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\"When the Equal Rights Amendment was first passed by Congress in 1972, Richard Nixon was president and All in the Family's Archie Bunker was telling his feisty wife Edith to stifle it. Over the course of the next ten years, an initial wave of enthusiasm led to ratification of the ERA by thirty-five states, just three short of the thirty-eight states needed by the 1982 deadline. Many of the arguments against the ERA that historically stood in the way of ratification have gone the way of bouffant hairdos and Bobby Riggs, and a new Coalition for the ERA was recently set up to bring the experience and wisdom of old-guard activists together with the energy and social media skills of a new-guard generation of women. In a series of short, accessible chapters looking at several key areas of sex discrimination recognized by the Supreme Court, Equal Means Equal tells the story of the legal cases that inform the need for an ERA, along with contemporary cases in which women's rights are compromised without the protection of an ERA. Covering topics ranging from pay equity and pregnancy discrimination to violence against women, Equal Means Equal makes abundantly clear that an ERA will improve the lives of real women living in America. \"-- Provided by publisher.

By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this study grapples not only with the battle over women's constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen. Through an examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize citizenship to correspond with women's changing status after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Finally, Rebecca DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment, but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.

Data on the state-level ERA ratification process are used here to address leading theoretical debates about the role of social movements, public opinion, and political climate on policy outcomes, the goal being to test the claim that these factors depend on each other. Social movement organizations, public opinion, and political party support all influenced the ratification process. But the effects are modified when the interactive nature of public opinion and electoral competition, and political party support and movement organizational strength, are tested. In particular, the effect of social movement organizations on ratification was amplified in the presence of elite allies, and legislators responded most to favorable public opinion under conditions of low electoral competition. These findings are used to suggest a more integrated theory of policy outcomes that considers interactive and contingent effects of movements, public opinion, and political climate.

Based on pioneering research on the history of homosexualities in Africa and current lgbti activism, Marc Epprecht provides a sympathetic overview of the issues at play, and a hopeful outlook on the potential of sexual rights for all.

Why is equality a bedrock principle in the United States? Our final Homework Help video of 2021 explores the origins of this principle and how our nation has not always lived up to it throughout our history.

There is a widespread perception that class receives no special protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. That perception arose forty years ago, when the Supreme Court shifted to the right, rejected the idea that the Constitution protects positive rights, and declined to recognize class as a suspect classification under the Equal Protection Clause. But those consequential developments have obscured an important, ongoing form of class-related constitutional protection: one that resides not in equal protection but in fundamental rights doctrine. This Article shows that a nontrivial number of fundamental rights came to be recognized as such—particularly during the Warren Court era—because they are essential not only to individual liberty but also to the equal citizenship of people without financial resources. Today, there are still doctrinal mechanisms in fundamental rights law that require courts to consider class when adjudicating the constitutionality of rights-burdening state action. To illustrate this phenomenon, this Article focuses on reproductive rights, a major area of fundamental rights law whose connection to class is poorly understood. The Court's opinions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade were not framed in terms of class, but class-related concerns informed the Court's decision to recognize birth control and abortion as fundamental rights. In the contexts of voting and criminal procedure too, the Court identified certain rights as fundamental in part because the state was denying them to financially disadvantaged people. In all of these areas, the Court developed fundamental rights doctrines that limited the extent to which the state could block such people from exercising their rights. Today, these long-standing class-sensitive doctrines are under threat. An increasing number of conservative judges — including a number of Supreme Court Justices — have begun to argue that class-related concerns have no place under the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this new class-blind approach, these judges cite Burger Court precedents rejecting positive rights claims and declining to treat the poor as a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause. But the Burger Court never held that courts are prohibited from considering class when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, it preserved many of the class-sensitive mechanisms its predecessor had developed to protect fundamental rights. Thus far, the Court has rejected attempts to eradicate these remaining forms of class-related protection from the law. But the composition of the federal judiciary is now in flux, and it is not clear that resistance to the new class blindness will endure. What is clear is that the emergent notion that class-based considerations have no place anywhere under the Fourteenth Amendment is a product not of the Burger Court era, but of our own.

Brown v Board of Education was a case brought to the Supreme Court in 1954 after Linda Brown, an African American student in Kansas, was denied access to the white-only schools nearby her house. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer for the case, and argued that segregated schools were inherently unequal. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Linda Brown and declared segregation unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment through incorporation under the premise that the bill of rights also applies to the states. This is one of the landmark cases that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

How did the United States attempt to reunite after the Civil War while also securing the rights of recently freed enslaved people and how successful was our country in accomplishing these goals? Our latest Homework Help video explores these questions while encouraging students to analyze the Reconstruction period and its relationship with the principles of liberty and equality.

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue.