United States 1923

Synopsis

After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, differences arose among women's rights advocates over strategy. One group of social reformers, most notably the National Consumers' League (NCL) and its allies, favored continuation of the 30-year campaign of multifaceted reform including protective legislation for women workers. A smaller group led by Alice Paul and her National Women's Party (NWP) came to embrace a more narrow strategy to achieve gender equality by passing a constitutional amendment to erase all surviving legal impediments to equality, including gender-specific protective legislation. The ensuing debate between proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and opposing reformers came to focus on the issue of protective legislation, increasingly defined by the NWP as discriminatory and a positive harm to women's economic opportunity. At the heart of the debate was the question of...