[gentle music plays]
[woman] Supreme Court Justices are guardians of the great charter
that has served as our nation's fundamental instrument of government
for over 200 years.
I surely would not be in this room today…
without the determined efforts
of men and women who kept dreams alive.
People like Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Tubman come to mind.
I stand on the shoulders of those brave people.
[woman] The time is now!
Justice has to be served.
[Ginsburg] Women and men are persons of equal stature
and dignity before the law,
and I don't think that that is at all any activist position to be taking
with regard to the proper interpretation
of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
[woman] Every generation in America
is going to need to make decisions about how they're going to fight
to make the promise of the 14th Amendment real.
There is a constant assault to take away the hard-won rights.
[chanting] My body, my choice!
Reproductive rights and control over reproduction
is absolutely essential for women's equal citizenship.
[Ginsburg] You ask me about equal protection
versus individual autonomy,
and my answer to you is it's both.
[chanting] We won't go back.
Access to abortion could be cut back in the United States.
That is a world that we could be entering into.
This is a travesty of justice.
[chanting] My body, my choice!
And if that happens, it will show a limitation on the 14th Amendment
that we have not reckoned with yet.
[Ginsburg] The state controlling the woman,
is both denying her full autonomy
and full equality with men.
To be treated as an equal participant,
this fight is really the fight for a more perfect union.
["Final Form" by Sampa the Great playing]
In recent years, the Women's Movement
has been galvanized by a number of attacks on women's equality and liberty,
the freedom to control their own lives,
and their ability to have equal footing as American citizens.
And these rights,
they're first established in the 1970s by groups of women who,
much like women of today,
demand their equality under the 14th Amendment.
[reporter] Thousands of nice women took to the streets,
protesting, demanding economic rights and political powers,
just like the minority movements of the '60s.
The main demand is equal rights. Equal rights to have a job, have respect.
They aren't frivolous demands at all.
We just want what men have had all these years.
The women of the '70s are building off the playbook
created by the Civil Rights movement.
They're demanding we expand the use of the 14th Amendment
in ways the country hasn't seen before.
But in order for women in the seventies to gain equality under Fourteen,
they have to gain control…
over their lives, over their bodies,
and over the story that we as Americans tell each other
about a woman's place in society.
[man] I have three horses, three dogs and a wife.
[laughter]
You want to think about the billing order there?
No, no, she's the most beautiful animal I own.
-[audience gasps] -[woman] You own?
-Wow! -[woman] I have to leave.
[laughter and scattered applause]
I don't think I'd want a female partner as steady partner.
If they're capable of doing the job, fine, but,
if time goes on, I believe it will be a hazard
for the police woman to work in the radio car with a police officer.
Men and women work together in this society.
Have done so for a long time.
We recognize there's going to be a struggle ahead
to define equality in terms that both women and men understand.
We are a movement about power, not a public relations movement.
We are challenging the power structure as it exists.
[woman] The 1970s, the Women's Movement
is trying to figure out the best strategy
for getting the court to recognize that the Constitution protected women.
American women will see in the 14th Amendment
a new possibility for equal protection in the 14th Amendment.
I did a study, a re-examination of the 14th Amendment
with regard to sex,
and urged that the 14th Amendment be used
using the civil rights precedents
to make the 14th Amendment clearly applicable to discrimination
because of sex.
Okay, you might not know who this person is.
Her name is Pauli Murray,
and she's one of the most brilliant legal minds of her age.
[woman] She's a really important figure in the Women's Rights Movement
and a pioneer in this field,
but she rarely gets credited.
So, I would like to lift her up.
Granddaughter of a slave, great-granddaughter of a slave owner,
lawyer extraordinaire.
No matter which thread you follow
in the grand story of the civil rights struggle
from the 1940s to the 1970s,
it all seems to lead back to Pauli.
Raised in Jim Crow North Carolina, Pauli Murray lives by a motto:
"Don't get mad, get smart."
She refuses to give up her seat on a bus 15 years before Rosa Parks.
Her legal arguments on the 14th Amendment while a student at Howard University
find their way to Thurgood Marshall,
who uses them to win Brown versus Board of Education.
But Pauli Murray doesn't stop at equality for Black Americans with white Americans.
She believes the 14th Amendment can be expanded
to give women full equality with men.
[Murray] She argues that gender-based discrimination
is akin to race-based discrimination.
[woman] Largely through the brilliance of Pauli Murray,
with that framework, the possibility of a renaissance of sorts
around the 14th Amendment
comes into being.
[chanting] Free our sisters, free ourselves!
You had the Women's Movement coming on the tails of the Civil Rights Movement.
You had social change, social unrest,
and you had a moment where it was time for change.
We want the 14th Amendment to apply to women.
[narrator] So, how did we get here?
Isn't it kind of a given that women are part of the Constitution?
Turns out, this struggle goes back to before the 14th was even created,
back to the founding of our country.
People like to say, "Oh, the Constitution says this,"
and, "The Constitution says that."
In reality, the Constitution doesn't say much.
The Constitution doesn't even mention women,
and certainly nothing about their rights.
Abigail Adams exhorts her husband John Adams
to remember the ladies, but they really don't.
[woman] This is supposed to be a government by "We the People."
Women were not considered equal in the eyes of the law.
[Grossman] Women were simply not accounted for.
And it's not because they weren't asking and talking,
and there weren't whispers.
It simply was not a document that was designed to upend gender relations.
[Bridges] When the 14th Amendment was passed,
the thing that was on everyone's mind
was discrimination on the basis of race.
Women are hoping this will not solely be for the condition of African Americans
but for anyone.
[Bridges] So, even before the Civil War,
before the 14th Amendment was even thought about,
women have been agitating.
[Murray] The Women's Rights Movement sees marriage as a kind of female slavery.
And the idea here is that women do not own their own labor,
or their own bodies.
They are hoping that all of these status relationships
will be dismantled by the 14th Amendment.
[Bridges] If it can produce equality between Black and white people,
why can't it produce equality between women and men?
To their eternal dismay, it really does not include them at all.
The 14th Amendment had a certain purpose.
It did not include equality for women.
[Grossman] The 14th Amendment did not give them rights.
It preserved the status quo.
[Murray] The 14th Amendment is preoccupied with this question of
remedying the wrongs of slavery, and women are pretty much sidelined.
The framers of the 14th Amendment weren't feminists.
It was a very inauspicious beginning for the cause of women's rights
as it relates to the 14th Amendment.
Feminists were furious.
[man] "Women have not been enslaved."
"Intelligence has not been denied to them."
"They have not been degraded."
"There is no prejudice against them on account of their sex."
"On the contrary, they are respected, honored and loved…
if they deserve to be."
[Bridges] To think about women's role in history and the most significant ways
in which they were subordinated,
you have to start with laws of the family.
[Murray] Under the common law doctrine of coverture,
the legal identity of husband and wife are one,
and that one is the husband.
He literally covers her and is her public face for everything.
You had no legal rights, no legal standing whatsoever.
You didn't exist legally, couldn't own any property.
[Murray] You were not permitted to serve on juries.
You did not have the right to own your own wages.
You did not have any of what we think of as the basic civil rights of life.
It's men's job, doing the labor out in the public sphere,
earning the wages.
Women are timid.
Where they belong is in the private sphere,
in the home caring for the children.
These were not just social taboos,
but these were formal limitations from the institutions of civil society.
One sphere for women, the private sphere, and one for men.
The public, the workplace, the marketplace.
Women, nevertheless, made every effort
to make the 14th Amendment apply to them.
"Women have the right to think and act as individuals."
"If the Great Father had intended it to be otherwise,
he would have placed Eve in a cage and given Adam the key."
Myra Bradwell is a woman living in Illinois
and she's married, but she wants to be a lawyer.
She takes her case all the way to the Supreme Court,
argues the common law rules that would have said
we would never see a woman as a lawyer at the bar
is drastically upended by the 14th Amendment.
So, she argues that one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship
that the 14th Amendment confers gives her the right to be a lawyer.
[Northup] This new amendment, guaranteed personal liberties to all citizens,
meant that men and women must be treated equally under the Constitution.
[Murray] The Supreme Court reads the text of the 14th Amendment
and says that that is actually not the case.
[Gersen] The Court said,
no, the state is allowed to discriminate against women
on the basis that women are naturally different from men,
that they have more "timidity," it said.
[man] "Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender."
"The natural, proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex
unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life."
"The paramount destiny and mission of women
are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother."
"This is the law of the Creator."
They really don't have a need to be in the public sphere
as voters, as workers, as anything.
Their lane is to be wives and mothers and they need to stay in their lanes.
You see all of history kind of collapsed into this one opinion.
All of the reasons that we historically
have thought women to be lesser or different.
And all of those are used to reject her attempt to claim equal rights.
If I'm Myra Bradwell when I basically hear that because I'm a woman
my destiny is set,
and my destiny is to have children, to be a wife, to take care of home,
I'm beside myself at this point.
What the Court is effectively doing
is writing a deeply patriarchal vision of the world
into the Constitution.
What they seem to be saying is, "This is the way God intended it."
"This is the way things shake out."
"And if we shake it up, we'll shake our society out of existence."
So it becomes clear, the 14th Amendment at this point is a no-go.
[jazz music]
[reporter] On August 26th, 1920,
the 19th Amendment was officially ratified.
[Bridges] It took until 1920 before women won the right to vote.
So, yeah, it took a while. [laughs]
[reporter] The winning of suffrage had greatest effect on the weaker sex
in that they had legally become man's equal.
[Grossman] Women's advocates believe that the 19th Amendment
was going to break down most or all of the barriers
to women's participation in public life.
[reporter] Universal women's suffrage was responsible for the transition
from woman's place in the home to their place in the sun.
So, women do get the vote,
but that does not prompt the Supreme Court to rethink its approach
to the 14th Amendment and to equal protection of the law.
[Grossman] As women turn to courts and cited the 19th Amendment
in support of challenging other restrictions,
they were almost universally turned away and told by those courts,
"The 19th Amendment gives you the right to vote,
it doesn't give you any other specific rights."
It's just about voting.
[Bridges] So, you're asking these courts to recognize that times are changing,
that they should reject the patriarchy of yesteryear
and embrace equality between the sexes.
And it's all old white men.
I mean, old white men who are steeped in a particular way of life.
These are the kinds of ideas that women are constantly up against.
The sexist, misogynist baseline that's written into the Constitution.
This kind of logic that the law, the state can protect women
gets used to justify rules that prohibit women
from working as waitresses in bars.
[as Sutherland] "Night work so injuriously affects the physical condition of women
and so threatens to impair their peculiar and natural functions,
it exposes them to the dangers and menaces incident to night life."
It gets used to justify protective labor legislation
that limits the number of hours women can work during the week.
"The injurious consequences bear more heavily against women than men,
considering their more delicate organism."
It underwrites a double standard in the law
that allows the law to continue
to officially legislate women's subordinance.
[narrator] Here's how bad it got between women and the Court.
The Supreme Court building wasn't always where it is now.
In 1935, the government went looking for property for their new home,
and you're never going to believe what they did to get it.
They seized the headquarters of the National Woman's Party.
There's a picture of the United States government
handing a check over to the lawyer for the National Woman's Party.
[Bridges] She's looking like,
"I'ma take this money. I'ma take it,
but you know you're wrong."
[laughs]
"You know you're dead wrong."
[Murray] Perhaps it's entirely fitting the Supreme Court
is literally built on the bones of this movement.
[man] "Every country that you go to,
usually the degree of progress can never be separated from the woman.
If you're in a country that's progressive,
the woman is progressive."
The 19th Amendment isn't going to produce this world of gender equality.
And so, we have to turn back to the 14th Amendment because what else--
What other options are on your menu?
The 14th Amendment is there looking pretty with this Equal Protection Clause,
talking about states can't deny people equal protection of the laws.
So, women have to rely on that very indeterminate clause
to make the case that the Constitution requires equality between the sexes.
[narrator] This is what women of the '70s are up against
when it comes to women's equality.
Pauli Murray knows this history.
She knows the 14th Amendment has never worked for women before.
But in the 1950s, she also knew how hard it would be
to overturn Jim Crow laws during the Civil Rights Movement,
and look what she achieved.
This is a woman who does not back down from a challenge
when she knows she's doing the right thing.
[Grossman] So, the question becomes how to get the Court to recognize
the Equal Protection Clause could apply to gender
in the same way it had been applied to race.
[woman] "It could be argued
that just as separate schools for Negro and white children
by their very nature cannot be equal,
classification on the basis of sex
is today unreasonable and discriminatory."
The analogy between race and gender
becomes a point of argumentation.
"Now, I don't say that race and sex are identical."
"I do say they have certain comparable characteristics."
"There tend to be problems common to both groups,
such as discrimination in employment
or failure to be represented in government."
Pauli Murray is saying the whole question of gender,
it's a lot like race because it turns on
these immutable characteristics that people have
that don't really affect their ability to contribute to society,
and this argument is adopted wholesale
by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I feel like RBG deserves a better introduction than I can give her.
Um…
Notorious RBG has become such a pop and cultural phenomenon
that whoever introduces her should do so with, like, "Whoo!"
[big band jazz plays]
[woman] "It's clear that the core purpose of the 14th Amendment
was to eliminate racial discrimination,
because a person's skin color bears no relationship to ability.
Similarly, sex, like race, is a visible, immutable characteristic
bearing no necessary relationship to ability."
[Bazelon] Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an incredibly determined Jewish woman
from Brooklyn.
She went to Harvard Law School
as one of nine women in her entering class.
When she graduates from law school,
she has an incredibly hard time finding any judge in the country
who will take a chance on her because judges at this point
just are not hiring women in their chambers.
So she starts litigating cases about sex discrimination,
and it's really her work that makes the Court look more closely
at these laws based on sex and gender.
[as Ginsburg] "Most men in courts at that time
didn't associate discrimination in its unpleasant sense
with the way women were treated."
"They genuinely believed that women had the best of all possible worlds."
"The challenge was to educate the men on the bench
to help them realize there was something wrong with that world."
[Northup] Back in the 1970s,
Women's Rights plaintiffs were bringing these cases before courts
that were overwhelmingly male.
[Bazelon] Ginsburg says, "You know what?
In order to get the sympathy and attention from these male Supreme Court Justices,
I'll have to show them a different person, and tell them a different story."
So, she picks male plaintiffs
who are being discriminated against on the basis of sex.
[Murray] In 1973, in a case called Frontiero vs. Richardson,
Sharon Frontiero is in the military,
and she doesn't get an allowance for housing for her husband
and the other male officers do.
So, she goes down to the benefits office like, "This is curious, fellas."
They're like, "It's actually not curious, Sharon."
[Northup] If you were a spouse of a male Air Force member,
you automatically got dependent benefits.
But if you were a man who was married to an Air Force service member,
you had to prove that you were dependent on your spouse.
And so this was a man challenging a gendered law
and saying it violates equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
And they won.
[Murray] Justice Brennan, he writes the opinion for the Court,
and he starts by talking about the history of the Court's decisions on gender.
"It is true that the position of women has improved in recent decades."
"Nevertheless, it can hardly be doubted
that women still face pervasive discrimination
in our educational institutions, in the job market,
and in the political arena."
"Our nation has had a long and unfortunate history
of sex discrimination."
"Traditionally, discrimination towards women
was rationalized by an attitude of romantic paternalism,
which put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage."
"With these considerations in mind,
we can only conclude that classifications based upon sex,
like classifications based upon race, alienage, or national origin,
are inherently suspect."
[Grossman] So, the Equal Protection Clause allows advocates to go around the country
and say, "You can't just for no reason treat men and women differently."
"They're in fact entitled in most cases to be treated the same."
-♪ I know we can make it ♪ -♪ I know that we can ♪
♪ I know darn well we can work it out ♪
♪ Oh yes, we can, I know we can can ♪
♪ Yes, we can can, oh, why can't we? ♪
♪ If we wanna, yes we can can ♪
♪ I know we can make it work ♪
♪ I know that we can make it if we try ♪
♪ Oh yes, we can, I know we can can ♪
-♪Yes, we can ♪ -♪ Great gosh Almighty… ♪
That interpretation changes the face of law
in a very dramatic way.
What it doesn't do is deal with all of the many situations
in which men and women are not what we call similarly situated.
Women's equality is linked
to a woman's ability to control her own body.
But the courts at this time, and for decades before,
don't see it that way.
In order to gain reproductive rights under Fourteen,
women will need an entirely new legal strategy.
[Tetrault] The Fourteenth Amendment has been cited over and over again
in a whole host of reproductive rights cases.
Maybe the most egregious Buck V. Bell,
when the State of Virginia sterilizes,
in other words, surgically operates on and ties the tubes of Carrie Buck.
And she sues and says this is a denial of her rights
because this was done without her consent.
And what the Supreme Court decides
in this kind of patronizing idea that never gets old,
that women's reproduction is actually their sole function
and something that the State therefore has a right to govern and control.
[Murray] This is happening at the time Virginia passes the Racial Integrity Act.
It's written by the Virginia Eugenics Board,
and it's meant to preserve the best of the white race.
It prohibits white people from marrying people of other races.
It's a eugenics law.
[Bridges] Basically, if you weren't affluent, white, married property owner,
then you probably had problematic genes,
according to the eugenic science of the day,
which suggested that you shouldn't be allowed to reproduce.
[Murray] Famous Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
he writes the opinion in Buck versus Bell,
and he says the State of Virginia is perfectly within its power
to prescribe the sterilization of the feeble-minded.
And it's a shocking opinion in its callousness.
"Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
It's hard to hear even now.
[Gersen] It doesn't violate Carrie Buck's due process,
and the Supreme Court basically says the State is permitted to do that.
It doesn't violate the 14th Amendment.
Why do so many men believe women need to be controlled and protected?
Because women were viewed as property.
Property cannot protect itself.
A chaise lounge can't fight off a burglar.
It's an excuse that men base on biology.
See, men see women as smaller and therefore weaker.
Feeble minds, delicate bodies…
For so long, the majority of work outside home involved heavy labor.
Man could say he was physically stronger and that was that. Argument over.
But by the 1920s, that's all starting to change. Why?
Technology.
As technology advances, work is no longer built on strength.
So man's excuse for dominance is gone.
You can't call a woman your property if she works at the textile mill.
A chaise lounge can't do that.
So the Industrial Revolution kicks off a countdown clock to equality,
which is convenient because everyone's on the clock.
And it just keeps going.
Telephone, typewriters, computers.
Many of the first computer engineers were women.
And the most important technological advance of all
is birth control.
Before birth control, women were expected to carry around ten pregnancies.
Ten.
Ten!
I'm about to faint just thinking about that.
Get me a chaise lounge, please!
So you can see why, once women can choose if and when to have children,
the path to equality lays itself out.
[Gersen] In Connecticut, there was a law
that prohibited the use of contraceptives,
and that law had been on the books since the late 19th century.
[Murray] Estelle Griswold becomes the Executive Director
of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut,
and she is energetic and ready to go to the mattresses
to take down this law.
So she opens a birth control clinic,
and she begins immediately to be very vocal.
She's out there passing out flyers.
"Would you like a diaphragm, birth control pills?"
"You can get them here."
"We advise, we distribute, we break the law."
She's basically trying to get arrested.
I think it's very evident that the law is unenforceable.
We are continuing,
uh, maybe illegally,
but we are continuing our program of education and referral.
[Murray] A few days later, she gets her wish
and Griswold vs. Connecticut is headed to the Supreme Court.
[man] We do argue that the discriminatory nature of the statutes
constitutes a deprivation of right against invasion of privacy
within the marriage relationship.
The Court, with Justice William O. Douglas writing for the majority,
latches on to the logic of marital privacy.
"Would we allow the police to search the sacred corners of marital bedrooms
for telltale signs of contraceptives?"
And that vision, Big Brother in your marital bedroom,
was what motivated the Court to say the State can't do this.
This was the birth of the right to privacy.
[man] Justice William O. Douglas has written more books, traveled more,
hiked more than any Justice ever.
He has also married more.
His present wife is Cathleen Heffernan.
When they married she was 23 years old, he was 67.
It's Douglas' fourth marriage,
the last three to women much younger than he.
Congressmen have made indignant speeches about this.
Douglas replies that his private life is his own business.
[Murray] It's probably not surprising that Justice Douglas
would take to marital privacy at this point in time.
I think he's on his third marriage. So, he really believes in marital privacy.
He knows a lot about it.
The problem for Douglas is that
nowhere in the Constitution is this understanding
of a right of privacy ever actually enumerated.
Douglas begins to sort of think about this idea
and notes that the concept of privacy has to be part of the Constitution
or else these other Constitutional rights don't make sense.
The Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of soldiers in the home,
that doesn't make any sense unless you have some expectation
that individuals have privacy in their homes.
So, the Supreme Court connects the right to privacy
to Fourteen's Due Process Clause.
Now that's a big deal because that's what Women's Rights advocates
have been fighting for and will continue fighting for.
And this new idea of privacy is about to be applied in a whole new way.
[gavel bangs]
[man] First in number 70-18, Roe against Wade.
[gavel bangs]
[Murray] Norma Jean McCorvey.
She goes to a doctor to get an abortion,
and he says she can't get an abortion in Texas.
It's against the law. It's a crime.
[Tetrault] She gets a lawyer who takes up her case
and sues the State of Texas for violating her right to privacy,
founded on the 14th Amendment.
[woman] The Court has in the past said
if the right of privacy is to mean anything
it is the right of the individual to make determinations for themselves.
Jane Roe's contention was that a woman has a right to an abortion
throughout the duration of her pregnancy.
[Gersen] The Supreme Court saw there's a conflict
between the woman's interests in controlling reproductive decisions
and the interests of a fetus.
And, of course, the fetus cannot assert its own,
so the State is looking out for it on its behalf.
[woman] We do not ask this court to rule that abortion is good.
We are here to advocate that the decision
as to whether or not a particular woman
will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy
is a decision that should be made by that individual.
Good evening. In a landmark ruling,
the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.
The majority said that the decision to end a pregnancy
belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.
[Gersen] The idea of Liberty is paramount.
It's not that if you take the 14th Amendment,
it's so obvious that it would include the right to an abortion.
It's that it becomes an unfolding process.
The logic of privacy that was first announced in Griswold
gets extended.
And the Supreme Court will basically say, "I don't know when life begins."
The Court says, no one can figure it out.
So, what the Court essentially says is,
"We'll give you the right to privacy for the early part of pregnancy.
You control your body then,
but for the later part of the pregnancy,
the State gets to come in, control your body if they so choose."
[Gersen] And so you go from contraceptives for married couples
all the way to the right to choose whether to have an abortion or not.
Things are revealed one step at a time.
It may not seem obvious as a path,
but that is the process of Constitutional law.
It's an extraordinary event.
And I think that January 22nd, 1973 will be an historic day.
♪ When I was your girl ♪
♪ Promised if I'd be your wife… ♪
[Murray] The combination of access to contraception and access to abortion
transforms women's lives.
In the period after Griswold and Roe,
women begin completing college in higher numbers,
going to professional and graduate school in higher numbers,
and entering the workforce in higher numbers.
♪ While you had all your fun ♪
♪ And every year that's gone by ♪
♪ Another baby's come… ♪
Control over reproduction is absolutely essential
to women participating in the economic life of the nation
as equal citizens.
♪ 'Cause now I've got the pill ♪
Wow, so we've gone from the government
controlling every aspect of a woman's life
to the government starting to protect a woman's freedom.
But are these gains being felt the same by all women?
Black women were not supposed to protest and march with the white women.
["All I Got" by Bravo & Carneyval playing]
Or if you do march with us, you've got to march in the back of the line.
[Murray] The Suffragist movement is prioritizing the question of gender,
not really seeing the race question as clearly
and not really willing to bring these two concerns together.
[woman] "We'll get to your issue later. We'll get there eventually."
"If you let us win on our thing we'll get to yours,
because your thing gets in the way."
"It's taking too much time. It's not efficient."
"We'll never get there if we keep thinking about all your problems."
Black women are living at the intersection,
as we like to say,
of the problem of sex and the problem of race.
Intersectionality is a concept that is not new,
but the framing of it was given to us by a Black legal scholar
named Kimberlé Crenshaw.
I don't think it's an accident
that a lot of people are just becoming familiar with it
because it was created by a Black woman.
Intersectionality came immediately from a case that I read many years ago
when African American women were trying to bring a lawsuit
claiming employment discrimination,
and their argument was repudiated by the court that heard the claim
because African American men were hired and promoted
and white women were hired and promoted.
So the court said they can't prove race discrimination
because the company did do okay by Black people, it's just men.
And they can't prove gender discrimination
because the company did hire and promote women, albeit white.
So, the problem was that Black women couldn't make a claim on their own
in part because the court didn't see that the interaction of racism and sexism
many times creates a different experience for Black women.
And it's not just that my oppression is double, it's not just times two.
It is actually that at that intersection,
there are certain stereotypes, tropes, and difficulties
that Black women uniquely face.
When Serena is passionate at a tennis match
or Michelle Obama is passionate while she's giving a speech,
we're called "angry Black woman."
People who have two or more oppressed identities--
indigenous women have and that API women have,
and that Latinas have--
do not just experience the sum of their oppression,
but they experience different kinds of oppression.
If you've got someone who's got even more than two of those identities,
a trans woman of color, for example,
the multiple systems are intersecting in her life
to create a unique brand of oppression.
[Pauli Murray] I personally have two problems,
that is, two problems which are built in.
I must always be concerned, not theoretically,
but I must be involved with
and necessarily concerned with racial liberation,
but I must also personally be concerned with sexual liberation
because the two, as I often say, the two meet in me.
The two meet in any individual
who is both woman and a member of an oppressed group
or a minority group.
[woman] Pauli Murray is the epitome of intersectionality.
She recognized that Black women face racial discrimination like Black men
and gender discrimination like white women.
She fought for rights of Black women
at a time when the world didn't see Black women
and struggled with her own gender identity and sexual orientation.
Much of her adult life, Murray sought, but was denied, testosterone treatment,
questioning if she was, quote,
"One of Nature's experiments, a girl who should have been a boy," unquote.
Pauli realized that race and sex discrimination
are legally the same,
that they both violate Fourteen's Equal Protection Clause.
We're all more alike than we think.
We see you, Pauli Murray. We see you.
["Wonder Woman" by Lion Babe playing]
[Gersen] So you get this Women's Rights movement that explodes onto the scene.
And there are all kinds of African American women
and Chicana women and Asian-American women and Indigenous women
who are within different civil rights organizations
pressing for gender to come to the fore
as a significant feature of that civil rights activism.
It feels like something very exciting is happening.
[Northup] The stereotypes that have kept women
in the domestic sphere, out of public life,
women are pushing against that.
You can be somebody's wife, somebody's mother, somebody's lover.
You can be somebody's anything, but you can't be somebody.
We want to have control over our own bodies and our own destinies.
[Murray] There's this movement around the United States
that rises up as this second-wave feminism.
[woman] And Black, Raza, Asian-American, and Native American women
that feel we have the most reason to oppose these laws
and have them wiped out.
[Tetrault] We cannot devolve into this argument about priority,
and we need to fight for all of these things,
not some of these things.
In the '70s, as the Women's Movement amps up,
it begins telling a story about an America where all men and women are equal.
And even though women have made some gains under Fourteen,
the strongest way to affirm that story is by ratifying a new amendment
that will officially put gender equality in the Constitution.
The problem is that there's never been
a fundamental commitment to gender equality
written into the Constitution.
We're kind of stepchildren of the 14th Amendment.
So what we need is our own house.
[woman] We hope that this,
the 50th anniversary of the winning of the vote,
will mark the end of the whole long campaign
for the emancipation of women by action of the government.
We now have 10 million women
backing this particular measure before Congress.
That's ten million women who've united through their organizations.
[reporter] The National Woman's Party lobbies for the 26th Amendment
to guarantee women equal rights under the law.
That Amendment would make women people in a legal sense for the first time.
[Crenshaw] We need our own Amendment.
We need a moment in which society comes together again,
like they did, presumably, during the 14th Amendment to say,
"We have wrongly excluded women
from the protections of equal citizenship."
"It is contrary to the deepest commitments
of American citizenship and we need to fix it."
♪ It don't make no difference ♪
♪ What you say about it ♪
♪ No, no ♪
This is the time that we will make women and men
share equally in the greatness of America.
[Murray] It takes as a starting point
much of the language of the 14th Amendment,
but reads it through the lens of women's equality
and sort of reiterates that women are equal in the law.
So, kind of updating the racial frame of the 14th Amendment
and making it applicable to women.
[Northup] The Equal Rights Amendment gets ratified by Congress
and sent to the states for three-fourths of the states to adopt,
which is what's necessary to amend the Constitution.
[reporter] 23 three states have so far
ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Thirty-eight states must ratify it before it becomes law.
[Crenshaw] And so, the ERA, it moves across the country.
Women organize.
Fear must not deter us now.
For the Equal Rights Amendment represents the highest American ideal:
recognition of the value of each individual.
Each woman, as well as each man.
The Equal Rights for Women Amendment
came two steps closer to becoming part of the Constitution today.
It was ratified by Oregon and by Minnesota.
The Amendment has been passed…
Guess what? It's going pretty well.
The Maine legislature today approved the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Amendment will become part of the Constitution
if seven more states ratify it.
And then we get to the last few states…
and the backlash.
Let me remind you what happened to Adam
when he let Eve talk him into biting the apple.
We've got a damn good country and good state.
What's wrong about it? Why do we always have to correct things?
I have a 16-year-old daughter sitting back here.
I don't want her drafted.
As the ERA picks up steam,
opponents start telling a different story about women's equality,
one that resonates with a lot of Americans.
And the most effective part?
This new story isn't just being told by men.
It's being told by women, too.
And it's a backlash that's led, at least superficially, by a woman.
We do not treat people equally,
and it would be grievously unfair to treat them equally.
[reporter 1] Leading the fight against the Amendment
is Illinois housewife, mother of six, Phyllis Schlafly.
[reporter 2] Phyllis Schlafly of Alton, Illinois.
Phyllish-- Phyllis Schl-- [chuckles]
Phyllis Schlafly. Phyllis Schla--
Forget it. [chuckles]
I'll just say Mean Phyllis! [laughs]
Laws of our country have given a wonderful status to the married woman.
For example, she has the legal right to be supported by her husband.
Phyllis Schlafly seems to have channeled decades and centuries
of the idea that women were better off protected than equal.
American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived.
They can get married
with the state law saying the husband should support his wife.
ERA doesn't give women any right, any benefit,
any opportunity that you haven't got now.
Phyllis. Um… [chuckles]
So, in opposing the Equal Rights Amendment
she made clear this was not what women wanted
not all women, certainly.
They didn't mind gender roles.
They were happy with their lives
and the Equal Rights Amendment was anti-family, anti-child,
and anti-traditional women's roles.
[reporter 1] Letters and calls came mostly from older,
middle-income, conservative women.
[woman] I want my children to look up to their Daddy,
to know that he is the head of the house, that he can protect us.
That's what we've got him for, why I married him, to be protected.
[reporter 2] Many said the amendment will make them too equal.
They don't want that,
and they're trying to stop ratification in those states where the amendment
is still before the legislatures.
[Ronald Reagan] My own belief is that an amendment
could lead to women losing discriminations that favor them
and which are proper.
The Republican Party withdrew its support
in its party platform in the 1980 elections.
The political winds had shifted
and at the end of the day, it fell three states short.
Fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment
ended yesterday after ten years.
Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment gathered across from the White House
to mourn the demise of the amendment.
[Schlafly] Tremendous victory against incredible odds!
[reporter] And what about the future of the ERA?
The ERA has no future.
[Tetrault] One consequence of the ERA failing to be ratified
is that we have a document
that does not argue that male and female citizens
must be understood as fully equal.
[woman] Can you explain the connection
between the abortion issue and the Equal Rights Amendment?
Well, first of all, the people pushing ERA and pushing abortion
are about 98% the same people.
[man] I'm optimistic about America.
May I begin by saying that I feel that America…
is, in these 1980s, particularly in this decade,
experiencing a moral and spiritual rebirth.
[Tetrault] By the 1980s, things start to look pretty gloomy.
You have the rise to power of the new Right
with the election of Reagan in 1980.
There's a powerful backlash movement.
What you get is the new Right scoring all kinds of successes
in terms of turning back some of the rights
that people had been demanding over the '60s and '70s.
[reporter] The issue is however gathering momentum.
One hundred thousand marchers stretching half a mile across Washington,
representing the biggest demonstration against abortion in America.
[Murray] The number of abortion restrictions has proliferated
over the last 25 years.
In some jurisdictions, there's a single abortion clinic remaining,
leaving women in more rural parts of states
without any kind of provider.
Many of the providers of abortion are not just abortion providers,
they're actually providers of standard health care for women.
So when an abortion clinic closes,
it's not just the loss of that particular service.
It's the loss of basic health services.
And lots of laws have been passed
that make it difficult for abortion providers to operate,
more expensive for them to operate,
and the plan is basically to legislate it out of existence.
I have two daughters, and my daughters are very aware
of the things that happen around them.
They are politically conscious because of the work that I do.
And being able to try to offer some solutions,
offer some optimism, is something that I have a hard time with.
What I tell them every day is,
"I'm gonna get up and fight every day."
"I don't know what's gonna happen or what the future holds,
but I will tell you that every day, I'll fight for you
and every girl in these United States of America."
[as Ginsburg] "It is part of our history."
"A sad part of our history, but undeniably a part of our history
that the 14th Amendment,
that great amendment that changed so much in this nation,
was not intended by its framers immediately
to change the status of women."
"It allowed a system to persist in our country where women couldn't vote."
"They couldn't hold office."
"If they married, they couldn't hold property in their own name."
"I remain an advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment
for this reason."
"I have a daughter and a granddaughter."
"I know what the history was."
"I would like the legislators of this country and all the states
to stand up and say, 'We know what that history was.'
'We want to make a clarion announcement
that women and men are equal before the law.'
"I would like to see that statement made just that way in the US Constitution."
One of the things we expect as Americans is that progress is linear.
That bad stuff falls away and the new stuff fills in.
I think what the last hundred years show us
is that fights take new frames,
things prop up in other directions.
Backlash comes, progress is made.
It's a messy, ever-changing, ever-evolving situation.
And to me, the struggle is just as great as it was a hundred years ago.
It's just different.
[Murray] We have to stop thinking of courts
as white knights on horses coming to save women.
If you care about reproductive rights,
most restrictive abortion legislation is coming from restrictive states.
[woman] I had to go before a judge
so he could decide if I was mature enough to have an abortion.
[person hollers]
My right to an abortion was up to someone else's view of me
and my future.
It was a long, exhausting ordeal and even more ridiculous
because I didn't have to do this when I had my daughter at 15.
[Murray] Why aren't we focusing more on having women run at the state level?
[chanting]
We should be more proactive in making sure that these kinds of restrictive laws
never get out of state legislatures in the first place.
Yes means yes and no means no!
[Murray] Me Too suggests that what we have done as a matter of law
has really been inadequate.
[woman] It was never okay not to have consent.
But what Me Too has done is given cover for people
to come forward and say, "This is not okay."
[chanting] Stop the violence, stop the rape!
The Me Too Movement calls attention to the failure of law
and then demands solutions, but outside of law.
I mean, Me Too is happening all in the realm of social media.
It's not happening in law at all.
[Sarsour] Why aren't men clamoring to give women equal rights?
Because men have also lived in the patriarchy.
Asking, "Can you give me a bit of the power that you have?"
That's what we're asking men, and men say,
"I don't know if I want to. I don't know if I want to share it with you."
"What will you do with power?"
And I hope that I can reaffirm and maybe reassure men
that I promise that, when we get power, we'll make everybody's lives better.
-[men chanting] Her body, her choice! -[women chanting] My body, my choice!
[chanting continues]
If you cannot control your body from the skin in,
you cannot control it from the skin out,
you cannot control your lives.
-This is a women's march. -[applause]
And this Women's March represents the promise of feminism,
and inclusive and intersectional feminism
that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism,
to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism,
to misogyny.
I stand here before you unapologetically Muslim-American…
[cheering and applause]
…unapologetically Palestinian-American.
If you wanna know if you are going the right way,
follow women of color, sisters and brothers.
We know where we need to go, and we know where justice is
because when we fight for justice,
we fight for it for all people, for all our communities.
Virginia became today the crucial 38th State
to ratify the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment,
which bars discrimination on the basis of sex.
To know that during my lifetime
that women will be included in the Constitution
would be a very proud moment.
It has been a long fight, it's a decades-long fight for the ERA.
And for me to know many of women, some of them elders now
who have fought for it and for them to see the fruits of their labor
would be so beautiful and inspiring.
And it also is a gift that we're giving to generations of women to come.
Getting the ERA into the Constitution
would be an incredible step forward in our national story of equality.
It is the natural progression of the 14th,
because ultimately women are asking not for control over each other,
certainly not control over men,
but simply control over their own lives.
Many Americans' resistance to women's equality
has been in part defined by traditional marriage roles,
the idea that a husband will define a woman's life for her.
As women have gained rights, though, our understanding of marriage has changed,
and it keeps changing.
The expanding definition of marriage leads to another 14th Amendment fight,
one that shows Fourteen can be an even greater force for inclusion,
even love.
♪ Well, I run to the river ♪
♪ It was boilin', I run to the sea ♪
♪ It was boilin', all on that day ♪
♪ So I ran to the Lord ♪
♪ I said, Lord, hide me ♪
♪ Please, hide me ♪
♪ Please help me, all on that day ♪
♪ He said, hide? ♪
♪ Where were you? ♪
♪ When you oughta have been prayin' ? ♪
♪ I said, Lord, Lord ♪
♪ Hear me prayin', Lord, Lord ♪
♪ Hear me prayin', all on that day ♪
♪ Sinnerman, you oughta be prayin' ♪
♪ Oughta be prayin', sinnerman ♪
♪ Oughta be prayin', all on that day ♪
-♪ Up come power ♪ -♪ Power, Lord ♪
-♪ Power ♪ -♪ Power, Lord ♪
-♪ Hold down ♪ -♪ Power, Lord ♪
-♪ Kingdom ♪ -♪ Power, Lord ♪
-♪ Power ♪ -♪ Power, Lord ♪
♪ Ma-na-ma ♪
♪ Ma-na-ma-na ♪
♪ Ma-na-na-ma-na, ma-na-ma-na ♪
♪ Ma-na-na-ma-na ♪
♪ Whoa-oa ♪
♪ Ha-ha-ha-ha-wa ♪
♪ Ha-wa ♪
♪ Wait ♪
♪ Oh, Lord ♪