Interpreting the Women's Movement

Abstract

Reva Siegel’s fine lecture is both illuminating and provocative. Illuminating: She convincingly establishes a striking parallelism between the doctrinal positions elaborated by the Supreme Court and those developed by the proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in their struggle for ratification. As she explains, the women’s movement did not really lose the ERA—the big loser was Article V, which failed to register the movement’s triumph, and the big winner was the Supreme Court, which reinterpreted the Equal Protection Clause in a way that created a “de facto” ERA.