The movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has a storied, contentious past, especially in the state of Utah.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
First introduced in 1923 by Alice Paul, the ERA is a proposed constitutional amendment originally called the "Lucretia Mott Amendment", which was later renamed and rewritten to become the Equal Rights Amendment we know today. The ERA states “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Both the Republican and Democratic parties added the support of the ERA to their political platforms in the early 1940’s and on March 22, 1972, after it had passed in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, the ERA was sent to the states for ratification with a 7-year deadline.
At the height of its media exposure in the 1970s and 80s, the passing of the ERA hinged on the decisions of only a handful of states. In that electoral landscape, it looked as though Utah would be a pivotal voice in ratifying the ERA.
Utah has a history of women fighting for suffrage and equal rights. Though Wyoming was the first state to grant full suffrage in 1870, it was The Beehive State where women actually cast votes for the first time in US history, those votes being cast in the February 1870 Salt Lake City municipal election. Utah women were later obliged to fight for their suffrage again after it was retracted by the Edmunds-Tucker act. It would take another decade and the adoption of the Utah state constitution around the time of statehood for full suffrage to be restored, but Utah women fought hard all the while for re-enfranchisement.
With regard to the ERA, Utah experienced an active campaign against the ratification of the ERA. The first year the ERA was sent to the states, 22 states ratified it, and that number increased every year until after the ratification deadline was extended to June 30, 1982. The ERA was still three states away from the 38 it needed. Utah, however, did not ratify the ERA, in part because of opposition from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The LDS Church issued a statement which read, "While the enactment or rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment must be accomplished by recognized political processes, we are convinced that because of its predictable results, the matter is basically a moral rather than a political issue; and because of our serious concern over these moral implications, we have spoken against ratification, and without equivocation do so again." The Church’s official stance was coupled with a vigorous campaign to mobilize members, especially women, to oppose ratification.
How does the fight over the ERA look today?
It has been nearly half a century and almost two generations since the ratification debate was prominently discussed in the state of Utah. Recently, after Nevada unexpectedly ratified the amendment, state Legislatures across the nation, including in Utah, have revisited the ERA.
We set out to get a picture of Utahns’ current feelings about the ERA in a recent poll we conducted for Utah Policy. In that poll, we contacted a sample of 911 registered voters across the state, and showed them the following statement coupled with the following question: “The Equal Rights Amendment, also known as the ERA, would be an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which states that equal rights under the law shall not be denied on account of a person's sex. This amendment has not been ratified, but it could be considered by the Utah State Legislature. Would you favor or oppose the Utah State Legislature voting to ratify of the Equal Rights Amendment also known as the ERA?”
Here’s what we found.
We found that across the state, almost three-fourths of respondents (71%) said they supported ratifying the ERA at the time our poll was taken in late November and early December of 2019.
Specifically, 48% of respondents said they “strongly support” the measure and 23% “somewhat support” it, while 13% “somewhat oppose” and 15% “strongly oppose” ratification. Even accounting the margin of error of 3.3 percentage points, a solid majority of Utahns favor ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
What about members of the LDS Church? Is contemporary opinion on the ERA different for LDS voters (56% of respondents in our sample)? Among LDS voters in our sample, about two-thirds (65%) reported that they support ratification.
74% of the self-identified LDS voters in our sample reported being “very active” in the church. Notably, church activity doesn’t really change support for ratification. Among the “very active” LDS voters, 64% support ratification compared to 67% of other LDS voters.
We can further break down opinions on the ERA by age. Because feelings in our sample are likely to be conflated with religious and cultural backgrounds, we show this breakdown explicitly for both the LDS subset of our sample and the non-LDS subset. The figures below show responses to our question on the ERA by age cohort.
Age Breakdown Chart for LDS Voters
Generally, support for the ERA among LDS respondents wanes as age increases and vice-versa. Youngest voters are overwhelmingly in favor of ratification with a combined 82% for strongly and somewhat support among 18 to 34-year old respondents. Opposition to ratification ticks up noticeably among those in the 45-54 age group — the youngest group to have any recollection of the prior national debate over ratification in the 1980s.
Age Breakdown Chart for Non-LDS Respondents
The age breakdown for support or opposition to the ERA among non-LDS respondents has a similar contour, but the difference in feeling between subsets is striking.
Support is markedly higher across the board and for each age group in the non-LDS subset of our panel. Most notably, there are no respondents in the 18 to 34 age category (though there are precious few in the sample to begin with) who are opposed to ratifying the ERA at all, and over 90% of them strongly favor ratifying the ERA. While older generations still favor ratification less than do younger ones, they still favor ratification much more than do older generations of LDS voters. While age, then, is a useful way to break down support for or opposition to the ERA, religious affiliation still most prominently underpins opinions on voting.
Our data has a few important limitations. For one, sample sizes of age groups of subsets are quite small, making for large margins of error. More importantly, at the time the survey was launched, the Church, which was believed by many to have shifted its stance to “Neutral” on this issue, but then reiterated its opposition to the ERA while the survey was being fielded (https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/12/03/lds-church-announces-it/). We launched our survey on November 19th of 2019 and closed it on December 7th. The Church, in a statement made on December 3rd, reiterated its stance of opposition to the ERA. The statement probably doesn’t change our numbers dramatically for two reasons. First, 84% of our respondents completed the survey before December 3rd. Second, the Church’s statement was not as vehement as its active campaign against the ERA in the 70s and 80s and at least so far, it lacks the visibility and wide distribution of other statements (for example, it was not read to members in Sunday meetings, or emailed to Utah Latter-day Saints like the Church’s Proposition 2 position in 2018). Certainly, the vast majority of our LDS respondents were unaware of the Church’s latest reclarification when they took the survey and it’s possible that most of them remain unaware.
Our results are not necessarily predictive of how Utahns or Utah legislators might actually vote on this issue. Indeed, as Gayle Ruzicka herself noted, the polls right now “...don’t mean much as [The Eagle Forum and others] have only just started going out to educate people.” (https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/01/08/utahns-support-ratifying/) But our findings highlight a deep concern with and curiosity about the ERA, both for the younger generations who are reading it for the first time, and for the older ones who are seeing it again.