Nomi Leasure On Why America Needs An ERA Equal Rights Amendment

Sign our Equal Rights Petition!! Yes, we’ve made our goal, but sign, sign, sign until Saturday, Feb. 10th. We have just begun to fight, so raise your voice in support! 

By Nomi Leasure    

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the Universe?” -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Charged with writing on the importance of an Equal Rights Amendment, I’ve pondered this critical question for the last few days. Why would men want to deny women rights? Why is it of relevance to the life of the banker, the businessman, the professor, the salesman, whether or not a women he does noteven know — and will never know — gets an abortion? Why fight so hard against accessible and affordable birth control for his daughter, his daughter’s friends and the daughters of men he will never meet? Why, I wonder, would a boss, a CEO, a Human Resources manager wish to deny women equal pay in the work place?

In attempting to write about the importance of adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, I can’t help but become more fixated on why not? And PS, most of my friends think we have one. Didn’t those second wavers take care of the ERA business?

Who Is The One Running Scared?

Though it was difficult, I listened to some of the arguments against passing the ERA. In a calm, objective state of mind, I stomached Phyllis Schlafly’s four minute appeal to the courts of Arkansas in February of 2007. I Googled arguments against Equal Rights Amendment. I listened to the RightWingWatch.Org radio program, according to whom feminists are family destroying whores.

Each piece I read and argument I listened to was fervent and impassioned, yet there was something unsaid looming under the surface. As I read and listened, my pulse quickened, and my muscles tensed. I felt stressed and unstable.

It was as if the sentiments of the material I was reading transcended my computer screen, growing on me — rather like a disease. It was then I realized what was buried in the right wing opposition of an Equal Rights Amendment: fear and loathing of modern women.

In the hearts of the opposition of this amendment, in the hearts of men across America and the women they have made docile over the years, is earth-shattering fear. They are afraid, and they are afraid of us. We see and hear so much more of men in their arguments against the rights of women, than we do of the women themselves. 

Listening, I realize this is not a debate with prepared arguments supported by facts and scientific analysis. This is not a logical presentation. In reality, these statements aren’t supported by evidence, presented in a coherent manner.

Voices of Angry Men

These arguments against women’s rights — against my rights and those of my friends and family — are impassioned. And they are angry, impetuous and irrational.

This conclusion leaves me with more questions. Why are these men afraid? Why are they angry? It is Virginia Woolf who can lend a voice here. She wrote:

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.

The superiority of a man — in “his” eyes — is up for debate. It is being questioned in front of the courts and discussed in the newspapers and on blogs. His wife, when reading the news, looks at him with less admiration and he can not bear it. As women, it is difficult to sympathize, because we are accustomed to fighting an uphill battle, so accustomed that our survival muscles are strong and conditioned. A man, who has been placed at the top of the food chain by birth, is weak. And now, in his eyes, he is being challenged by a superior strength. 

Sign our Equal Rights Petition!! Yes, we’ve made our goal, but sign, sign, sign until Saturday, Feb. 10th. We have just begun to fight, so raise your voice in support! 

The Battle for My Body

Make no mistake. This struggle is not taking place solely in politics. No, it is happening in my life — in the colleges across America. I can not call them men, for they seem so far from being grownup, but the boys of my generation still have residual patriarchal blood in their veins.

They need say only one word and their dominance is cemented, at least for the moment: “That girl is a slut.”

And herein I have found the last nugget of man’s unquestioned power. Naturally, amidst the modern expectation of at least moderate liberalism (No one wants to be seen as racist, no one wants to be seen as un-accepting. People will dope themselves with disillusionment to be sure of this) we will never see the day that women’s basic rights in this country are taken away. Rights such as the right to vote, the right to work, the right to a fair trial, etc. are cemented fast in women’s history.

There is little left that we have not fought for and won, in my opinion. And I admit that when Anne tells me all those victories are lost if women’s rights are totally returned to the states as Republican justices advocate and red states demand, it’s difficult for me to take her totally seriously. 

The Battle for Women’s Bodies

I choose to be positive and focus on a battle that is immediate. In climatic fashion, the last battle will give way to the biggest bang. Today, ladies, we are battling for our own bodies.

The majority of my college-age friends are liberal. Some come from conservative families and have remaining strict social values for that reason. A few align themselves with the left wing. Several don’t even know what the wings reference in reality.

Despite our varied family backgrounds, our eclectic values and political - or lack of — political involvement, we have one thing in common: We are all having sex. College is a mini-breeding ground and the favorite past time of us 20-somethings is unabashed sexual intercourse. Sorry if you’re horrified. 

Frighteningly, a lot of my friends don’t know the first thing about their sexual rights or health. Our concerns go as far as ensuring we don’t contract or spread STD’s and not become pregnant. We are not thinking political, we are thinking social and we need protection.

I casually informed a friend of mine the other day that there is no guaranteed protection for women’s rights in the Constitution. “Really?” She asked dimly.

This is the same friend who came to me in the middle of the night, panic in her face because something wasn’t right down there. I coolly told her just to go to Planned Parenthood. “Walk right in,” I said, “They’ll give you an evaluation.” The next day she took my advice and a week later got the results of her STD test. She had chlamydia, a sigh of relief on the STD front as far as college kids are concerned, and went back the next day to get medication. 

We girls are concerned for ourselves, our partners and our friends. We take birth control, insist on using condoms, and when a moment of weakness happens or when we trust someone we shouldn’t, we depend on health care or programs like Planned Parenthood to catch us when we fall. Our sexual habits will not change. We enjoy having sex. It’s the topic of conversation every weekend. We dish about sex on the subway, in class, and in restaurants.

Evangelicals and Premarital Sex

Now before you judge me and my friends, I understand that social conservatives have their own issues with young people and sexuality. By their own surveys, 80 percent of young evangelicals have engaged in premarital sex. According to the National Association of Evangelicals, almost a third of evangelicals’ unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. Their own video says:

It’s time to speak honestly about sex because abstinence campaigns and anti-abortion crusades often aren’t resonating in their own pews, evangelical leaders say.

If we judge me and my friends holistically, these same girls who are enjoying our sexual freedoms are also majoring in Psychology, Political Science, Public Relations, Pre-Med, Criminal Justice and Law. We are earning degrees, collecting accolades, making deans list, volunteering, juggling internships, boyfriends, sororities bake sales and mid-terms. We are advocating for the political candidates we support via our iPhones when we should be paying attention to Senior Seminar. We are giving advice to our siblings back home who have yet to leave the suburban bubble we used to think was the end of the world. We are earning medals, paying bills, trying to watch what we eat and make it to the gym three times a week. We are indulging in the Victoria Secret Semi-Annual Sale because we want hot underwear for the weekend because…we want to have sex! Nothing is going to stop that. And we simply cannot continue to change the world — which is a common goal in my crowd — if we have to a mouth to feed.

I turn again to Virginia Woolf who wrote:

Life…is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are babes in the cradle. And how can we guarantee this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority…over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to his power.

My Body Is Not Up for Political Debate

This fight is about power and it is about sex. I am 21-years old and my body will not be up for political debate. I signed the petition to pass an ERA in America once and for all — and I urge you to do the same.

I admit my friends and I are a bit clueless that South Dakota in 2011 was set to pass a law making it legal for a man to shoot his wife (or vice versa) for assisting their daughter to get an abortion. Yes, Anne was practically shaking me two weeks ago when 10 Republican Women in New Mexico moved to make it a felony to have an abortion in rape and incest cases — because they would be destroying evidence. Studying for exams in 2010, I missed the news that Utah nearly made miscarriage a felony, an action thwarted only by a promised veto from the governor and an outcry from websites like this one. 

This disgusting new conversation about me and my friends having dead fetuses in the lining of our wombs because we use birth control is — pure, unscientific insanity and a patriarchal power trip. Reverend Kevin Swanson and his unscientific, mind-in-the-gutter ego trip takes calling women ‘sluts’ to an entirely new level. 

The Ultimate Protection Is Required for American Women

Protect me, my sisters and my friends. Protect the future of this country and the fantastic accomplishments waiting to happen — so long as women are Constitutionally guaranteed our equal rights. We women are wonderful, and if our rights are stripped away, and we are subtly — or not so — nudged back into domestication, the world will lose some of its brightest stars.

Are we seriously having this conversation in America in the 21st century? Whoever in a million years thought I would become part of a drive to keep American women from being declared property of individual states? Didn’t we call that slavery at an earlier time in America’s not always illustrious history?

Sorry my dears, it’s time to take a reality check on women’s rights in America. We have work to do … really a lot of work to do. ~ Nomi

Sign our Equal Rights Petition!! Yes, we’ve made our goal, but sign, sign, sign until Saturday, Feb. 10th. We have just begun to fight, so raise your voice in support!