We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment

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Friday, March 5, 2021 | 6PM to 8PM

2020 marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, revolutionary women demanded full equality beyond suffrage, by proposing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Congress took almost fifty years to adopt it in 1972, and the states took almost as long to ratify it. In January 2020, Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the amendment.

In her book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, legal scholar Julie Suk tells the story of the ERA through the voices of the bold women lawmakers who created it. Facing opposition and subterfuge at every turn, they kept the ERA alive. And, despite significant victories by women lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the achievements of gender equality have fallen short, especially for working mothers and women of color. We the Women excavates the ERA’s past to guide its future, explaining how the ERA can address hot-button issues such as pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay.

The rise of movements like the Women’s March and #MeToo have ignited women across the country. Unstoppable women are winning elections, challenging male abuses of power, and changing the law to support working families. We the Women shows how the founding mothers of the ERA and the forgotten mothers of all our children have transformed our living Constitution for the better.

URL: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-the-Women/Julie-C-Suk/9781510755918

Author Bio

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Julie Suk is Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a former Dean for the Master's Program at The Graduate Center, and a recent Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Prior to joining The Graduate Center, Prof. Suk was a law professor at Cardozo Law School, and a visiting professor at the law schools of Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and UCLA.

Prof. Suk is an interdisciplinary legal scholar, focusing on women as constitution-makers at the intersection of law, history, sociology, and politics. Her broader research interests include constitutional and social change; antidiscrimination law and its effects on social inequality; women, work, and family; civil litigation as an enforcement mechanism for public law; access to justice, including the past and future role of nonlawyers in solving the civil justice problems of poor and middle-income people; social, political, and legal theory; and law and literature.

Her 2020 book, We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment, explores the ERA’s past to guide its future, and tells the stories of the forgotten women lawmakers and lawyers who shaped the ERA over a century. Prof. Suk is currently working on her second book, Misogyny’s Law: How the Law Fails Women, and What To Do About It (University of California Press, anticipated 2022).