Maya McFadden Photo
Brian Montez, Jennifer Lopez, Isabella Raucci, Maxwell Gamboa, Josh McGree, Alma Mendoza, Jayleen Nieves, Julia Miller.
Forty nine years after the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was originally proposed, seven New Haven juniors joined a national call for its ratification with “equality among all the sexes” in mind.
Metropolitan Business Academy (MBA) junior Maxwell Gamboa put an emphasis on “all” when discussing the ERA and his hope that it will protect all “people with wombs.”
In March, MBA social studies teacher Julia Miller taught her students about the history of the ERA, the decades-long halt in the effort to pass it, and the recent revival of efforts to get it fully ratified as the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, aimed at protecting people from discrimination on the basis of their sex. (Click here to read about that revival.)
Inspired, the students wrote letters to U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy to urge them to take charge in the push for its passage.
The proposed language of section one of the ERA is “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
In 1972, Congress passed the ERA with the condition that state legislatures ratify the amendment within the next seven years. By that deadline in 1979, only 35 states ratified the amendment; 38 were needed. To add an amendment to the Constitution, Congress must pass it with a two-thirds majority, and three-fourths of the 50 states must then ratify it.
A Congressional extension moved the deadline to 1982, but no additional states passed the amendment within those three years.
In 2017, Nevada ratified the ERA followed by Illinois in 2018. In January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA.
Some argue that the deadlines initially determined were binding. However, last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution affirming that the amendment is a part of the Constitution. The Senate did not pass the resolution. As of this March, a similar resolution, sponsored by Democratic U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has been filed in the Senate.
Connecticut ratified the ERA on March 15, 197., Miller’s students reached out to Blumenthal and Murphy to urge them to push their legislative colleagues to support them in pushing Congress to pass another resolution that effectively removes the deadline.
Due to the pandemic’s abrupt switch to remote learning, Miller couldn’t fit all of the usual units into the school year. So she offered the students the a choice in March between a unit on the Fourth Amendment and women’s constitutional rights. The group agreed on the women’s Constitutional rights unit in honor of it being Women’s History Month at the time and because they hadn’t “learned anything about women’s history in school growing up.”
This was the first time Constitutional Law students Gamboa, 16, Jayleen Nieves, 17, Jennifer Lopez, 16, Brian Montez, 16, Isabella Raucci, 17, Josh McGree, 17, Alma Mendoza, 17, were ever hearing about the ERA.
The students agreed that the limited information they learned about women’s history was from the internet while educating themselves in their own time.
“We won’t get closer to equity until this amendment happens,” said Lopez.
Several of the students interpreted the amendments language around sex to also protect those who are transgender and non-binary.
“If this existed earlier, being LGBT wouldn’t be deadly,” said Nieves.
The students each submitted a letter to the senators about their personal reasons for pushing the ERA. They received similar or replicated responses from Blumenthal and Murphy affirming their support for women’s issues and the ERA.
“We are a generation of change,” said McGree. “We’re not in the 1940s anymore. New rules need to be set like the ERA.”
Gamboa wants to be a teacher one day with a goal of teaching New Haven youth about sexual health beyond the gender binary.
He said hopes that the ratification of the ERA would improve the future of education about sexual health, women’s history, and gender nonconforming people.
In his years in New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), Gamboa said, health education was not taken serious. It made gender nonconforming students feel ostracized, he said.
“This could help New Haven be the first to give students proper education about sexual health for all,” he said.
While discussing the ERA, the class learned about legislation’s use of broad language versus specific language. The ERA’s board language inspired Nieves to focus her letter on the ERA’s potential impact on the LGBTQ+ community.
The students also talked about the ERA shedding light on discrimination against trans women, women of color, and undocumented women. “Many don’t know their rights. And other times there’s no law in place stopping people from dehumanizing someone,” said Gamboa.
The students learned about the ERA’s initial proposal nearly 50 years ago and the leadership of Phyllis Schlafly in opposing the ERA. In class they watched a clip from the show Mrs. America, which tells the story of Schlafly’s backlash against the movement pushing the ERA in the 1970s.
The students used this background as evidence to support their letters and submitted the assignment as a final project for the unit.
Gamboa’s goal is for the ERA to help New Haven push for providing more education about LGBTQ+ history, normalized pronoun usage, safer gender policies for bathrooms, and access to health care for gender nonconforming New Haveners.
“It about equality among all the sexes,” he said.
I would like to amend the proposed language of section one of the ERA to
"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex, gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation or disability or race or religion or ethnicity."
Regardless of whether you have female or male reproductive organs, or hormones, or secondary sexual characteristics, or have both male and female characteristics, or identify with the gender assigned to you at birth or not, or are physically attracted to the same sex or both sexes or none at all, or regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or physical abilities or disabilities everyone should be treated equally under the law with the same rights and privileges that sys-gendered Caucasian primarily Christian heterosexual males with no disabilities have enjoyed in our society without question for centuries. No government should restrict anyone's rights for simply who they are, how they identify, and their physical disabilities, who they love, as long as they are consenting adults.