Better Late Than Never: Virginia's 2020 Ratification of the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment

This paper examines the efforts of women legislators in the Virginia General Assembly to have the state ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. The ERA, which passed in both chambers of the U.S. Congress in 1972 and states 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," would effectively prohibit sex discrimination in federal and state law. Virginia's status as the 38th state to ratify the ERA is important because amendments to the U.S. Constitution require an affirmative vote of two-thirds in both the U.S. House and Senate and passage by three-fourths of the 50 U.S. states. With ratification of the ERA in 2020, Virginia became the last state needed to reach that requisite state threshold even as the action was largely symbolic since the deadline for states to ratify the amendment passed in 1982. This paper considers how the two main ERA bill sponsors, both women of color, used their status as lawmakers to navigate the gendered structures of the Virginia General Assembly and secure passage of the Amendment. I draw on elite interviews of women state legislators and archival information from the 2020 session of the Virginia General Assembly to reconstruct and analyze the legislative effort and outcome. That these women legislators prevailed in their efforts at substantive representation of women by women is all the more remarkable given that women, especially women of color, are significantly underrepresented as members of the Virginia state legislature, the oldest legislative body in the U.S.