Micah Saul: This project is built on a hypoth­e­sis. There are moments in his­to­ry when the sta­tus quo fails. Political sys­tems prove insuf­fi­cient, reli­gious ideas unsat­is­fac­to­ry, social struc­tures intol­er­a­ble. These are moments of crisis. 

Aengus Anderson: During some of these moments, great minds have entered into con­ver­sa­tion and torn apart inher­it­ed ideas, dethron­ing truths, com­bin­ing old thoughts, and cre­at­ing new ideas. They’ve shaped the norms of future generations.

Saul: Every era has its issues, but do ours war­rant The Conversation? If they do, is it happening?

Anderson: We’ll be explor­ing these sorts of ques­tions through con­ver­sa­tions with a cross-section of American thinkers, peo­ple who are cri­tiquing some aspect of nor­mal­i­ty and offer­ing an alter­na­tive vision of the future. People who might be hav­ing The Conversation.

Saul: Like a real con­ver­sa­tion, this project is going to be sub­jec­tive. It will fre­quent­ly change direc­tions, con­nect unex­pect­ed ideas, and wan­der between the tan­gi­ble and the abstract. It will leave us with far more ques­tions than answers because after all, nobody has a monop­oly on dream­ing about the future.

Anderson: I’m Aengus Anderson.

Saul: And I’m Micah Saul. And you’re lis­ten­ing to The Conversation.

Aengus Anderson: A real mess of con­ver­sa­tion’s about to begin here.

Micah Saul: Hi.

Neil Prendergast: Hi.

Saul: Yeah, that’s right. There’s three of us tonight. 

Anderson: Which is three too many as far as you’re con­cerned, but we’re bring­ing a new episode to you. This is Roberta Francis. She’s the chair of the ERA task force for the National Council of Women’s Organizations. She’s been work­ing in the ERA for over three decades and she also man­ages the web­site equal​right​samend​ment​.org. There’s a lot we could say about this. We haven’t talked about gen­der issues enough in this project yet.

Saul: We’ve been say­ing this a lot late­ly. This is one we want­ed from the very begin­ning. We need­ed some­body to talk about… Well, sort of the mod­ern state of feminism.

Anderson: Right. And Neil’s going to pla­gia­rize every­thing she says for his next lecture.

Prendergast: Oh, yeah. Give me a few weeks I’ll have it down.

Anderson: So here we go. We’ll be back on the end of this thing.

Roberta Francis: I grad­u­at­ed from col­lege in the mid-1960s. I was very interested—at that point got turned on to issues of social jus­tice because the civ­il rights strug­gles were very hot at that time. And I got it right away and was acti­vat­ed by the idea of social jus­tice based on race. And pret­ty much the whole cul­ture was not engaged in social jus­tice based on sex, gen­der at that point.

I got mar­ried in the mid 60s. I had a daugh­ter in 1969 and a son in 1973 and was doing the at-home mom gig at that point. I was a mem­ber of the local League of Women Voters in Chatham, New Jersey, and some­one asked if I had infor­ma­tion about the Equal Rights Amendment. And I looked in the League files, read about it. Fifty-two words say­ing ​“equal­i­ty of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and then two oth­er sec­tions that are imple­ment­ing it. 

And I thought what’s to argue? If ever ques­tions break open peo­ple’s psy­ches and lives, that was the ques­tion that that it for me. What’s to argue with ​“equal­i­ty of rights shall not be denied?” And when I found out that what was being denied was pret­ty much the same as what had been argued against woman suf­frage and why women should­n’t have the vote, etc., it just opened up the whole his­to­ry of sys­temic sex dis­crim­i­na­tion to me.

It was first writ­ten and pro­posed in 1923. And that was almost nine­ty years ago, and we are done with it yet. It actu­al­ly had been intro­duced in every Congress between 1923 and 1972, and just had not got­ten out. But 1972, Congress passed the ERA. It got thirty-five of the nec­es­sary thirty-eight rat­i­fi­ca­tions by 1977. It had been out to the states for five years. Well, Jimmy Carter was President at that point. Ronald Reagan’s machine was kick­ing up and the winds were behind the sails of the con­ser­v­a­tives. And the ERA was one rea­son, because it was a good orga­niz­ing tool for them.

Also, for instance insur­ance com­pa­nies real­ized if the ERA is in place, we’re going to have to stop using male/female as cat­e­gories of pric­ing for pre­mi­ums, cov­er­age, etc. And any busi­ness who was pay­ing inequitably based on gen­der (sex), was going to have to stop it. It was a big eco­nom­ic issue. It was a big cul­tur­al issue. A big the­o­log­i­cal issue. When you live in a uni­verse where God is male, and it goes from God to male to female to child to ani­mal, what­ev­er, this is the order of the uni­verse, then the ERA is upset­ting your whole world­view. And I think at bot­tom, a lot of the oppo­si­tion to it comes out of those lev­els of our psy­ches and our social­iza­tion that aren’t even fore­most in the argu­ments that are made. 

The ERA nev­er did get rat­i­fied by those final three states. So the vast major­i­ty of states, the very vast major­i­ty of peo­ple, were for it, but the polit­i­cal strate­giz­ing pre­vent­ed it from being put into the Constitution. So, since 1982, thir­ty years ago, the ERA has always been rein­tro­duced in every ses­sion of Congress. It’s still polit­i­cal­ly out there. People are look­ing at both the tra­di­tion­al start-over (both hous­es of Congress by two thirds and then thirty-eight states) afresh, or look­ing to get it rat­i­fied in three more states and test that oth­er premise.

Aengus Anderson: So thir­ty years lat­er, here we are. It’s almost like the machin­ery could even still be in place. Culturally, where are we now?

Francis: Back in the day, in the 70s, major argu­ments— I won’t even…yes I am rais­ing it by men­tion­ing it, but peo­ple always make fun of the uni­sex bath­rooms argument.

Anderson: Oh, that’s… I mean, yeah we kin­da have to talk about it—

Francis: We do.

Anderson: Because when I think about some­thing that—

Francis: Yes.

Anderson: One of the only things I asso­ciate with killing the ERA is the uni­sex bath­room argument.

Francis: Yes, yes. I mean again, so many of these things are ques­tioned so good because in the last thir­ty, forty years since it came out of Congress, things have changed so much. Even going into the 80s. I mean my daugh­ter, at Johns Hopkins in the late 80s into the 90s was on a co-ed floor in her dorm where they shared the bath­room etc. But she did­n’t have the ERA to pro­tect her legal­ly in a lot of ways.

So, many of these things have hap­pened absolute­ly with­out the ERA. The lines drawn between equal­i­ty of rights under the law shall not be denied on account of sex, and some of the argu­ments are… You know, they’re pulled almost out of thin air. But they worked, because they push peo­ple’s buttons.

Another one was women would have to be draft­ed if we had an ERA. Well, Congress can draft women today, if it choos­es. There are sev­er­al times when Congress was on the verge of draft­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of women, for cer­tain cat­e­gories of jobs at least. Plus, when you look at what wom­ens’ role in the mil­i­tary is now, there are some com­bat jobs opened up to women now. Women are serv­ing on sub­marines. All kinds of things. Women have risen to the high­est ranks of admi­rals, gen­er­als, and so on. And yet argu­ments like that still seem to get under the radar and and make peo­ple say, ​“Oh, we should­n’t have this com­pelled same­ness.” It’s not about com­pelled same­ness, it’s about equal­i­ty of rights under the law.

Twenty-two states out of the fifty have vari­a­tions of state equal rights amend­ments. We’re liv­ing in a coun­try that has almost half its states oper­at­ing under what you might call the ERA. All of the hor­ror sto­ries that oppo­nents cite…haven’t hap­pened. Is this a great con­spir­a­cy over the decades for the states not to imple­ment all the hor­ri­ble things about the ERA until we have a fed­er­al one? No, it’s that prin­ci­ple works real­ly well. And it’s fair, and it’s part of a tradition.

Anderson: Do peo­ple feel like oh, well that bat­tle’s basi­cal­ly been won. Who cares?

Francis: There are two won­der­ful polls I cite. The recent one, April 2012, Daily Kos and Service Employees International Union did a poll. Question was, ​“Do you believe that the Constitution should guar­an­tee that men and women have equal rights?” essen­tial­ly. Ninety-one per­cent of peo­ple in April 2012 said the Constitution should guar­an­tee that women and men have equal rights.

And that has gone up by 3% since the oth­er poll that I quote, which was done in 2001—never got much visibility—that asked the ques­tion, ​“Do you believe men and women should have equal rights?” And 96% said yes. ​“Do you believe the Constitution should guar­an­tee it?” Eighty-eight per­cent said yes. ​“Do you think the Constitution already guar­an­tees it?” Seventy-two per­cent said yes. Three quar­ters almost of the peo­ple, and who knows ten years lat­er whether it would be even more, think what’s the issue? That the Constitution already guar­an­tees equal rights for women and men when in fact it doesn’t.

Anderson: And it does in dif­fer­ent ways. So there’s vot­ing, right. And dif­fer­ent states have leg­is­la­tion. So, is it a moot point, fed­er­al­ly? I mean, what we gain by hav­ing the ERA at this point?

Francis: Well, that’s anoth­er absolute­ly key ques­tion. The 14^th Amendment, which guar­an­tees equal pro­tec­tion of the laws and due process, the main objec­tive was to make the freed enslaved peo­ple cit­i­zens. Now, it’s been applied to sex dis­crim­i­na­tion for about forty years, has done won­der­ful things to pro­hib­it it, but still does not pro­hib­it sex dis­crim­i­na­tion under the law to the extent that an equal rights amend­ment would.

It does­n’t raise sex dis­crim­i­na­tion cas­es to the same lev­el of required judi­cial scruti­ny, it’s called. A court must look at race dis­crim­i­na­tion under the high­est lev­el of strict scruti­ny. So, we want sex dis­crim­i­na­tion to have the same required lev­el of judi­cial scruti­ny that race dis­crim­i­na­tion does. And that does­n’t hap­pen yet under the 14^th Amendment. It’s a kind of inter­me­di­ate lev­el of scrutiny.

But, I’ll ask myself, ​“What about Justice Scalia?” He has said that the Constitution does not pro­hib­it sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. In oth­er words, he is com­plete­ly opposed to the appli­ca­tion of the 14^th Amendment to cas­es of sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. His argu­ment, which he would say is true to his orig­i­nal­ist read­ing of the Constitution, is that it was added to the Constitution on the basis of deal­ing with race discrimination.

Anderson: So it’s almost like if you’re deal­ing with Supreme Court jus­tices like that, you need to have the ERA in writing.

Francis: Exactly. And that’s the whole point. I said when I read it at first it was exple­tive undelet­ed response. And the next thing I thought is, ​“My God, there’s no bet­ter argu­ment for the Equal Rights Amendment than his cou­ple sen­tences.” Those of us who endorse equal­i­ty of rights under the law with­out even think­ing about it much do not under­stand how that chal­lenges the tra­di­tion­al male-dominant world­view. Without an Equal Rights Amendment, we’ve got no pro­tec­tion against the vagaries of who’s inter­pret­ing the Constitution.

Anderson: Gotcha. And how does that man­i­fest? I imme­di­ate­ly think work­place pay. You know, I think of jobs and schools being open to people.

Francis: Yeah.

Anderson: Is it con­ceiv­able that we could lose ground on those more, or that they could get worse?

Francis: Oh, we def­i­nite­ly could. Now, even with­out the ERA, we’ve made tremen­dous progress in statu­to­ry law and case law. They’re two ways that we advance in terms of, in this case, pro­tect­ing against sex dis­crim­i­na­tion in the law. So we’ve had things like Title IX. Everybody hears Title IX. Well, there were admin­is­tra­tive reg­u­la­tions in George W. Bush’s time that tried to pull back insti­tu­tions’ oblig­a­tions to live up to Title IX.

So, gen­er­al­ly peo­ple don’t see the skir­mish­es that are always always always going on in the back­ground to pre­serve where we are now in terms of laws against sex dis­crim­i­na­tion or laws that would pro­mote sex equal­i­ty. But com­pared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much bet­ter off in terms of equal­i­ty of rights being guar­an­teed by the law, because so many laws that did dis­crim­i­nate on their face are off the books as a result of the strug­gle for the Equal Rights Amendment. And in those thir­ty, forty years, the cul­tur­al con­text for the dis­cus­sion of the ERA has shift­ed under our feet more than I would have guessed, par­tic­u­lar­ly around gay rights. I would have pic­tured same-sex mar­riage as still being more of a hot-button issue. But it seems as though there’s a long row to hoe before it’s a non-issue, if you will. But right now, I think in my mind we reached the tip­ping point with that soon­er than I would have expected.

Anderson: So, this project has explored what of dif­fer­ent visions of the future, and I would like to look at where do we go from here say, kind of your best-case sce­nario possible. 

Francis: Well, I’ll start out with we were talk­ing before you start­ed tap­ing about a book that I just fin­ished read­ing called Jerusalem, Jerusalem by James Carroll. At the end he has two para­graphs about for exam­ple mov­ing for­ward, just as you’re describ­ing it, what it would look like. And he says that the tra­di­tion­al reli­gions have upheld misog­y­nist sex­ism. He calls it ​“a spe­cial symp­tom of reli­gious disorder.”

And he believes that what he called anti-female vio­lence that is inher­ent in the misog­y­ny, in the male dom­i­nance, is on a con­tin­u­um which we know when we work with this—I thought this was an inter­est­ing way to express it—on a con­tin­u­um from intel­lec­tu­al assump­tions of male suprema­cy, to porno­graph­ic den­i­gra­tion, to phys­i­cal abuse, to enslave­ment and mur­der. If you start look­ing for root solu­tions to that, every­where you look, pro­mot­ing gen­der equal­i­ty bal­ances things out, takes some of that pow­er away that’s inher­ent in the male­ness. He says the oppo­site of male suprema­cy is not female suprema­cy but equal­i­ty. And I think that’s what a lot of men fear. If women are chal­leng­ing the male on top, the males are afraid what women are going for is women being in charge when if they paid any atten­tion they would see that’s not what it’s about. It’s about equality.

Anderson: And it seems like that taps into a very…like a very low-level way as maybe even humans we think about the world in which we cre­ate hier­ar­chies, just in our minds, to orga­nize things. 

Francis: That’s right.

Anderson: And equal­i­ty can threat­en the whole men­tal struc­ture. So Carroll is sort of talk­ing about—and we’ve been dis­cussing a lot of inequal­i­ty can be baked into these old faith traditions—

Francis: Oh, absolutely.

Anderson: —which is real­ly intrigu­ing because I think of a lot of what I do is I talk to peo­ple about ideas of the good, and what are your lowest-level assump­tions. And reli­gion pro­vides a lot of those. It’s that ter­mi­nus point at which you don’t ask why anymore.

Francis: Mm hm.

Anderson: And whether some­one’s sec­u­lar not, there’s always that point that you hit. 

Francis: Sure.

Anderson: So, if a lot of old­er faith tra­di­tions, at least in some of their inter­pre­ta­tions, are espous­ing inequal­i­ty, where are we get­ting this notion of equal­i­ty from? The one that we’re talk­ing about right here.

Anderson: Oh… Wow. You know, you can trace it back polit­i­cal­ly. The Enlightenment, Jefferson, John Locke. I mean, how far back do you go? But that’s only on the pub­lic, or you know the func­tion­al lev­el. Where does the impulse toward equal­i­ty come from? You know, you could go back and back and back. I think that what we look for is bal­ance. If equal­i­ty and bal­ance can be equat­ed, I think that when the sex roles are defined so hard and fast to be dif­fer­ent, we lose bal­ance. Because they’re defined to be dif­fer­ent, but then one is always count­ed as more important.

Anderson: It gets back to that hierarchy.

Francis: A Margaret Mead study—I think it was in… I don’t know if it was in Samoa stud­ies or just some­where in Polynesian stud­ies. There were some islands where men did the weav­ing and women did the fish­ing. And there were some islands where women did the weav­ing and men did the fish­ing. What was com­mon was what the men did had more social val­ue than what the women did. So it was­n’t what they did, it was who was doing it.

Anderson: Hm. Do you think that’s part of what makes the ERA scary? Like, are we actu­al­ly afraid of equality?

Francis: Yes. I think so. Thank you for mak­ing it so clear-cut. And obvi­ous­ly there are peo­ple who pant after it, and there are peo­ple whose knee-jerk reac­tion is, ​“Don’t you dare because you will be turn­ing my world upside down.” Inequity is taught from the begin­ning in the patri­ar­chal fam­i­ly. And so peo­ple would see equal­i­ty as a threat to the tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly. And again, that hits very close to where a lot of peo­ple live.

Anderson: I mean it’s anoth­er ara­tional assump­tion, right, that in this case it maybe com­ing from faith tra­di­tions or maybe from a more amor­phous cul­tur­al sense. But like, how do you talk to some­one if you come from a back­ground where you ara­tional­ly just think look, equal­i­ty is impor­tant, fun­da­men­tal­ly, for peo­ple. And you’re talk­ing to some­one who thinks, ​“Well, I have a faith tra­di­tion that says we should have a hier­ar­chi­cal soci­ety,” and that that’s the way it is. Is there a con­ver­sa­tion there, because you’re deal­ing with such dif­fer­ent low-level assumptions?

Francis: Well, I’ve been on TV shows and so on argu­ing with oppo­nents of the ERA. And one of my take­aways is we’re speak­ing two dif­fer­ent lan­guages. I said it’s like I’m speak­ing Swedish and the oth­er per­son­’s speak­ing Swahili, and the the word equal­i­ty has two dif­fer­ent mean­ings. And I don’t mean that to sound pes­simistic. I’m basi­cal­ly a very opti­mistic per­son. You can’t work on this for thirty-five plus years and not be an opti­mist that it’s going to do good and your giv­ing time to it is good. But there are so many lay­ers to this, and some of our con­ver­sa­tion, it’s help­ing elim­i­nate for me what are at some of those lev­els of the opposition.

I man­age the web site equal​right​samend​ment​.org. You can go to the Frequently Asked Questions page. You can get all these facts. You can go to the page ​“Why We Need the ERA”. And putting all those facts out there is only the begin­ning of engag­ing peo­ple with this issue. You have to understand…one has to, I have to, that the ratio­nal lev­el of engage­ment with this is only the tip of the iceberg.

You almost can’t even say, ​“Let’s have a con­ver­sa­tion,” before you have the glos­sary; define your terms. Which I don’t find depress­ing, I just find more burdensome.

Anderson: And I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in this because you’ve been engaged in one of these con­ver­sa­tions. I think of ERA and wom­en’s rights as being a real­ly heat­ed, emo­tion­al, arationally-rooted con­ver­sa­tion. And so how do you bal­ance those two things, the opti­mism with the sense that maybe you talk past each oth­er, and that you’re using dif­fer­ent words?

Francis: Well, let me… I’m not going to side­step the ques­tion, I’m going to take it to a place where in the ear­ly 80s I was the state wom­en’s issues direc­tor for the New Jersey League of Women Voters, and we adopt­ed a study of abor­tion pub­lic pol­i­cy. But what I did as I was look­ing at the mate­ri­als was almost imme­di­ate­ly see there are two ques­tions here, and they almost always get mushed togeth­er. The first ques­tion is what’s the moral sta­tus of abor­tion? And as you said, we’re in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety. We are nev­er going to have a con­sen­sus posi­tion on abor­tion, the moral sta­tus of abortion.

And so, we live in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety. We live under a Constitution that sep­a­rates church and state. That led me to ques­tion two. Given that there’s nev­er going to be a con­sen­sus in the fore­see­able future on what abor­tion’s moral sta­tus is, what should gov­ern­men­t’s role be? And I con­tend­ed, and the League con­tend­ed, and even very Catholic mem­bers who were anti-abortion per­son­al­ly, could agree on the answer that gov­ern­men­t’s role should not choose one posi­tion on abor­tion’s moral sta­tus from across that broad plu­ral­is­tic spec­trum and make laws based on that one position.

Government’s role has to take into account dif­fer­ent moral views of it. And as Roe v. Wade did, it takes a lot of work. It’s very com­pli­cat­ed. But when you do it right, and I think Roe vs. Wade did it right—I mean, I’m not into all the legal technicalities—but when you do it right, you’re being able to bridge the irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences of a moral posi­tion on abor­tion. In the con­text of we’re talk­ing here about what gov­ern­ment should do, and here’s what gov­ern­ment should do, giv­en the whole con­text of the Constitution.

Anderson: Right. I think so much of that for me depends on all sides being will­ing to accept ulti­mate­ly that there is a plu­ral­i­ty. And that’s kind of what makes me some­times pes­simistic. Because—and actu­al­ly this is exact­ly the word that Lawrence Torcello would’ve used—people who are rea­son­able can say, ​“Plurality’s inevitable.” But not all peo­ple are rea­son­able. I mean, and that’s the ter­ror of fundamentalism.

Francis: Or if they can’t win them over that they can enforce their way on them.

Anderson: Right.

Francis: That’s where the vio­lence comes in, and it’s not all phys­i­cal. It’s psy­cho­log­i­cal, it’s legal, etc. ​“We shall have them always with us” I guess is my answer, that we have to fig­ure out ways to allow peo­ple to real­ize their own indi­vid­ual goods, liv­ing the way they would like, with­in the con­text of hav­ing a good pub­lic sit­u­a­tion for the whole.

To me, I’m opti­mistic about The Future, how­ev­er long it may or may not be, because I think we all have such poten­tial to real­ly do pos­i­tive things and change things for the bet­ter. And we’re always going to come up against resis­tance to that. Some resis­tance being peo­ple who con­scious­ly want to change things for what we would call the worse. Other things being the iner­tia of social cus­toms, of laws, what­ev­er. But to me, opti­mism is say­ing yeah, there’s really…you know, it’s good to get up tomor­row morn­ing. There’s good stuff to be doing, and how­ev­er long it lasts I know in my lit­tle bit of time here I’ve helped advance it.

I love Martin Luther King’s— I nev­er quote it exact­ly right, but some­thing like the moral arc of the uni­verse is long but it bends toward jus­tice. So I’m just hap­py to be adding a lit­tle weight to the bend­ing of the arc of justice.

Neil Prendergast: Yeah, so what I enjoyed about this con­ver­sa­tion was that you know, she picks up some stuff that was laid out at the begin­ning of the con­ver­sa­tion, which is to think about this long arc of jus­tice. You know, the com­mit­ment she has to it is as long-standing for her as it is for John Fife, both com­mit­ted activists for decades.

Aengus Anderson: Yeah, which is a real­ly nice con­nec­tion. I love that we’ve got­ten two peo­ple cit­ing the same MLK quote here.

Micah Saul: Yeah, and it’s a good one, too. I mean, through­out the project we’ve sort of butted up against tele­o­log­i­cal ideas in terms of tech­nol­o­gy. Teleology in gen­er­al is prob­lem­at­ic, but this is a tele­ol­o­gy I can at least sup­port emotionally.

Anderson: It’s nice to think that things are get­ting better.

Saul: Right.

Prendergast: What I like about it, too, is that as far as kind of map­ping a con­ver­sa­tion, it is a great touch­stone. Because of course the civ­il rights move­ment touch­es both what Fife is doing, but then obvi­ous­ly lots of inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal inter­sec­tions with fem­i­nism and the wom­en’s movement. 

Anderson: And the oth­er con­nec­tion I sort of like with the idea of his­tor­i­cal momen­tum or tra­jec­to­ry or some­thing like that is that it real­ly gets us to why we want­ed to record this con­ver­sa­tion in the first place. Because if we look at the long arc of social change, at least here in America, we had a lot of it, and it feels like a lot of it petered off. Have we had seri­ous progress with things like the ERA? And do we still need it?

Saul: So you know, the ques­tion is like well, why? And I thought she gave some very good answers for why we still need that pro­tec­tion, activist Supreme Court jus­tices being just one.

Anderson: Right, and then all of that case law you’ve built up can just be over­turned so readily.

Saul: One can always set a new precedent.

Prendergast: And it seems like, I mean, some­thing that we hon­est­ly did­n’t talk about but might’ve belonged in there would be just the prin­ci­ple of it. Like, you just should have that in your constitution.

Saul: Right. I mean, actu­al­ly isn’t lan­guage like that already in the UN Declaration of Civil Rights? If a glob­al body has that in there, and we view our­selves as being a mod­ern nation, not mir­ror­ing that is kind of ridiculous.

Anderson: And so as we’re talk­ing about this, there are a whole vari­ety of rea­sons why we might still want it, whether it’s prece­dent or just…dignity. But the fact that it’s gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be already in effect, what do you guys think of that? Do you think that we believe the ERA’s already imple­ment­ed because…I don’t know, some sort of social frag­men­ta­tion? I mean, are we just not hav­ing this conversation?

Prendergast: You know, I have to say as an instruc­tor of US his­to­ry, I think it prob­a­bly has a lot to do with peo­ple con­fus­ing what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is, and think­ing that it’s some­how the Constitution.

You know, what’s real inter­est­ing to me about that is that there is this kind of inter­sec­tion between gen­der and race and the Civil Rights Act, and then the two move­ments, the wom­en’s rights move­ment and the civ­il rights move­ment, there. In that inter­sec­tion, they kind of help each oth­er out. But one social move­ment does­n’t always help out a sib­ling social movement.

For exam­ple, the 14^th Amendment. It estab­lish­es all sorts of rights for African Americans but is also the first time that you actu­al­ly see the word ​“male” in the Constitution. But in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the two move­ments inter­sect rather than diverge. And so it kind of to me opens up all sorts of ques­tions about okay, well where is ERA right now, and are there per­haps ways in which it’s inter­sect­ing with oth­er social move­ments or diverging?

Anderson: I mean, there’s a fas­ci­nat­ing thread to this, right, because a lot of the rea­son that the ERA was shot down orig­i­nal­ly, a lot of peo­ple were wor­ried that it was going to push the gay rights agen­da. And of course now it seems like the gay rights agenda—and she does men­tion this a lit­tle bit in the interview—it’s kind of leapfrogged ahead and it feels like there’s a lot of momen­tum there. And here we are with the sort of founder­ing ERA. So is it going to pick up any steam from gay rights?

Prendergast: I hes­i­tate to ven­ture any kind of pre­dic­tion there, giv­en how var­ied the past has been.

Anderson: Right. You know, some­thing else that we should talk about in terms of like, where the ERA stands and how it fits into our cul­ture today, I think, is the con­ver­sa­tion about big gov­ern­ment and small gov­ern­ment. And the ERA is one that it’s hard to pin down. Is this some­thing that you could por­trayed as being a small gov­ern­ment thing? It’s kind of a bul­wark of the indi­vid­ual against these larg­er sys­tems. At the same time, by guar­an­tee­ing equal­i­ty is it sort of encour­ag­ing the pro­duc­tion of larg­er gov­ern­ment? Enforcement and things like that. How does that sail in this cul­tur­al context?

Prendergast: Yeah, I mean I think that there’s a lot of inter­est­ing sort of ques­tions there when you do frame it that way. But my sense of things, which should not be trust­ed, is that it’s real­ly a ques­tion about gen­der and fam­i­ly. I think peo­ple have a ten­den­cy to sort of see those things as issues first before they see size of gov­ern­ment questions.

Anderson: Right. I think the phi­los­o­phy in this con­ver­sa­tion was­n’t quite as exposed as it is in some of the oth­er con­ver­sa­tions. I think a lot of its implic­it here. But I think some­thing that Roberta was talk­ing about that I real­ly liked was the idea of the fam­i­ly, and what you were just say­ing, Neil, real­ly made me think of that. This threat­ens a lot of struc­tures that are… I don’t know… They’re reli­gious struc­tures. They’re cul­tur­al struc­tures. They’re ways of under­stand­ing the world.

Saul: Yeah, I mean those are the ara­tional beliefs that we keep com­ing to in this project.

Anderson: So is the ERA, then, this like…kind of Enlightenment-era lib­er­al tra­di­tion found­ed in a notion of good that isn’t per­sua­sive to a lot of peo­ple anymore?

Prendergast: It seems like what you’re say­ing about the Enlightenment and the ERA being togeth­er is that they pro­tect the rights of indi­vid­u­als. And so I think that real­ly kind of ideas about the fam­i­ly for a lot of Americans sort of trump any kind of idea about indi­vid­ual rights that might come out of the Enlightenment.

Anderson: Oh, that’s interesting.

Prendergast: I mean, you know, it’s makes sense. I mean, peo­ple expe­ri­ence fam­i­ly like it’s a felt thing. It mat­ters a lot, it’s a world of belong­ing, and you know…what the fuck is the Enlightenment? 

[All laugh.]

Anderson: Oh…and there it goes. That’s, that’s the end of the sto­ry. That is such an elo­quent way of dis­miss­ing the Enlightenment, I don’t want to talk about it any­more. So let’s talk about some­thing else.

Prendergast: Yeah, well I think anoth­er real­ly cool thing that came up in this conversation…issue of lan­guage. People are sort of not using the same def­i­n­i­tions for their terms, and that that was one of the big bar­ri­ers to the ERA sort of hav­ing trac­tion at the lev­el it’s going to need to be passed.

Saul: You know, this con­nects with every­thing else we’ve been talk­ing about, I think. The attempt to have con­ver­sa­tion with­out a shared vocab­u­lary real­ly gets in the way of cre­at­ing any sort of mean­ing­ful change. And this is a theme that’s gone through­out the project. Some peo­ple I think call it lan­guage. Other peo­ple talk about need­ing to cre­ate new shared myths. They’re all sort of inter­con­nect­ed and deeply related.

Anderson: And it’s a huge prob­lem. In a way, right, it’s kind of what we’re try­ing to address with this series. And I know a lot of peo­ple come in and they’ll lis­ten to an episode for a thinker that they know and like, but the hope is of course that they lis­ten to the next one. And the oth­er hope is that some of the inter­vie­wees lis­ten to each oth­er’s episodes, and that we forge a lan­guage with­in the project that’s about the good.

Saul: When we start­ed the project, maybe I thought we had—mmm—one chance in a…thousand? of get­ting that. And I’m more and more think­ing that’s uh…one in a mil­lion. Fortunately and inter­est­ing­ly, this con­ver­sa­tion and the next one actu­al­ly are going to share some lan­guage and share some ideas.

Anderson: Quite a lot of them, actu­al­ly. Next we’re talk­ing to John Seager of Population Connection. And he’s going to talk a lot about—surprise—equality and repro­duc­tive rights. So, until next week. 

That was Roberta Francis, record­ed November 12, 2012 in Chatham, New Jersey. 

Saul: And you are of course lis­ten­ing to The Conversation. Find us on the web at find​the​con​ver​sa​tion​.com.

Prendergast: You can fol­low us on Twitter at @aengusanderson.

Saul: I’m Micah Saul.

Prendergast: I’m Neil Prendergast.

Anderson: And I’m Aengus Anderson. Thanks for listening.