one more thing. It has nothing to do with employment. It would not have given women jobs, promotions or anything in the way of employment that they don't already have.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Ms. Felsenthal, you heard Ms. Wilson say that it wasn't a failure, certainly in their organization, to do lots of lobbying at the state legislature level; it was just a bunch of crusty rural legislators who had been opposed to equal rights all along.

Ms. FELSENTHAL: Well, that's not true. There were -- many of the anti-ERA legislators in Illinois were from Chicago. And that's true in the other unratified states. She did make one comment that I think I should respond to because it was another problem with the ERA. She mentioned on their new agenda that abortion rights or freedom to choose would be a part of that agenda. Well, that was another reason that ERA was done in because abortion/homosexual rights were tied into ERA by the proponents. It wasn't only done by Phyllis Schlafly. She did it too because she believes that ERA will give every woman in the country the right to a federally-financed abortion. But she didn't have to argue too much because the proponents were saying the same thing to these state legislators, and there are a lot of people who might have been for ERA, but are not sure about homosexual rights and abortion rights.

MacNEIL: Is that true, Ms. Wilson?

Ms. WILSON: It just doesn't square with the facts. With my experience, having been time after time to the key unratified states in the past couple of years, I personally never spoke to a legislator about the subject of abortion when I was there to talk about the Equal Rights Amendment.

MacNEIL: Well, maybe you didn't, but was it in their minds?Were they all associated?

Ms. WILSON: I never had one legislator tell me that that was his -- that he was recalcitrant because of the issue of abortion.

MacNEIL: Do you think it's true, Ms. Donnelly, that people are associating those various things with ERA?

Ms. DONNELLY: Well, the pro-ERAers said this was one of the reasons we had to have the ERA -- to put abortion into the U.S. Constitution as a right that could never be taken away. Now, this is an issue on which reasonable people of both sexes do disagree upon.You cannot say that only the feminist movement has the right to speak for all women, and certainly those legislators, regardless of what districts they come from, were well aware of that. All the pressure from the celebrities and the presidents' wives and the White House itself did not deter them because they knew their constitutents backed them up. And we have re-elected them and will continue to re-elect them, and will not allow it to be rammed into the Constitution.

MacNEIL: What about the charge from -- first of all, do you agree with that, that ERA had an abortion and homosexual-rights albatross around its neck, Congresswoman?

Rep. FERRARO: No, I don't.As a matter of fact, the discussion that has always been held down in the Congress has always kept the two issues separate, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.Totally separate. We have many, many supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment who are not pro-choice, who are pro-life and who still find no difficulty in supporting this, so it has never reached a level of discussion in the Congress.

MacNEIL: What about the charge by your sister organization -- if that's the term, the National Organization for Women, today? Eleanor Smeal said ERA had been defeated by the Republican Party.Do you agree with that?

Ms. WILSON: Not really. Of our list, the dirty dozen that we released today, 10 of the 12 are Democrats. I guess I don't really think this was as much of a party issue as it was an issue of very powerful individuals in key unratified states opposing the amendment, and who either procedurally or politically, because of their powerful positions, thwarted it at every turn. I know that the Democratic Party in the past couple of years has done an awful lot to try to help ratify this amendment, and several party officials have shared in my frustration in states where recalcitrant legislators and their party were not coming around. But the Republican Party I don't think can bear the responsibility for a 10-year battle where the recent leadership has only emerged that is terribly insensitive to women's issues.

MacNEIL: Ms. Felsenthal, what did your research discover on how much of a partisan issue it was?

Ms. FELSENTHAL: I agree that it was not a partisan issue. For example, in Illinois, there was a Republican in the House, the Speaker of the House, Ryan, who was blamed for killing ERA in the House, but the president of the Senate also last week did it in the Senate and he's a Democrat. So I think that it is a nonpartisan issue. There happened to be in Illinois and in most of the other unratified states more Republicans in the anti-column, but there are both Democrats and Republicans in the anti-column.

MacNEIL: Well, thank you. Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: Congresswoman Ferraro, you heard Ms. Donnelly say that there were two women's movements in the country -- the feminist movement and then all of the other women. What do you think, given all of the ethnic and racial and class differences and other differences among women, is it at all possible that there can be a single organization or issue that would unite women across the board?

Rep. FERRARO: I would certainly hope so, and when she spoke about those two groups I sat here trying to figure out which one I belonged to.I certainly have felt that I'm most concerned about women's issues, but they're broad-based women's issues. It's the Equal Rights Amendment; it's the pro-choice position on abortion; it's economic equity in pension plans; it's equity for elderly people under Social Security -- and if you take a look at that system, I want to tell you, there women are discriminated against horribly. We want to reach out to those people, and I'm a family person with three kids and a husband, so I'm an individual as is Kathy. We're not what people have traditionally thought of or have stereotyped as a feminist, and obviously the other guest has done so as well.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, what about the suggestion that you could reach out to them, that there are issues that you could work on jointly together? Is there no common ground?

Rep. FERRARO: I certainly see the necessity for all the women of American to work together. You know, you talk about whether or not this is a partisan issue. In 1980 Reagan made this a partisan issue. The Republican Partyhas gone on record against the Equal Rights Amendment, but that's not all. He has gone on record with reference to other legislation that affects women -- Title IX has been weakened; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has been weakened; the Office of Economic Employment Opportunity has been weakened. I mean, this man has traditionally gone on the road against women. We are now facing a gender gap, and I think he's going to be a little bit concerned about it.

HUNTER-GAULT: By a gender gap, you mean --

Rep. FERRARO: Of approval and disapproval for the President. There is a 14-point approval and disapproval gap between men and women as for how they feel about the President, and I think he's becoming very, very aware of that, and very concerned about where the women in this country are. But we cannot split the women of this country up. We have to be concerned about all of them: the traditional feminists and the family woman.

HUNTER-GAULT: What about that, Ms. Donnelly?

Ms. DONNELLY: I'm afraid there can't be any compromise or getting together as long as ERA is there as an obstacle. You can't pick and choose from its effects. When a federal court rules under an ERA that young women must be subject to the draft sometime in the future, you cannot lobby a federal court; you can't vote them out of office. You're stuck with that.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Ms. Wilson says that the ERA is non-negotiable because there is no substitute for permanent legislation that --

Ms. DONNELLY: Well, I think she's wrong about that. I think women need to know what their rights are in the area of employment, credit, education and the rest. And, by the way, President Reagan has done some very positive things for women in eliminating inheritance taxes, reducing the marriage tax, increasing day-care credits for working women. These are the kinds of positive things that we would like to see more of, but we'd also like women to know what their rights are and not look to ERA as a false panaces.

HUNTER-GAULT: Do you disagree with that, Ms. Wilson?

Ms. WILSON: I really do. I think that equality of rights is everyone's constitutional right. It is not something that 53% of the population should be denied.

HUNTER-GAULT: I'm sorry. We have to leave it there. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes, Ms. Felsenthal and Ms. Donnelly, thank you very much for joining us in Washington; Congresswoman Ferraro and Ms. Wilson in New York. Good night, Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That's all for tonight. We will be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.