Two landmark events recast the trajectory of American citizenship in June 1982, and they pointed in opposite directions. The first, a major victory for social justice advocates, was led by some of the same figures and adopted the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. The second revealed how gender equality had become a wedge that cleaved the nation’s culture and politics, portending a hostile future for the democratic movements born in the 1960s.
Two landmark events recast the trajectory of American citizenship in June 1982, and they pointed in opposite directions. The first, a major victory for social justice advocates, was led by some of the same figures in, and adopted the tactics of, the Civil Rights Movement. The second revealed how gender equality had become a wedge that cleaved the nation’s culture and politics, portending a hostile future for the democratic movements born in the 1960s.
“No one questions that the Voting Rights Act has changed the face of American politics, particularly in the South,” Time magazine noted in 1981, as portions of the law were soon to expire. Its advocates built a campaign that culminated in a months-long march from Alabama to Washington, D.C. to dramatize its historic significance. After a resounding victory in the House of Representatives, the act seemed stuck in the US Senate, where conservatives echoed the defense of states’ rights that Ronald Reagan had trumpeted across the southern states that carried him to the presidency in 1980. Moderate Republican senators brokered a compromise that yielded the most bipartisan and strongest VRA yet. President Reagan signed it into law on June 29, 1982. For conservatives, this was a setback, but their movement was making inroads elsewhere.
The very next day, the Equal Rights Amendment expired after a decade-long drive to ratify it. To many feminists, the proposed constitutional amendment, which had languished in Congress for decades since Alice Paul first proposed it, in 1923, was the ultimate referendum on how sex mattered for citizenship. Buoyed by a social climate that was favorable to new notions of gender equality, both houses of Congress had affirmed the ERA by huge majorities by 1972. Feminists’ protests, persistent lobbying, and advancement into policymaking roles had made their ideas seem normal and even inevitable. But a new partnership between social and business conservatives helped make the ERA the terrain where feminists and anti-feminists fought over competing visions for society. As women-led grassroots organizations sprang up to fight the amendment, the ratification drive stalled in state legislatures, three short of the thirty-eight it needed to become law.