Some of my Facebook friends are celebrating the death of Phyllis Schlafly, most famous for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment:
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification
Here’s a question for readers then… How would our world be different if the Equal Rights Amendment had passed? Most of these Constitutional provisions don’t have much effect until lawsuits are filed. Therefore we could ask “What litigation would have been spawned by this amendment?”
Related:
According to Wikipedia she advocated “The ERA would repeal protections such as alimony and eliminate the tendency for mothers to obtain custody over their children in divorce cases.”
Federico: I’m not sure that she was correct regarding this. Most states have nominally gender-neutral alimony, custody, and child support laws. A state where women win 97 percent of the custody lawsuits can still be operating a gender-neutral system by (a) saying that they want every lawsuit to result in a primary/secondary parent split, (b) saying that they want the primary (“winner”) parent to be the “historical primary caregiver”, and (c) having judges find that, in nearly all cases, the mother was doing at least 51% of the care and therefore should be the winner parent. States couldn’t operate a Danish or Swiss-style statutory “mom wins” system (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International ), but they aren’t doing that right now anyway.