79th Congress 1st Session. S.J. Res. 61 [Caption title]

[Washington, D.C.]: [Government Printing Office?], 1945. Very good. 13” x 8 3/8”. Single sheet handbill. Very good: creased at old horizontal folds; paper clip scar and tiny hole to one edge; light foxing.

This is the text of a 1945 Joint Resolution “proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to equal rights for men and women.” It covers one of the many (failed) introductions to Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a decades-long battle fought by the National Woman's Party (NWP) that was finally won in 1972.

NWP was an outgrowth of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, formed in 1913 (truncated) by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. The group played a critical role in the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, and one year later announced plans to campaign for another amendment to guarantee women equal rights with men; this would come to be known as ERA. In 1923 Paul made the first revision to ERA at Seneca Falls; she named this version the Lucretia Mott Amendment, after the abolitionist who fought for women's rights and attended the First Women's Rights Convention. ERA went under further revision in 1943. The women of NWP worked tirelessly for years, planning, publicizing and fighting for its approval. From 1943 it was reintroduced in each subsequent Congress, to no immediate avail; between 1948 and 1970, House Judiciary Committee chair Emanuel Celler refused to even consider it. The text of the 1943 revision became Section 1 of the version that would finally be passed by Congress in 1972.

This handbill lists the group of senators who introduced the April 1945 incarnation of the resolution, “which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.” It specifies three parts of the article, namely that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and that Congress would have the power to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” In September of that year, there was a Senate hearing on the resolution, at which multiple NWP leaders spoke; their words, again, unheeded.

A rare and important piece of political ephemera. We were unable to find evidence of this handbill in OCLC or online. (Inventory #: 8331)