🌼👗🌼 March 25, 2023 (Saturday) Lady Bug High Tea at 20589 W. Homestead Road, Cupertino 🌼
Cost $35.00 Phone 408-252-3954
for Information
Equal Rights Amendment 150 years ago, Americans believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Bright, curious, and ambitious women found few other places to display their talents. After household care, benevolent work at church and patriotic fundraising for Civil War soldiers were the only outlets that permitted women to contribute to shaping the public world. Education and career opportunities were few. Skill-building, beyond needlework, was deemed unnecessary. Political activism, civic reform, and community involvement were regarded as outside the realm of big-hearted mothers and wives who should focus on loving their families and providing a good example of moral behavior. A few brave women in New York and Boston challenged these constraints in the late 1860s and soon persuaded the general population of middle-class American women to form voluntary organizations in their neighborhoods to defy custom, undertake serious study of intellectual topics and current events, and organize for social reforms at the local, state, and national levels. All this well before they saw the right to vote to effect change at the ballot box! In the years between the 1870s and 1920s, women’s clubs became the major vehicle by which American women could exercise their developing talents to shape the world beyond their homes. Although the twentieth century would deliver increasing educational, professional, and business venues for women to make use of their intellect, training, and creativity, hundreds of clubs continued to function in this country into modern times, providing members with regular meetings in order to network, learn about social issues, identify civic problems, and devise solutions through volunteer power.
Julia Ward Howe, 1908. CREDIT
Library of Congress It was journalist Jane “Jennie June” Croly in New York and anti-slavery advocate Julia Ward Howe in Boston who first brought together their peers, in 1868, to usher in the women’s club movement that would sweep the nation by the turn of the century. These women decided to ignore customary restrictions and insisted on developing their minds and communities by meeting regularly in order to learn about the great ideas of the past and contemporary urban problems together. In particular, they came to target limitations on the lives of women and children and sought to do something about them. They valued education and called for women’s admittance to institutions of higher learning, but they also addressed the abysmal conditions of working girls in factories and appealed for the amelioration of workplace abuses.
General Federation of Women's Clubs in the early 20th century. CREDIT
Women's History & Resource Center at the General Federation of Women's Club Soon women throughout the United States, in small towns and large cities, embraced the club format to bolster their association with like-minded neighbors. Some enjoyed the long overdue study of literature, history, and geography. Others stressed reform and initiated scholarships for girls, improved street lighting, environmental protections, and free milk clinics for impoverished mothers. By 1890, a General Federation of Women’s Clubs was founded to assist the nation’s club women in benefiting from the experiences of other clubs. The organization, which still exists in Washington, DC, provided publications and regular conventions for members to swap success stories about the educational and reform projects that they had attempted. Jane Croly’s massive book The History of Women’s Clubs in America, published in 1898, attests to the impressive number of clubs and staggering ambition of members in the era before the twentieth century. By 1910, membership totaled 800,000 women, and the numbers would rise until 1926.
Officers of the Women's League of Newport, Rhode Island. Circa 1899 CREDIT
Library of Congress At first, club membership tended to be exclusive. In general, white, Protestant women of comfortable means, with husbands in positions of local prominence and servants who carried out domestic tasks, tended to form and join clubs. Once their youngest children were in school, mothers felt free to hold meetings once or twice a month, September through June. Gradually, the club idea grew among excluded populations, including religious, racial, and ethnic minorities and wage-earning women, who founded clubs of their own. Small groups held meetings in members’ homes. Larger and more affluent groups built clubhouses with posh facilities to host meetings, classes, and events for members as well as the community. The two largest clubs in the nation in the 1920s were located in Los Angeles. The Friday Morning Club and Wilshire Ebell, each with an enrollment of over two thousand members, could therefore marshal significant pressure on government officials to improve local parks, playgrounds, libraries, workplace safety, clean water, and a wide range of other reforms for the community. Our entire nation is dotted with grand clubhouses that represent the heyday of women’s organizational efforts in our past: the Woman’s University Club and Woman’s Century Club in Seattle, Ebell in Los Angeles, Worcester (Massachusetts) Women’s Club, Baton Rouge (Louisiana) Women’s Club, Victoria (Texas) Women’s Club, Barnesville (Georgia) Women’s Club, to name but a few. Their histories are replete with major and minor improvements instigated by the members through their clubs. As modern women pushed to break more and more glass ceilings in business, politics, and the professions, clubs ceased to remain key venues for women to develop and spend their organizational skills. Club work did continue, meeting community needs as they arose, notably through charitable efforts during the Great Depression of the 1930s, war relief efforts during World War II in the 1940s, and suburban community building in the 1950s. But clubs did not continue to attract the numbers of women that they had prior to the 1920s. Recent years have seen the closure of many once-esteemed women’s clubs, but others are enjoying revitalization through interest from today’s women, eager to reconnect with peers and enrich their lives by advancing the livability of their communities. Originally published in Volume 19 of A Different Point of View.
The Equal Rights Amendment The first official meeting of women to discuss the issue of gender equality was at Seneca Falls in 1848. Over 170 years later, women have sought gender equality through various waves in American history. The Progressive Era saw the passage of the 19th Amendment and the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s saw major advances for women in such areas like Title IX. The ERA, to many Americans, would be the necessary step in making a legal statement about gender equality and gender protection in the Constitution. That dream fell short after the anti-ERA movement fought against its passage. The #MeToo movement in recent years has reignited the feminist movement and brought the ERA back to Capitol Hill.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” - Section 1, Equal Rights Amendment. After more than a generation of significant advances for women, do we still need the Equal Rights Amendment? Yes, we absolutely do. Legal sex discrimination is not yet a thing of the past, and the progress of the past 60 years is not irreversible. Remaining gender inequities result more from individual behavior and social practices than from legal discrimination, but all can be positively influenced by a strong message when the U.S. Constitution declares zero tolerance for any form of sex discrimination. The reasons why we need the ERA are at one level philosophical and symbolic, and at another level very specific and practical. The first — and still the only — right that the U.S. Constitution specifically affirms equally for women and men is the right to vote. Equal rights activist Alice Paul first introduced the ERA in 1923 to expand the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to both genders. She understood the importance of constitutional protections for all citizens when she argued, "We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government." Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in 1920.[1] After 1920, Paul spent a half century as leader of the National Woman's Party, which fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Paul and Crystal Eastman, to secure constitutional equality for women. She won a large degree of success with the inclusion of women as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Afterward, Paul and the National Women’s Party focused on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to guarantee women constitutional protection from discrimination. Paul spent her life advocating for this and other women’s issues. The Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress on March 22, 1972 and sent to the states for ratification. In order to be added to the Constitution, it needed approval by legislatures in three-fourths (38) of the 50 states. The ERA was ratified by 35 states in the 1970s, but by the 1982 deadline was three states short of 38 needed to become a constitutional amendment. The 15 states that did not ratify the Equal Rights Amendment before the 1982 deadline were Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. Since formulation of the "three-state strategy" for ratification in 1994, ERA bills have been introduced in subsequent years in one or more legislative sessions in ten of the unratified states (Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia). Between 1995 and 2016, ERA ratification bills were released from committee in some states and were passed by one but not both houses of the legislature in two of them. In Illinois, the House but not the Senate passed an ERA ratification bill in 2003, while the Senate but not the House did so in 2014. In five of the six years between 2011 and 2016, the Virginia Senate passed a resolution ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, but the House of Delegates never released a companion bill from committee for a full vote on the House floor. On March 22, 2017, 45 years to the day after Congress passed the ERA, Nevada became the 36th state to ratify it. On May 30, 2018, Illinois became the 37th state. ERA bills have also been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.
