Defining Equality

Chapter 7 describes how class intersected with the Nineteenth Amendment, in the context of the United State Supreme Court’s decision in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital and the divisions over a proposed Equal Rights Amendment. It explores the NWP’s negotiations with social feminists and legal progressives, in the three years after ratification. That negotiation was focused on modifying the language of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to ensure that courts would not use it to strike down protective labor legislation for women. These efforts came to naught, and the “neutrality feminists” within the NWP arranged for the ERA to be introduced into Congress in 1923. Chapter 7 argues that Adkins was the high watermark for a potentially robust or “thick” interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment. Social feminists and legal progressives feared that the ERA would be used in the same way Justice Sutherland invoked the Nineteenth Amendment in Adkins, to justify invalidating minimum wage legislation for women. One consequence of this battle over the ERA is that it has still not been ratified, one hundred years later. But, another consequence was to create a vacuum around the Nineteenth Amendment, contributing to the thin constitutional conception that emerged following ratification.