Considering the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) might call to mind a scene from The West Wing, where Republican token character Ainsley Hayes vilifies the proposed amendment. “I’m a low maintenance lady, I’ve got the Fourteenth Amendment,” Hayes sighs, “I’m mortified there’s reason to believe I wasn’t” equal under the law. “I’m not a special subset in need of your protection,” Hayes continues, unintentionally echoing the decades-earlier position of emancipationism, or anti-protectionism, which ironically supported the ERA. While Hayes doesn’t want her “rights handed down… by a bunch of old white men,” ERA’s early history was, to the contrary, a story Read more