After the Nineteenth Amendment

Jo Freeman, famed feminist and political scientist, referred to the era after the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment as the Doldrums for American feminism. This period, from roughly 1921 to the end of World War II, did not fit into the the period Suffrage Movement, nor did it fit into the time of the women’s liberation movement that began in the latter half of the century. After the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, there was an expectation among feminists that more needed to be done, that the right to vote was only the beginning of for female political representation. The National Women’s Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, decades before the ERA would gain national attention in the 1970s. The Equal Rights Amendment wanted an end to all legal discrimination based on sex. During this time, women were still restricted in many aspects of their lives, for instance, many states still had unjust property laws for Women. It was decided that the best course of action would be to campaign for an all encompassing Equal Rights Amendment that would be applied to the Constitution, rather than depending on every state to agree on Individual Equal Rights Acts.