Female lawmakers of color launch ERA caucus, push to affirm 28th Amendment

A multiracial coalition of female lawmakers announced the launch of the Congressional Caucus for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Tuesday afternoon. 

The caucus, which will work to affirm the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, will be co-chaired by Democratic founders Reps. Cori Bush (Mo.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.). 

Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) and Summer Lee (D-Pa.) will serve as vice chairs. 

Addressing press and advocates gathered outside the Capitol, Bush said the ERA is “overdue.”

“It is time that Congress centers the people who stand to benefit the most from the gender equality we’re talking about, including Black and brown women, the LGBTQ plus community, people seeking abortion care and other marginalized groups,” Bush said. 

“We’re here because from the start, people like me and many of my constituents were intentionally written out of our nation’s founding document,” she added. “The absence of foundational equality allows discrimination to persist and injustice to fester.”

The ERA was introduced in Congress 100 years ago. The amendment would add to the Constitution 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.”

Despite the more than 50 years since the ERA was passed in Congress, the reason it hasn’t been affirmed as the 28th Amendment is because Congress set a deadline that 38 states needed to ratify the ERA by 1982. 

It wasn’t until 2020, under the leadership of then-state senator McClellan, that Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA. 

McClellan, the first Black woman elected to Congress from Virginia, said it is “poetic justice” that her state is the one to “put the ERA over the top.”

“Virginia was the birthplace of American democracy, founded in July of 1619, when the House of Burgesses first met,” McClellan said. “A month later, the first Africans including the first African women arrived with no rights. They were considered property. A few months later, English women were recruited to be wives, who, when they arrived on our shores, had no rights. Any property they had was surrendered to their husbands. They couldn’t vote, they couldn’t run for office.”

“But from the beginning, women have been fighting to make true the words ‘we the people’ include us, to make true the words that all men and women are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights.”

Many of the women at Tuesday’s announcement also praised the work of Black women in the fight for equality. 

“Black women have been in this fight from the beginning for rights and equality,” McClellan said. “We have often been the last to benefit from our work. No more. We are taking the reins and the leadership to lift up all women and all Americans to ensure equality.”

Pressley added that passing the ERA will address pay disparities, LGBTQ rights and abortion access, among other things. But, she added, there is also a personal element in her push for the ERA. 

“I’m thinking a lot about my 14-year-old daughter, Cora, and how I do not want her to continue to live in a country in a world where we have so conflated and normalized the disparate treatment and outcomes and disparate access and the second class status it is to be a woman in this society,” Pressley said.

“I look forward to the day when calendars will say and on this day in history, the ERA caucus was established, but I really look forward to the day when our calendars will say on this day in history, the ERA was passed.”