Equals Rights Amendment Never Ratified; due to Phylis Schlafly

[Savannahmann]

41. It was the era as well.

For the last decade, America had watched their sons drafted, and taken off to war. They saw the horror on the nightly news. Young men, boys really, cut to pieces with bullets, bombs, and other horrors. They saw the veterans returning, limbless and or crippled. A young life cut short by death, by dismemberment. Plus there was the psychological scars that they would be dealing with for decades, or even forever.

The idea that young women would also be subjected to such horror was in itself horrifying. It was bad enough that our boys were going, but the idea of our girls was just too much. While it was mentioned only briefly, no one wanted to imagine their daughters, sisters, or the young women of the nation brutally gang raped if they were captured. A special hell that the men did not face for the most part. As awful as the POW experience was, and we were getting some idea by this time, we could not imagine it for a young woman.

That alone was enough to make people pause. Yes, we wanted equality for our women in the workplace. The nation however, did not want to see that equality subject the young women to horrors that we had grown reluctant to have our young men endure.

Unisex bathrooms were another horror. Women had been ogled enough by the time they reached voting age. Remember, this was the era where Separate but Equal was finally discredited. They could well imagine a court deciding some obscure case that made it a crime to have bathrooms for separate sexes, because there was an amendment that said that the women were equal in every way imaginable.

But mostly, it was the draft, and the all too fresh images of Viet-Nam. The televised war brought the truth to the people, there was no glory on the field of battle. There was only horror to be found there.