2
"Reasonable Distinctions": An Alternative to the ERA

In 1945 and 1946, the respect engendered by women's performance during World War II had lent unprecedented energy to the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. Even after Congress decided not "to amend motherhood," the New York Herald Tribune , calling the amendment "a measure of simple justice that is not to be denied,"^[1] predicted rightly that the ERA would reappear on the legislative docket. Without missing a beat, the National Woman's party had begun to collect new statements of support from political figures, and in January 1947 John Robsion (R-Ky.) introduced the measure in the House, declaring its passage by Congress to be "at hand."^[2] But the political climate had already begun to change in the mere year and a half since the war's end. The impulse toward women's equality, which had never really held the field, continued to dissipate, and the backlash, with its insistent message that women stay home, took stronger hold. If the ERA was out of step with that prescription, alternative proposals appeared no more effective at resolving the tension between women's two roles.

As part of the conservative reaction, women's magazines launched an attack on feminist ideas, following the lead of a 1947 book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex . Its authors, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, described feminism as a "deep illness," characterized by a hatred of men and a taste for lechery. Women's quest for education, employment, and political power represented, they asserted, an attempt at symbolic castration. Rather than pursue such misbegotten goals, the healthy woman would choose to create a rewarding life for herself based on mothering and dependency, in tune with her biological and psy-

chological destiny. Although sociologists offered thoughtful counterarguments, these usually appeared in inaccessible scholarly journals. In any case, Lundberg and Farnham had struck the note of the times: women belonged at home.^[3]

After fifteen years of depression and war, American women and men sought a haven in the home—stability, security, and the warmth of family in the place of uncertainty, fear, and loneliness. No one had to force women into marriage and motherhood.^[4] The marriage rate, 84.5 per thousand women in 1945, shot up to 120.7 in 1946 and 106.8 in 1947; fluctuating between 78 and 98 per thousand for the next ten years, it fell off again only in 1958.^[5]

Yet with only the briefest dip in the immediate postwar period, the number of women employed continued to rise. Many women did not want to, or could not, leave the labor force to be full-time wives and mothers. They voted with their feet in the postwar period and throughout the 1950s, taking jobs in the face of public disapproval but in the solid company of their peers. Between 1951 and 1963, married women with husbands present and children between the ages of six and seventeen increased their labor force participation rate from 30.3 percent to 41.5 percent. They worked to buy food and pay the rent in the face of a staggering inflation rate, but they also sought an education for their children and a higher standard of living for the entire family.^[6]

Women also went back to school. Although the GI bill offered educational opportunities almost exclusively to men, and so the proportion of women in schools declined compared to men in several years, women made substantial gains. The number of women Ph.D.'s, though small, doubled between 1948 and 1960, and the number of women who held master's degrees (thirteen thousand in 1948) increased by 80 percent in the same period. More than 103,000 women earned bachelor's degrees in 1950; by 1959 the number had risen to over 127,000.^[7]

Under penalty of being labeled neurotic (à la Lundberg and Farnham), women workers declined to offer a feminist defense of their right to work. Their families, they insisted, needed the money they earned. They did not challenge male prerogatives in the prestigious professions, nor did they overtly demand a

redefinition of sex roles within the home. Although many states gave husbands control of the earnings women brought home and some barred women from certain occupations, working women in general took little notice of legislation concerning their right to jobs, to equal pay with men, or to constitutional protection against discrimination.^[8] Women leaders were therefore hard pressed to argue that such legislation demanded immediate attention.

Advocates of civil rights for black Americans had no such problem. Faced with public demonstrations, retaliatory violence, and pressure from notable Americans, President Truman had taken a number of steps to improve the lot of black Americans. In December 1946 he had created a presidential committee on civil rights, which issued a report the following year; in 1948 he banned discrimination based on race in federal employment, and barred segregation in the armed services. In December 1951 the newly formed Committee on Government Contract Compliance began to monitor federal contractors for discrimination. The National Woman's party demanded that women be included in Truman's executive orders, but the request was ignored. None of the largely white women's organizations interested in the Equal Rights Amendment or other measures had tried to forge an alliance with civil rights groups; the NWP did not usually even support measures seeking to eliminate racial discrimination. Worse, it responded in anger to the notion that blacks would have rights denied to women. Still, the federal measures undertaken on behalf of blacks served as models in the fight to eradicate similar problems for women. Only months after Truman named his presidential committee on civil rights some women leaders made much the same proposal for women, as a way to meet the threat of the ERA.

The "Status Bill"

Aware of the activity of the National Woman's party and anxious about the continuing strength of the constitutional amendment, ERA opponents in 1947 decided to follow Eleanor Roosevelt's advice to construct a positive alternative piece of legislation, one that would eliminate "unfair" discrimination in the law without

the supposedly deleterious effects of the ERA. The proposed joint resolution became known as the "Status Bill" or the Taft-Wadsworth bill (after its sponsors Senator Robert A. Taft [R-Ohio] and Representative James W. Wadsworth [R-N.Y.]).^[9] Seeking a less negative image, the National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment, which had drafted the bill, changed its name to the National Committee on the Status of Women (NCSW).^[10]

The members of the NCSW chose to offer an alternative "joint resolution" rather than a constitutional amendment for several strategic reasons. First, they believed that because a resolution required only a simple majority in each house of Congress, it would be easier to obtain than a constitutional amendment, which required a two-thirds majority in Congress and then approval by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Second, they feared that any amendment they offered might itself be amended to resemble the ERA more closely than they would wish. Finally, they felt that any constitutional amendment concerning women would invite litigation, and the outcome of a court fight could jeopardize the legislation they wished to safeguard.^[11]

The Status Bill had two main components. The first was an unusual statement of "policy" for the United States, one that sought to acknowledge the desire both to enhance women's autonomy and to reaffirm their connection to the family. Apparently presuming that the two aims were reconcilable, the Status Bill declared that "in law and its administration no distinctions on the basis of sex shall be made except such as are reasonably justified by differences in physical structure, biological, or social function." The proponents of this bill noted approvingly that, although such a section "prohibited" sex discrimination, it permitted differentiation on "reasonable" grounds, such as those underlying protective labor legislation only for women and military service only for men, "based on rational and commonly accepted assumptions and beliefs."^[12]

The other key section seemed more unambiguously aimed at change. It created a Commission on the Legal Status of Women, composed of seven members appointed by the president, to "make a full and complete study . . . of the economic, civil, social and political status of women, and the nature and extent of dis-

criminations based on sex throughout the United States, its Territories, and Possessions." The bill also required federal agencies to comply with the policy statement and urged that states take similar actions.^[13]

According to its drafters, the bill constituted a compromise with the ERA. They knew that the National Woman's party would not accept it: "Frankly [the bill] is not framed to win the support of individuals who would seem to be satisfied with nothing less than a declaration, in fundamental law, that women, however different from men in their physical structure, biological or social function, must be accorded, by governments, identical treatment with men." But they argued that "all who earnestly desire to remove outmoded sex discriminations in law can at long last unite" behind their "practicable working program," whether or not they supported the ERA.^[14]

With its policy statement, however, the bill could not serve as a compromise. If the law could take note of social function as well as physical structure and biological characteristics, virtually any discrimination could be justified. Even committed members of the Women's Bureau coalition took exception. The executive secretary of the New York Women's Trade Union League wrote to its national office, which supported the bill: "Please tell me, what is a social function of women as distinguished from a social function of men? If you are implying that it is the social function of women to rear the children . . . , keep the home fires burning and to be supported by their husbands, then I say to you that you have opened wide and fastened back with iron bars the door to eliminating by law all married women from employment. . . . A continuation of this reasoning takes us into the question of equal pay."^[15] Several members of the Labor Advisory Council of the Women's Bureau also felt uneasy about the phrasing. Esther Peterson of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Katherine Ellickson of the research department of the Congress of Industrial Organizations requested that a preliminary definition of "reasonable distinctions" be made to guide the presidential commission the bill proposed to establish.^[16]

ERA proponents expressed markedly less enthusiasm. The General Federation of Women's Clubs asserted that enough data on women existed to make the commission superfluous,

and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs characterized the Status Bill as "sniping at the Equal Rights Amendment." The NWP issued a statement labeling the bill "unnecessary and unjustified," opening the "floodgates" to discrimination against women through the policy statement.^[17]

Nevertheless, proponents of the Status Bill regarded it as a method "to break the deadlock over the so-called Equal Rights Amendment." Eager for some movement, Eleanor Roosevelt, all seven women members of Congress, the League of Women Voters, and former directors of the women's divisions of both party national committees endorsed it. So did some ERA supporters, such as the New York Herald Tribune, which argued that the commission would "inevitably" reach the conclusion that protective labor laws should be extended to men. The Women's Bureau lobbied actively for the bill, although the White House remained silent.^[18]

The Status Bill failed as an effort of conciliation. Solidly identified with anti-ERA forces, the paradoxical policy statement engendered enough controversy that Congress could hardly enact it in the interest of accommodation. The ERA had been in both platforms, and both House and Senate judiciary committees were on record in favor of it. Thus, in the spring of 1948, both committees once again reported the amendment favorably and postponed consideration of the Taft-Wadsworth measure. Action to remove the ERA from the parties' platforms also proved unavailing, thanks to the efforts of prominent party women in support of the measure.^[19]

The ERA was not an issue during the 1948 campaign. Beset within his party by objections to his civil rights measures and assaulted by Henry Wallace's new Progressive Party for his belligerent stance toward the Soviets, Harry Truman's defeat seemed assured. But much to everyone's surprise, Truman pulled the election out of the grasp of Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress (although by only twelve votes in the Senate). India Edwards, who, as head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, had planned the program to get out the women's vote, emphasized inflation, not women's rights. Relatively few women held or ran for public office. In

1949, fewer than 3 percent of the nation's state legislators were women: only one woman sat in the Senate, and eight in the House of Representatives.^[20]

The new count revealed, however, that the ERA stood a reasonably good chance of passage in the Senate. In view of the lack of enthusiasm for the Status Bill, ERA opponents looked around for another measure that would provide either a positive alternative, or at least a way to maintain the status quo with respect to protective labor laws. They devised such a safety catch in the Hayden amendment.^[21]

The Hayden Amendment

In 1921, when the National Woman's party first proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women, it had considered a proviso to exempt laws that applied to conditions of women's work, hoping to win support from the women's groups who advocated those laws. It was a compromise unacceptable to both sides. The members of the Women's Bureau coalition found it insufficient protection, and the NWP, irritated by the coalition's response, declared that special laws for women ought to be eliminated because they restricted women's right to employment on their own terms. A Wisconsin decision concerning an "equal rights" law passed in that state substantiated this view. That law had included a clause exempting "special protections and privileges" for women, and in 1923 the state attorney general had ruled that the state could continue to forbid women to work as employees of the Wisconsin legislature because that job required "unseasonable" hours of work.^[22]

Nevertheless, adversaries of the ERA held to their view that the addition of a section to the ERA expressly exempting protective labor legislation would not prove adequate. In 1944 the solicitor of the Department of Labor had warned that too many kinds of protective laws existed—an amendment could not exempt them all: no matter how carefully such a provision were drafted, some desirable laws might yet be vulnerable to elimination through the ERA. Moreover, the possibility existed that such an amendent to the ERA could be adopted by one house of Congress and then eliminated by the other. Still, in the face

of the apparent popularity of the ERA, the National Committee on the Status of Women had decided that it had no choice but to support a safeguarding clause.^[23]

The Senate debate on the ERA in the Eighty-first Congress began on January 23, 1950, and continued for three days. Proponents cited platform pledges, favorable committee reports, the support of well-known women's organizations, and the unfairness of discrimination based on sex. Opponents defended protective laws for women, cited labor opposition, and expressed fear of unknown consequences. Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.), an ERA opponent and introducer of the Status Bill, claimed that the ERA could "eliminate rape as a crime" and lead to joint bathroom facilities. Senator Andrew Schoeppel (R-Kans.) argued on the other side that giving women constitutional equality would help counter Communist propaganda (a salient issue with the intensification of fighting in Korea).^[24]

On January 25, near the close of the debate, Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.) offered his amendment. Following instructions from the Women's Bureau, Hayden proposed that a new section be added to the ERA: "The provisions of this article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions conferred by law upon persons of the female sex." Hayden offered the following explanation: "In the beginning, God made them different when male and female created He them." He went on in a personal vein, noting that his mother had borne and breast-fed him, that his father had built them a home and provided food and clothing on the "wild Apache-infested frontier," and that neither could have played the other's role. In the few minutes remaining for debate, Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) protested that Hayden was "emasculating" the ERA. The senators, however, eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to go on record in favor of both equal rights and special laws for women. They voted for the Hayden rider fifty-one to thirty-one and the ERA sixty-three to nineteen, well over the two-thirds vote required for a constitutional amendment.^[25]

The Hayden amendment caught ERA adherents by surprise. Because of the short time between Hayden's motion and the vote, ERA backers Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Me.) and Rep. Katharine St. George (R-N.Y.) had no opportunity to

approach their colleagues and explain that they wanted the rider defeated. Thus the ERA went to the House with the Hayden rider attached.^[26]

ERA adversaries considered the amendment with the Hayden rider only slightly less objectionable than the unaltered version, but ERA proponents repudiated it completely: in their view, the rider effectively negated the body of the amendment. NWP leader Alice Paul stated flatly, "It is impossible to imagine the Constitution containing two such paragraphs."^[27] If given no other choice, they preferred the bill dead.

In the House, the ERA faced not only the threat of the Hayden rider but also the unshakable antipathy of House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler. The liberal New Yorker had become committee chair in 1949, and he had no intention of allowing the ERA to reach the House floor even in its amended form. Katharine St. George had collected enough signatures of representatives to discharge Celler's committee, but fear of the Hayden amendment led her to withdraw her petition.^[28]

ERA opponents had succeeded in finding a technique to undercut the ideal of complete legal equality for women. The Hayden amendment proved unbeatable, so long as no outside social or political impetus pressured Congress to choose unequivocally between equal treatment for women or a legally defined special family responsibility. If forced to vote on the measure, members of Congress could now have it both ways: equality and special privileges for women. Moreover, with the Hayden rider, the ERA proved unacceptable to its initial backers, making it unlikely to pass—the outcome the anti-ERA forces desired most. If it were to pass, the rider offered a safeguard for the legislation they deemed essential to the welfare of women workers.

ERA advocates were stymied. Eleanor Roosevelt, now at the United Nations and sensitive to the international implications of constitutional equality for women, backpedaled on her long-standing objection to the amendment, but it made no difference. President Truman stayed out of the crossfire. With no genuine support for an amended ERA, and with no grassroots enthusiasm for a radical change in women's legal status, stalemate was a foregone conclusion. The NWP therefore looked to

the 1952 election, hoping for a Republican presidential victory to move the amendment forward.^[29]

Eisenhower: For . . . But Not Quite

The NWP and other ERA supporters were optimistic after the 1952 Republican victory because they believed that Republicans would be less sensitive to pressure from women labor activists. Indeed, retention of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act had been a campaign issue, with the Republicans coming out in favor of keeping it. In addition, Republicans had a longer history of support for the ERA, as the first party to introduce it in Congress in 1923 and the first, in 1940, to include support for the amendment in its platform.

But President Eisenhower held very conservative social views, and the Eisenhower period was profoundly one of social consolidation. Eisenhower eschewed a deliberately conceived and openly executed program aimed at social reform. In 1954 the Supreme Court decreed, in Brown v. Board of Education, that states could no longer segregate children by race in the public schools. Rather than welcoming this overdue gesture in support of racial equality, Eisenhower was angered by the decision and its intentional initiation of such broad social change by federal action. Confronted with overt resistance to the federal system on the part of some Southern states, Eisenhower took action against the segregationists only when national integrity appeared genuinely threatened.^[30]

Eisenhower disliked overt social manipulation by the federal government, but measures passed by Congress—as federal aid for education and home and highway construction—wrought extraordinary alterations in the country's landscape and demographics. Government support of industry included a massive influx of federal dollars, all in the name of defense, into the chemical, aerospace, electronics, and computer industries, creating thousands more white-collar jobs for women to fill. The money built the economy. Between 1945 and 1960 the GNP increased more than twofold, and per capita income rose 35 percent. By 1960 nine million families had become new home-

owners. More than ever before, Americans were suburban white-collar workers, well educated and well off.^[31]

Although Eisenhower insisted that government should be restrained, he did give small signs of promise to ERA supporters. For one, he replaced the Democratic Women's Bureau director, Frieda Miller, with a Republican state official, Alice Leopold. Miller had been only the second director in the bureau's thirty-year history, and by tradition bureau directors did not change with a change in administration. Mary Anderson, appointed by the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, had stayed through three Republican administrations. The Women's Bureau had long been the exclusive terrain of the liberal reformers and labor women who had lobbied for its creation, and Miller and her colleagues were not only hurt when she was replaced but also alarmed. Eisenhower's action suggested that the bureau would become less closely tied to its constituents and, therefore, presumably less a champion of women's welfare and more a tool of the administration.

Mary Anderson had been a trade unionist; Miller had worked with the National Consumers League before accepting an appointment as Industrial Commissioner in the New York State government (a post Frances Perkins had filled before her). Each represented a wing of the Women's Bureau coalition, devoted to the welfare of working-class women.

Leopold's career differed sharply. A businesswoman, she had started out as personnel director for a department store and then had owned a children's toy company. Active in Republican politics, she had won a seat in the Connecticut state legislature and gone on to become Connecticut's secretary of state in 1950. She was not unsympathetic to women's labor issues and had in fact authored Connecticut's equal pay law; she had also championed protective labor legislation. But she shifted the perspective of the Women's Bureau. For the first time, the bureau devoted part of its resources to the examination of issues concerning professional women. And as the Women's Bureau coalition feared, Leopold took the bureau out of the ERA fight.^[32]

Alice Paul thought that Leopold herself supported the amendment but that she could not make an unambiguous state-

ment in favor of the ERA because of opposition from the Women's Bureau staff. Leopold never did champion the measure, but she did consistently refuse to take any action to oppose the bill, and by stating on several occasions to ERA opponents and supporters, as well as to members of Congress, that the bureau no longer took a position against the ERA, she left a gaping hole in the leadership against the measure.^[33]

To the disappointment of ERA sponsors, however, her position made little difference with respect to the fate of the measure. The Hayden amendment had become an effective weapon in the anti-ERA arsenal, and with little pressure on Congress outside of the small group of Washington lobbyists the ERA had no real chance. The National Committee on the Status of Women, whose agenda had narrowed to the Status Bill, disbanded when the Hayden rider proved more successful in scuttling the ERA.

ERA adversaries easily maintained the upper hand, even after the Republicans had gained control of both houses of Congress in 1953. In May the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably, and by July 64 senators had pledged to vote for the amendment on the floor, as had 255 members of the House. But Carl Hayden offered his proviso on the Senate floor when the measure came up in mid-July, and once again the Senate approved both Hayden's clause (by a vote of 58 to 25) and the ERA (73 to 11).^[34]

As before, the amended ERA created not a measure tolerable to both sides of the women's political community but one acceptable to neither. When NWP sleuths determined that the House would endorse the Senate "compromise," they directed their supporters to kill the hybrid creation. Janus-faced, the ERA with the Hayden amendment incorporated two contradictory views of women—equal but not equal. So long as the nation remained divided, the Congress would not choose.

Likewise, administration signals on this issue remained ambiguous throughout the decade. The Department of Labor, under the direction of James P. Mitchell, had held steady in its opposition to the ERA, but the White House had begun to give other indications. In a 1954 meeting with Katharine St. George Eisenhower had, according to her report, offered his private

support. (The fall elections, however, put the Democrats back in control in both houses, vitiating Eisenhower's backing, even such as it was.) National Woman's party members began to receive invitations to Women's Bureau meetings, and in December 1955 Gerald D. Morgan, special counsel to the president, had written to Nina Price of the NWP that, because it had been included in the party platform, the ERA would continue to be part of the Republican program and that Eisenhower was "encouraged by the number of sponsors of the amendment in the House and Senate."^[35] (Secretary Mitchell countered, when he received a copy of Morgan's letter, that the platform did not commit the administration to a particular bill.) Notes of a prepress conference White House briefing in April 1956 suggest that the White House staff did not itself truly understand the basis for the dispute. A memorandum remarked: "Equal Rights for women came up, but nobody seemed to know exactly what was meant."^[36]

In 1956 the ERA stayed in both party platforms, and a high-placed Eisenhower campaign official succeeded in arranging what all regarded as a coup for ERA supporters. Dorothy Houghton, cochairman of the Citizens for Eisenhower campaign, pledged that she would try to get the president to make a statement of support for the amendment. To the satisfaction of ERA enthusiasts, in an address given to a packed house at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 25, a mere twelve days before the election, Eisenhower uttered these words: "And we shall—with intelligence and sympathetic understanding—do all in our power to make more secure, for all citizens, their civil rights. And, as a special item of this matter, we shall seek, as we promised in our Platform, to assure women everywhere in our land equality of rights."^[37] Although the candidate had not in fact promised with this pledge support for any specific measure, it gained him much affection from Republican women. Eisenhower won a personal landslide (which probably did not owe much to this particular statement), but the Democrats retained their control of both houses of Congress.

Neither his campaign promise nor his 1957 budget message, which also referred to equal rights for women, made a differ-

ence in the amendment's fate—nor could it have. Moreover, Eisenhower's sincerity in championing the women's cause, even if in fact he favored the ERA, seemed questionable in light of his other behavior. The minutes of a February 1957 meeting of the secretary of labor's policy committee noted that the secretary inferred a lack of whole-hearted commitment to the ERA on the president's part: "Pres. for—but not quite." In view of his own reservations and the president's recent messages, his own posture, he decided, would be cautious: "Secretary will fudge."^[38] The White House indeed responded to letters assuring the inquirers of the president's continuing interest in the subject of equal rights for women, but without specifically mentioning the Equal Rights Amendment.^[39] Eisenhower further unsettled ERA advocates by his response to reporter May Craig at an August press conference. When the well-known correspondent for the Portland, Maine, Press-Herald asked the president why he had not worked harder for the ERA, Eisenhower replied, laughing: "Well, it's hard for a mere man to believe that woman doesn't have equal rights. But, actually, this is the first time that this has come to my specific attention now since, oh, I think a year or so. . . . I just probably haven't been active enough in doing something about it."^[40] ERA supporters were shocked at both the president's response and his laughter; they had been under the impression that he had received and read their letters. Administration support was tepid, the Hayden amendment seemed unbeatable. The unadorned Equal Rights Amendment did not express the national sentiment, and it remained an unachieved objective.

The AFL-CIO Department of Legislation, headed by labor lobbyist Andrew Biemiller, maintained a cursory anti-ERA lobbying effort in the absence of effort from the Women's Bureau and other groups. The labor federation recognized that many legislators were sympathetic.^[41] As lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder put it, being for the ERA "is like being against sin, I suppose";^[42] AFL-CIO officials even admitted that "many of our own people . . . are surprized [sic ] to find labor opposed to it."^[43] But the labor organization had no internal qualms about its position or its support for protective labor laws. In fact, a half-hearted attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to craft yet an-

other compromise on the ERA elicited derision. One labor official responded: "If the ladies who are now worrying about this did not have this to worry about they would find something else. Vive le (sex) difference!"^[44] Biemiller made it clear to Senator Hayden that the organization was depending on him to continue to introduce his proviso. The Industrial Union Department urged affiliate unions to "keep up a constant barrage of communications to members of Congress," a campaign coordinated by legislative representative Esther Peterson.^[45] Although the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the amendment favorably in May 1959, by a vote of nine to three, the Senate in July 1960 voted both to adopt the Hayden rider and to recommit the bill to committee.

The course of the amendment's fortunes suggested that defeat of the measure throughout the decade rested on a national unwillingness to restructure sex roles, an unwillingness revealed in the success of the Hayden rider to the otherwise ideologically appealing amendment. The ERA stood little chance of passage because it represented an affirmation of absolute equality for women at a moment when heightened recognition of sex roles served a number of national functions, most important of which was the re-creation of a stable and familiar society in the wake of the social chaos of wartime. Engaged in the contest, some ERA opponents argued that only a more sharply focused piece of legislation would avoid the conflict that the ERA engendered. They proposed an equal-pay law.