Ratify the ERA More Than 30 Years Past the Deadline? Heck, Yes! Why Not?
From April 2014
In December 1972, the Tribune urged the General Assembly to ratify the proposed federal Equal Rights Amendment with an editorial headlined, “Give the ladies what they want.”
The wording was a play on the unofficial founding motto of Marshall Field & Co. department stores, “Give the lady what she wants,” and reflected the sexist paternalism of the times and of the editorial.
The amendment is a meaningless, if harmless measure. The ‘rights’ it accords to women are already contained in the Constitution. … At best, its enactment will make the leaders of the Women’s Lib movement happy. At worst, it will just clutter up the federal Constitution.
And anyway, the editorial went on, “ratification by the required 38 states seems so inevitable that it doesn’t make much difference what Illinois does.”
But no. Illinois went on to become a central battleground in the consuming national fight over the ERA. That fight ended 32 years ago when outraged members of “the Women’s Lib movement” poured animal blood on the floors of the Capitol in Springfield and wrote in it the names of Gov. Jim Thompson, House Speaker George Ryan and other lawmakers they blamed for leaving the
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