What If The Equal Rights Amendment Was Ratified?

The Actual History

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) represents one of the most significant near-misses in American constitutional history. First introduced to Congress in 1923 by suffragist Alice Paul, the amendment's text was simple yet profound: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." For nearly five decades, the ERA remained largely dormant in Congress, introduced in every session but rarely advancing beyond committee hearings.

The political landscape shifted dramatically in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of second-wave feminism. Women's rights advocates, frustrated by the uneven patchwork of state laws governing women's legal status and inspired by the civil rights movement, rallied around the ERA as their central legislative goal. Representative Martha Griffiths (D-Michigan) successfully used a discharge petition to bring the amendment to the House floor, circumventing the Judiciary Committee where it had been bottled up for years.

On October 12, 1971, the House of Representatives passed the ERA by an overwhelming vote of 354-24. The Senate followed suit on March 22, 1972, approving the amendment 84-8. With bipartisan support and the endorsement of President Richard Nixon, the amendment was sent to the states for ratification. Congress set a seven-year deadline (until March 22, 1979) for three-fourths of states (38 at the time) to ratify.

Initially, ratification seemed assured. Within a year, 30 states had ratified the amendment. However, momentum stalled as organized opposition emerged, most prominently led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly and her STOP ERA campaign. Schlafly mobilized conservative women around arguments that the ERA would eliminate gender-specific protections for women, require women to be drafted into military combat, legalize same-sex marriage, and undermine traditional family structures.

By 1977, the ratification count had reached only 35 states—three short of the required threshold. In a controversial move, Congress extended the deadline to June 30, 1982. However, no additional states ratified during this extension. In fact, five states (Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee, and South Dakota) voted to rescind their earlier ratifications, though the legal validity of such rescissions remained disputed.

When the extended deadline expired in 1982, the ERA fell three states short of ratification. In subsequent decades, occasional congressional efforts to restart the process failed to gain traction. A renewed push began in 2017 following the Women's March, with Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018), and Virginia (2020) voting to ratify the amendment decades after the deadline. However, the legal status of these late ratifications remains disputed, with the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel ruling in 2020 that the deadline had expired, effectively killing the amendment unless Congress were to restart the entire process.

As of 2025, despite periodic congressional efforts to revive it, the Equal Rights Amendment is not part of the U.S. Constitution, leaving gender equality protections primarily established through legislation like the Civil Rights Act and court decisions interpreting the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

The Point of Divergence

What if the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified before the 1979 deadline? In this alternate timeline, we explore a scenario where three additional states ratified the ERA between 1977 and early 1979, securing its place as the 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Several plausible paths could have led to this outcome:

Scenario 1: A Weaker Opposition Movement

In our timeline, Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign successfully mobilized conservative opposition. In this alternate scenario, internal disagreements fragment the opposition movement, particularly around tactics and messaging. Without Schlafly's organizational genius or with a split in the conservative movement, the anti-ERA forces fail to build the cohesive coalition that proved so effective historically. As a result, state legislators in key swing states face less coordinated pressure against ratification.

Scenario 2: Strategic Feminist Adaptation

In this variation, ERA supporters recognize earlier the effectiveness of Schlafly's arguments about military service and traditional family values. Rather than dismissing these concerns, pro-ERA organizations mount a more effective counter-campaign that directly addresses fears about the amendment's impact. By framing the ERA as strengthening families by ensuring women's economic security and emphasizing that Congress would retain authority over draft legislation, they neutralize key opposition arguments in critical swing states.

Scenario 3: Different Political Timing

A slight shift in political timing could also have changed the outcome. In this scenario, key state votes are scheduled slightly earlier, before opposition fully mobilizes. Alternatively, particular elections in swing states result in slightly different legislative compositions in 1977-78, providing narrow pro-ERA majorities in states like Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois (which in our timeline didn't ratify until 2018).

In this alternate timeline, we posit that through some combination of these factors, three additional states—Florida, North Carolina, and Oklahoma—ratify the ERA by January 1979. The 38-state threshold is reached, and despite legal challenges regarding the state rescissions, the ERA is formally certified as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution on March 1, 1979, just weeks before the original deadline would have expired.

The United States Constitution now includes the text: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

Immediate Aftermath

Legal Implementation Challenges

The immediate aftermath of ERA ratification presented significant challenges for the American legal system, which suddenly needed to evaluate thousands of sex-based distinctions in federal and state laws:

Initial Legal Confusion: In the first year following ratification, federal and state courts faced a deluge of cases challenging sex-based distinctions in law. The Justice Department under President Carter established a special ERA Implementation Task Force to systematically review federal statutes and regulations for compliance.
State Law Revisions: States with extensive gender-based distinctions in their legal codes scrambled to review and revise laws. Some states, anticipating ratification, had already begun this process, while others were caught unprepared. By late 1979, most state legislatures had established special committees to identify and remedy non-compliant laws.
Supreme Court Recalibration: The Supreme Court, which had already been moving toward heightened scrutiny for sex-based classifications under Justice Brennan's influence, quickly adopted strict scrutiny for gender classifications in the 1980 case Williams v. Arizona State University. This decision established that gender-based distinctions would be treated with the same high level of scrutiny as race-based distinctions—permissible only if narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.

Military Service and the Draft

One of the most contentious immediate issues concerned military service and the draft registration system:

Selective Service Revision: In June 1979, Congress faced the expiration of draft registration requirements instituted during the Vietnam War. With the ERA now in effect, legislators could not simply reinstate male-only registration. After heated debate, Congress passed the Equal Military Service Act of 1979, requiring all citizens regardless of gender to register with Selective Service upon turning 18, though with differing physical requirements for combat roles.
Military Integration Acceleration: While women had been serving in expanding military roles since the 1970s, the ERA accelerated integration. President Carter directed the Department of Defense to eliminate remaining sex-based restrictions on military service, though the process of implementation extended into the early 1980s. The first women entered combat training programs in 1980, though full integration into all combat roles took years longer.
Public Backlash: The draft registration issue sparked perhaps the most visible early backlash against the ERA. Anti-ERA groups organized protests at post offices during registration periods, and some religious communities advised civil disobedience for their female members regarding registration. However, these protests diminished as the all-volunteer military continued and no actual draft occurred.

Employment and Economic Impact

The ERA had significant immediate impacts on employment policies and practices:

Corporate Compliance Efforts: Major corporations, already adapting to Title VII and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requirements, accelerated gender equality initiatives. Human resources departments expanded compliance teams, revised employment policies, and conducted internal pay equity analyses to preempt potential litigation.
Insurance and Pension Recalibration: The insurance and financial services industries faced immediate disruption. Gender-based actuarial tables used for life insurance, annuities, and pension calculations became legally suspect. The insurance industry lobbied for transition periods, but by 1981, unisex rating became the standard practice, causing significant premium adjustments across various insurance products.
Labor Market Adjustments: Protective labor laws that limited women's working hours or conditions were immediately challenged. While some genuine safety provisions were maintained in gender-neutral form, many restrictions were struck down, opening previously restricted occupations to women. Female applications to law enforcement, firefighting, and certain industrial jobs increased significantly in 1979-1980.

Political Realignment

The ERA's ratification triggered significant political realignment, particularly around gender issues:

Republican Party Divisions: The GOP, which had included ERA support in its platform since 1940, experienced internal strife. Moderate Republicans who supported the ERA, like President Ford and many northeastern Republicans, clashed with the emerging conservative wing that had opposed it. This tension contributed to the party's rightward shift on social issues as Reagan secured the 1980 nomination.
Democratic Consolidation: Democrats largely unified around implementing and defending the ERA. The party saw an influx of women activists who had been mobilized by the ratification campaign. In the 1980 elections, Democrats emphasized their role in securing the amendment's passage, helping them maintain their congressional majorities despite Reagan's presidential victory.
Emergence of Gender Gap in Voting: Political scientists noted the emergence of a distinct "gender gap" in voting patterns beginning with the 1980 election. Women, particularly younger, educated women, shifted more decisively toward Democratic candidates, while men, especially those in traditional industries, moved toward Republicans.

Media and Cultural Reactions

The cultural response to ERA ratification was mixed and evolved rapidly:

Media Representation: Television productions quickly incorporated the ERA's implications into programming. Shows like "Alice," "One Day at a Time," and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" featured storylines about women entering traditionally male occupations or challenging gender discrimination. By the 1979-80 television season, network executives were actively seeking programs featuring women in non-traditional roles.
Educational Changes: Schools and universities began reviewing curricula and policies for ERA compliance. Title IX, already in effect for educational programs, gained reinforcement from the constitutional amendment. Women's athletic programs received increased funding and attention, though full parity remained a distant goal.
Conservative Countermobilization: Religious conservative organizations like the Moral Majority, formed in 1979, incorporated opposition to "ERA excesses" into their broader platform of traditional values. While they could no longer oppose the amendment itself, they focused on shaping its implementation through legislation and court challenges, particularly around issues of family law and religious exemptions.

Long-term Impact

Constitutional Jurisprudence Evolution

The ERA fundamentally transformed American constitutional law over the decades following its ratification:

Elevation of Gender to "Suspect Classification": By the mid-1980s, the Supreme Court firmly established gender as a "suspect classification" deserving the highest level of judicial scrutiny, equivalent to race. This standard, articulated in cases like United States v. Jenkins (1984) and Rockwell v. Maine (1986), meant that virtually any gender-based distinction in law faced an exceedingly high bar to survive constitutional review.
Impact on Other Groups: The ERA jurisprudence created ripple effects for other equality movements. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2013)—earlier than in our timeline—the Supreme Court invoked ERA principles to strike down same-sex marriage bans, ruling that distinctions based on sexual orientation often functioned as impermissible sex-based classifications. Similarly, transgender rights cases evolved more rapidly, with the Court ruling in Thompson v. Department of Education (2017) that discrimination based on gender identity constituted sex discrimination prohibited by the ERA.
Religious Freedom Tensions: As ERA implementation expanded, tensions emerged with religious liberty claims. In Sisters of Mercy v. Michigan (1991), the Supreme Court carved out limited exemptions for religious organizations regarding ministerial positions but otherwise upheld the ERA's applicability even to religious employers. This balance between equality rights and religious freedom claims continues to evolve through present-day litigation.

Legal System Transformation

Over decades, the ERA drove systematic changes throughout American law:

Family Law Revolution: State family law systems underwent complete transformation. By the late 1980s, all states had abandoned gender-based presumptions in child custody decisions, replacing them with "best interests of the child" standards. Alimony laws were rewritten to be gender-neutral, with support based on economic factors rather than spousal gender. These changes accelerated the trend toward more egalitarian divorce outcomes.
Criminal Justice Reform: The criminal justice system gradually eliminated gender disparities in sentencing, facility conditions, and parole decisions. Women's prisons received increased funding to achieve parity with men's facilities. The documented "sentencing discount" that women historically received for similar crimes gradually disappeared, leading to more equitable outcomes but also increasing the female prison population by approximately 15% by the 2000s compared to our timeline.
Expansion of Legal Concepts: The legal concept of discrimination expanded to include practices with disparate impact on women, not just intentional discrimination. This led to successful challenges against occupational licensing requirements, zoning restrictions, and government contracting practices that, while facially neutral, disproportionately disadvantaged women-dominated occupations or businesses.

Military and National Security

The ERA's impact on military policy represents one of its most profound and visible effects:

Combat Integration Timeline: Full integration of women into combat roles occurred more rapidly than in our timeline. By 1986, all combat restrictions had been eliminated, with appropriately gender-neutral physical standards established for different positions. The first female Army Rangers graduated in 1989, nearly 25 years earlier than in our timeline, and the first female Navy SEAL completed training in 1994.
Military Demographics: By 2025, women comprise approximately 28% of active-duty military personnel (compared to about 17% in our timeline) and hold 23% of general and flag officer positions. Studies indicate that earlier integration led to more rapid cultural acceptance within military institutions, reducing harassment and discrimination issues that plagued our timeline's more gradual integration.
National Security Leadership: The normalization of women in military leadership accelerated their advancement in national security roles more broadly. Presidents from both parties appointed women to key national security positions at higher rates than in our timeline. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall became the first female Secretary of Defense in 2009 under President Obama, while Michele Flournoy served as National Security Advisor under President Romney (2017-2021).

Economic and Workplace Effects

Over five decades, the ERA drove substantial economic changes:

Pay Equity Acceleration: The gender wage gap narrowed more rapidly than in our timeline. By 2025, women earn approximately 94 cents for every dollar earned by men in comparable positions (compared to about 82 cents in our timeline). This acceleration resulted from stronger legal remedies under the ERA and greater corporate accountability for unexplained pay disparities.
Occupational Desegregation: Traditionally gender-segregated occupations integrated more rapidly. Female representation in STEM fields, for example, reached approximately 40% by 2020, compared to roughly 27% in our timeline. Conversely, male representation in nursing, elementary education, and social work increased significantly, though these fields remain majority female.
Benefits Restructuring: Employee benefits systems underwent comprehensive restructuring. Pension systems eliminated gender-based actuarial calculations. Family leave policies developed along gender-neutral lines, with paternity leave becoming normalized by the late 1990s. Corporate benefit structures increasingly accommodated diverse family arrangements rather than assuming traditional nuclear families.
Entrepreneurship Gap Reduction: Female entrepreneurship rates accelerated, with women-owned businesses constituting approximately 45% of all businesses by 2025 (compared to about 33% in our timeline). Financial institutions faced greater scrutiny for lending disparities, leading to more equitable access to capital for female entrepreneurs.

Political Landscape Transformation

The ERA fundamentally altered American political dynamics:

Gender Representation in Government: Female political representation increased more rapidly, though not reaching parity. By 2025, women hold approximately 38% of congressional seats (compared to about 27% in our timeline) and have served as governors in 40 states. The first female president, Elizabeth Warren, was elected in 2024, defeating incumbent President Ron DeSantis.
Party Realignment Acceleration: The gender gap in American politics widened earlier and more dramatically, with women moving more decisively toward the Democratic Party and men toward Republicans. This accelerated other demographic sorting in American politics and contributed to greater partisan polarization around gender-related issues.
Judicial Composition: The federal judiciary achieved gender balance more rapidly. President Clinton appointed the first female Chief Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in 1994. By 2025, the Supreme Court has a 5-4 female majority, and approximately 48% of all federal judges are women, compared to about 35% in our timeline.
Policy Priority Shifts: Issues historically categorized as "women's issues" gained earlier mainstream political attention. Universal pre-K education, passed under President Obama in 2014, gained support as an economic policy rather than as a gendered family issue. Similarly, paid family leave passed Congress in 2019 with bipartisan support, framed as a workforce competitiveness measure rather than a women's benefit.

Global Influence

The ERA's ratification influenced gender equality movements globally:

Treaty Ratifications: The United States ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1980 under President Carter, removing previous reservations due to the ERA's passage. This accelerated global adoption of CEDAW's principles and strengthened international gender equality norms.
Democracy Promotion: U.S. foreign policy more consistently emphasized gender equality in democratization efforts. The Millennium Challenge Corporation, established in 2004, made gender equality metrics central to its aid qualification standards. New constitutions drafted with U.S. assistance, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, featured stronger equality provisions than in our timeline.
Corporate Global Standards: American multinational corporations, adapting to strict domestic equality standards, exported those practices to global operations more comprehensively than in our timeline. This created pressure for improved standards in countries with weaker legal protections, effectively making ERA standards a de facto global corporate baseline by the 2010s.

Persistent Challenges

Despite the ERA's impact, certain challenges proved resistant to constitutional guarantees alone:

Informal Discrimination: While formal barriers fell rapidly, informal discrimination proved more persistent. Workplace culture, hiring biases, and promotion patterns continued to disadvantage women in complex ways that proved difficult to address through litigation alone, though at reduced levels compared to our timeline.
Intersectional Limitations: Critics noted that the ERA's benefits disproportionately advantaged white, middle-class, and educated women. Women of color, disabled women, and economically disadvantaged women continued to face compound discrimination that the ERA alone couldn't fully address. This recognition led to the development of more nuanced "intersectional equality" legal frameworks by the 2010s.
Work-Life Balance Issues: Despite more gender-neutral family policies, women continued to perform a disproportionate share of unpaid care work. By 2025, time-use studies show women spending approximately 1.4 times as many hours on household and caregiving responsibilities as men—improved from our timeline's 1.8 ratio, but still unequal.

Expert Opinions

Dr. Melissa Chen, Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School, offers this perspective: "The ERA's ratification in 1979 fundamentally altered the trajectory of American legal development. Without it, gender equality jurisprudence would have continued its piecemeal evolution under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, subject to shifting judicial interpretations and political appointments. Instead, the explicit constitutional guarantee created an enduring foundation that weathered conservative courts and administrations. The most significant counterfactual impact, in my view, is in the military sphere—our timeline's accelerated integration of women into combat roles fundamentally transformed not just the armed forces but broader social conceptions of gender capability and American security policy."

Professor James Thornton, Historian of Social Movements at Howard University, presents a more critical assessment: "While the ERA undoubtedly accelerated formal legal equality, we should be cautious about overstating its transformative impact. Many of the advances we've witnessed would likely have occurred anyway, albeit more slowly, through legislative action and social evolution. The amendment's greatest limitation was its formalistic approach to equality, which addressed discrimination but not the deeper structural barriers facing women, particularly women of color and those from working-class backgrounds. The ERA gave us a more gender-balanced elite, but did less to challenge fundamental economic hierarchies. Today's remaining gaps in childcare availability, wage structures in feminized professions, and occupational segregation reveal the limits of constitutional remedies for deeply embedded social problems."

Dr. Eleanor Washington, Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy, provides this analysis: "The most profound long-term impact of the ERA has been the normalization of female authority in American society. When women routinely commanded military units, led Fortune 500 companies, and occupied the highest political offices decades earlier than in alternative scenarios, it fundamentally altered how Americans conceptualize leadership. This shift is evident in polling data showing that by 2010, fewer than 5% of Americans expressed reservations about women serving in any leadership capacity, compared to figures three times higher in the 1970s. The ERA created a virtuous cycle: more women in visible leadership positions normalized female authority, which in turn reduced barriers to advancement for subsequent generations. This may be why we see significantly higher rates of female participation in fields ranging from venture capital to neurosurgery compared to what we might expect in a counterfactual timeline without ERA ratification."