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• 1 2023-10-03T16:18:55-07:00 Race, class, and the Equal Rights Amendment 56 image_header 2024-03-08T18:51:26-08:00

  From the late 1970s and into the 80s the monolithic view of lesbians was challenged more openly with discussions on the intersectionality of class and race. The Women’s Liberation Movement and feminist movements were dominated and documented by white middle-class identities that often erased and excluded the experiences, feminist ideas, and foundational work by women of color in these movements. In the 1980s more discussion on the different voices within the lesbian feminist movement were brought into the mainstream.
  
  Books, essays, and papers published by women of color led the conversations of a more intersectional feminism. In 1981 the feminist anthology Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa was published, as was Ain’t I a Woman by Bell Hooks, and Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, run by Barbara Smith, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde, was in full operation publishing feminist and lesbian writers of color.
  

  Barbara Smith's book, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977) begins with Smith saying:

  I do not know where to begin. Long before I tried to write this realized that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous, merely by writing about Black lesbian writers from any perspective at all. These things have not been done. Not by white male critics, expectedly. Not by Black male critics. Not by white women critics who think of themselves as feminists. And most crucially not by Black women critics who, although they pay the most attention to Black women writers as a group, seldom use a consistent feminist analysis or write about Black lesbian literature. All segments of the literary world-whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian —do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist.
  
  For whites, this specialized lack of knowledge is inextricably connected to their not knowing in any concrete or politically transforming way that Black women of any description dwell in this place. Black women's existence, experience, and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these are in the "real world" of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible, unknown.
  -Barbara Smith, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism

  
  

  Zoe Nicholson and the Equal Rights Amendment

  In addition to an awareness of labor, class, and race, the 1980s brought a resurgence of effort to pass the Equal Rights Act (ERA). This had always been part of NOW’s mission. Zoe Nicholson is a lesbian activist, and has fought for the ERA beginning in the 1970s.  
  
  The Equal Rights Act (ERA) was an amendment to the US Constitution introduced in the 1920s after Women’s Suffrage. It would remove legal distinction between men and women, asserting that sex would not determine legal rights, especially surrounding laws that determine child support and job opportunities.

  Between 1923 and 1970 the ERA was buried, amended, and nullified, before finally being passed by a vote from the full House of Representatives for the first time in 47 years. But it took until 1971 before the ERA as it was intended was approved by the House and passed by the Senate. The National Organization of Women (NOW) was integral to pushing the ERA through in the late 1960s and 1970, and effectively reversing opposition in state governments. For an amendment to be added, 38 states need to ratify. In 1972 a deadline was set that demanded that in 7 years the ERA needed to be ratified by the full 38, but by 1973, only 30 states had done so.^[1] Eventually the deadline would come and go without enough state support, getting extended for 3 more years ending in 1982. Even then, only 35 states ever ratified. While the deadline has been expired for decades, ERA continued to be pushed, and in 2020 Virginia became the 38th state to ratify. In 2021, there are ongoing debates over whether the ratifications occurring after the expiration of the deadline are valid, and these keep the ERA from being fully passed by the House and Senate.^[2]
  
  Zoe Nicholson is a member of NOW, as well as president of the Pacific Shore NOW chapter, the founder of ERA Once and for ALL, and a member of the ERA Roundtable. In 1982 she acted to persuade Illinois legislators to ratify the ERA by publicly fasting for 37 days with six other women. She published her experience in a memoir titled The Hungry Heart: a Woman’s Fast for Justice.^[3]
  
  Zoe Nicholson donated materials to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives on February 29, 2022, which includes her book manuscripts, book-related material, activism ephemera, photographs, articles, activism presentations and audiovisual material relating to the ERA and Nicholson’s political contributions. She recorded a oral history interview for the Mazer with Angela Brinskele in early 2023.
   

   

  
  

  Zoe Nicholson address, "Where are the Women" at the Los Angeles United Nations Rally in 2012:
  
  "I want a world where women and men and children attend the matter of life.
  I want a world where everyone is well, thriving, prospering.
  I want a world where women make all family planning and healthcare decisions.
  I want a world with women at the helm, in parliaments,
  on the front line of justice and law enforcement.
  I want a world where women are empowered to lead the way to PEACE
  I am so proud to be here with you today.
  I am in love with equality and you are too 
  It is just that simple.
  
  Welcome to this moment
  Welcome to the place our opponents fear the most.
  Where we have drawn a line
  We have drawn the line to say enough is enough
  When we rise up together to say enough is enough
  In all 50 states We UNITE to say, enough is enough.
  
  Welcome to this moment
  We are women and men who demand equality
  We are LGBT who demand equality
  We are First Nation who demand equality
  We are First Immigrants who demand equality
  We are the 99% who demand equality under the law.
  
  Welcome to this moment
  when the majority sees their power,
  seizes their power,
  exercises their power
  The moment of UNITY has arrived
  when we refuse to be divided, diminished, dismissed.
  
  Welcome to this moment
  The whole of Mother Earth is calling for change. 
  The forces are collecting
  The tipping point has arrived
  From Egypt to Wall Street, from India to Mexico
  The people are rising up and uniting for change
  
  Welcome to this moment
  Throw open your arms, be of good cheer,
  we have found one another as never before 
  I am in love with equality and you are too
  It is just that simple.
  
  Today Let Us declare:
  Peace on Women
  Peace on Immigrants
  Peace on Queers
  Peace on Workers
  Peace on the Poor
  Peace on America
  Peace on Earth"

  ---

  Citations
  [1] "Timeline of the ERA until 1978," n.d., drawer 02-03, folder 6, subfolder 1, Subject Files, June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, CA.
  [2] Veronica Stracqualursi, “House Passes Joint Resolution to Remove ERA Deadline | CNN Politics,” CNN, March 17, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/politics/congress-era-deadline-joint-resolutions/index.html.
  [3] Casey Winkelman, "Biographical Note," Zoe Nicholson Collection, June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives.