The major issues behind the movement towards the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), were primarily women’s suffrage and labor rights. These are two topics that women fought for their right in for decades. With all the inequality we are looking at in this course and through the readings touches a little bit on different injustices, because they can’t help but connect. If there is someone who wants to be at the top, they most likely are pushing the majority to the bottom, metaphorically speaking.
More specifically, when women came up against these issues, they connected within themselves. If a women wants to make changes in how the system is run, wether it be decisions about her own work, life, and body, or other decisions as a member of society, she has to have a say in who is running the government offices. Therefor, she needs the right to vote. Additionally, if a woman wants to then fight for the labor conditions where she works, or labor rights in general, she needs access to the persuasion of the law.
ERA would give all the changes some land to stand on, because before they are just a fight away of being lost or won, and that is too risky when time and time again has shown that people’s lives end up on the line, not only literally but figuratively. People dye in fires, they die from abuse, and they also live a lot better if they can take part n the culture around them, contributing to it as well as having a say about their rights in it.
The Labor laws are also a gender issue because of the different types of jobs given to people. In the films we watched. Although they have been extended into many different variations and developments, they were originally born from the devastation of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
I see labor issues all the time, not just from women’s to men’s salaries, but the protection of women and children. Like we learned about in the final movie, sweat shops, fast fashion, coming down on the women who have to also bring their children with them.
Hi Clare, Women connecting with themselves to push forth the agenda of making the change was the start of the movement that is still being moved to this day. There is work to be done, and we can continue to voice our rights as women.
Hi Clare! I totally agree with you about how the ERA was, so to speak, the result of what women’s suffrage and labor rights are. Since, these movements had in common that women are able to raise their voices and make a change towards the discrimination they were experiencing. I feel the same as you do about the ERA, which is like what would bring the rights that every woman deserves/deserved at that time, as well as it was a stage where women began to have hopes of being able to create change in the masculinist system . In Shirt Waist we see how the building was set on fire by the wasted and poor state of work in which each woman faced every day. That is why that was like a trigger, to what the women were actually living, the fact that all those women died in that “accident” was a total case of misogyny.
Hi, Clare, I enjoy reading your discussion board and I do happen to agree about the ERA, it’s sad as this is continuing to go on to this day and people aren’t taking it seriously especially the abuse for women in work as well.