| dc.description.abstract | From 1972 through 1982, the national battle over the Equal Rights Amendment fomented dissension and unrest. Far from the early and easy passage many Americans envisioned for the amendment, the ERA brought to the nation a ten year struggle between activists who invested ratification with two differing ideological and personal meanings. For feminists, ratification would guarantee for American women two long denied principles of the Constitution - equality and justice. For antiratificationists, the amendment would disrupt accepted cultural norms of the day and would continue the dissolution and destruction of the traditional beliefs they held dear, striking at the heart of the nation's founding doctrines. As the first state to deny ratification, Oklahoma became a battleground between those two factions from the moment Congress sent the amendment to the states. Caught between the two sides, politicians used compromise, concession, and avoidance of the issue to negotiate the political dilemma of the ERA and to save their political careers. By the latter years of the decade, the struggle over ratification had politicized large numbers of female state Christian ERA opponents, which helped lead to the Oklahoma political realignment from Democrat to Republican. As founding members of the Pro Family, Religious Right movement, Oklahoma and other states' anti-ERA Christian women helped initiate, and provided one primary element of, the conservative movement influencing national politics beginning in the 1980s. | |
