Sign our Equal Rights Petition!! Yes, we’ve made our goal, but sign, sign, sign until Saturday, Feb. 10th. We have just begun to fight, so raise your voice in support! 

By Nomi Leasure    

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the Universe?” -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Charged with writing on the importance of an Equal Rights Amendment, I’ve pondered this critical question for the last few days. Why would men want to deny women rights? Why is it of relevance to the life of the banker, the businessman, the professor, the salesman, whether or not a women he does noteven know — and will never know — gets an abortion? Why fight so hard against accessible and affordable birth control for his daughter, his daughter’s friends and the daughters of men he will never meet? Why, I wonder, would a boss, a CEO, a Human Resources manager wish to deny women equal pay in the work place?

In attempting to write about the importance of adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, I can’t help but become more fixated on why not? And PS, most of my friends think we have one. Didn’t those second wavers take care of the ERA business?

Who Is The One Running Scared?

Though it was difficult, I listened to some of the arguments against passing the ERA. In a calm, objective state of mind, I stomached Phyllis Schlafly’s four minute appeal to the courts of Arkansas in February of 2007. I Googled arguments against Equal Rights Amendment. I listened to the RightWingWatch.Org radio program, according to whom feminists are family destroying whores.

Each piece I read and argument I listened to was fervent and impassioned, yet there was something unsaid looming under the surface. As I read and listened, my pulse quickened, and my muscles tensed. I felt stressed and unstable.

It was as if the sentiments of the material I was reading transcended my computer screen, growing on me — rather like a disease. It was then I realized what was buried in the right wing opposition of an Equal Rights Amendment: fear and loathing of modern women.

In the hearts of the opposition of this amendment, in the hearts of men across America and the women they have made docile over the years, is earth-shattering fear. They are afraid, and they are afraid of us. We see and hear so much more of men in their arguments against the rights of women, than we do of the women themselves. 

Listening, I realize this is not a debate with prepared arguments supported by facts and scientific analysis. This is not a logical presentation. In reality, these statements aren’t supported by evidence, presented in a coherent manner.

Voices of Angry Men

These arguments against women’s rights — against my rights and those of my friends and family — are impassioned. And they are angry, impetuous and irrational.

This conclusion leaves me with more questions. Why are these men afraid? Why are they angry? It is Virginia Woolf who can lend a voice here. She wrote:

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.

The superiority of a man — in “his” eyes — is up for debate. It is being questioned in front of the courts and discussed in the newspapers and on blogs. His wife, when reading the news, looks at him with less admiration and he can not bear it. As women, it is difficult to sympathize, because we are accustomed to fighting an uphill battle, so accustomed that our survival muscles are strong and conditioned. A man, who has been placed at the top of the food chain by birth, is weak. And now, in his eyes, he is being challenged by a superior strength. 

Sign our Equal Rights Petition!! Yes, we’ve made our goal, but sign, sign, sign until Saturday, Feb. 10th. We have just begun to fight, so raise your voice in support! 

The Battle for My Body