119 Educating and Engaging Youth about the Equal Rights Amendment Through Legislative Advocacy

Introduction

As a community organizer and a relentless advocate for social justice, I realized early on that gender issues would be deeply ingrained in my activism. As a woman of color, I was exposed to the ugly truths of gender gaps and forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated by sexists, misogynists, and male chauvinists. It was already burdensome to bear the brunt of these behaviors, but it’s more challenging when there’s no legal guarantee within the Constitution for a fundamental legal remedy against sex discrimination by guaranteeing that constitutional rights may not be denied or abridged on account of sex.

When the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1787, the rights it affirmed were guaranteed equally only for certain white males. After intense political battles and a bloody civil war, those rights have been extended far more broadly through constitutional amendments, laws, and court decisions for race and other protected classes. However, all of those rights are not yet guaranteed to apply equally without regard to sex. The first — and still the only — right that the U.S. Constitution specifically affirms and applies equally to women and men is the right to vote. The equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment was first applied to sex discrimination only in 1971, and according to the Equal Rights Amendment website, it has never been interpreted to grant equal rights on the basis of sex in a uniform and inclusive way (“Why We Need the Equal Rights Amendment”). 

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It is necessary because the Constitution has never been interpreted to guarantee the rights of women as a class, and the rights of men as a class, to be equal. It seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and other matters. For the first time, sex would be considered a suspect classification, as race, religion, and national origin currently are. Governmental actions that treat males or females differently as a class would be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and would have to meet the highest level of justification – a necessary relation to a compelling state interest – to be upheld as constitutional (“Why We Need the Equal Rights Amendment”). The ERA would guarantee “Equal Justice Under Law,” as inscribed over the entrance to the Supreme Court, and send a strong preemptive warning against writing, enforcing, or adjudicating laws unfairly on the basis of sex. 

The ERA would provide a clearer judicial standard for deciding cases of sex discrimination. Not every state in the U.S. has ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, and therefore federal and state courts are inconsistent in their rulings regarding claims of sexual discrimination. The ERA would help clarify sex discrimination jurisprudence and would provide a strong legal defense against a rollback of the significant advances in women’s rights that have been achieved since the mid–20th century. Without the ERA women regularly — and occasionally men — have to fight long, expensive, and difficult legal battles in an effort to prove that their rights are equal to those of the other sex. Without the ERA, the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly guarantee that the rights it protects are held equally by all citizens without regard to sex.

The longer the ERA is not ratified in Utah, the longer that many live without equal rights indefinitely, which is why this is pertinent to the youth as they are changemakers and help change the future of the country. More social changes that have come with time have helped lean away from patriarchal culture as young Americans learn to incorporate more social justice into their timelines, such as the Me Too movement that revealed ugly truths and the urgent need for women’s rights that sparked national conversations and protests. As solidarity becomes more championed, it gradually becomes an inherent characteristic through collective organizing, effectively building power and influence of youth activists. Thus, the youth are needed because they can help drive another shift towards an equitable future and could prove to be a powerful and collective force for leveling up the ERA ratification. 

Literature Review

Introduction

The Equal Rights Amendment relies on the push for ratification that has been ongoing for decades. It had begun with strong support but was also met with organized opposition from conservatives that had stopped the ERA 3 short of the needed 38 state ratifications (Cohen and Codrington, 2020). Since 1978, attempts have been made in Congress to extend or remove the deadline for ratification. In the 2010s, due in part to fourth-wave feminism and the Me Too movement, interest in getting the ERA adopted was revived. The main pillars to these renewed efforts are focused on education, advocacy, and activism that targets today’s youth and decision-making legislators. Therefore, exploring scholarships about 1) the importance of youth engagement in legislative advocacy and the obstacles to it, and 2) what can motivate legislators to take action on what issues, will help understand why the effort to ratify the ERA is centered around these two pillars.

Engaging in Legislative Advocacy 

Social movement scholars have long realized that young people have been, and continue to be, critical to the rise of many social movements and social movement organizations (SMOs) over the last 50 years (Earl, Maher, & Elliott, 2017, p. 2). Student contributions include (but are not limited to) the New Left, the Free Speech movement, lunch counter sit-ins to push for desegregation, campus campaigns for anti-apartheid divestment, anti-sweatshop activism, the DREAMers, and Black Lives Matter. It is hard to imagine the landscape of activism in the United States without the efforts of young people. 

Nevertheless, engaging youth in legislative advocacy is difficult. Barriers to youth political engagement are erected by assumptions that youth are not interested in politics, which denies young people agency over their own political socialization. Youth political participation is also undermined by the fact that young people have fewer of the resources that predict political engagement: money, time, knowledge, skills, and efficacy (Rosenstone & Hansen, 2010, p. 402). Moreover, those who have a lower socioeconomic status and less privileged backgrounds tend to participate less and are less engaged. This is especially true for female and BIPOC youth who, traditionally, have been disproportionately absent from the political organizing scene. They face more systemic issues that prevent them access to advocacy as well as dismissal of their political agency. Youth of color face these barriers to participation within activist organizations, too. Only a few organizations engage in intersectional mobilization and recruitment strategies (Elliott, Earl, & Maher, 2017, p. 6), leading to a lack of opportunities targeted explicitly to people of color. Youth of color are likely to experience a double penalty in this regard, both for their age and for their racial and ethnic identities. These barriers are especially consequential for youth of color, because of the social capital these youth gain from participating in community and activist organizations. 

Youth activism has undergone recent transformation to its participants and forms of legislative advocacy, which could prove beneficial if the increased mobilizing capabilities are strategically used and recognized. The intersectional identities of many young people draws together political socialization, youth participation in activist organizations, and social movements more broadly by focusing on the gendered and racialized experiences of youth activists (Fisher, 2012, p. 124). Girls are often faced with a general activist identity that devalues their identities as girls, forcing them to do additional identity work to make their identities congruent and work to legitimize a girl identity within their activist identity. Further, the increasingly tumultuous political context around race has driven a new generation to become involved in social justice activism, drawing on intersectional approaches to youth and racial identities.   

Motivating Factors for Legislators

Legislators estimate the costs and benefits of time spent with an advocacy organization or group. Potential benefits legislators seek from providing an advocacy organization access fall under three categories: electoral, informational, and intrinsic. 

Electoral benefits relate to how much electoral payoff a legislator can expect by working with a particular issue group (Wiener, 2020, p. 3). A legislator is likely to estimate attractive benefits from providing access to or partnering with a group with strong capacities to mobilize his or her constituents to vote or to contribute to his or her campaign (Mayhew, 1974; Arnold, 1990). Informational benefits are more broadly defined, as valuable information can take many forms (Wiener, 2020, p. 3). But groups can often provide valuable information to a legislator, including about the opinions of groups of voters, or about how stakeholders in the public are affected by existing policies. Finally, intrinsic benefits can be had from the positive or negative feelings a legislator gets from working with or on behalf of a particular group (Broockman, 2013, p. 522). These benefits relate to a legislator’s personal preferences and life experiences. For state legislatures like Utah’s that are predominantly white and male, their identities don’t match with marginalized groups’ interests. For a marginalized group facing structural barriers to access, intrinsic benefits become a critical factor to consider, as a legislator’s own experience of marginalization as a member of an identity group can shape their political priorities.

Ample research sees this work out in practice. Legislators, especially those from historically marginalized groups, are found to prioritize the interests of their identity groups in solidarity (Gay, 2004, p. 547)–a phenomena called “descriptive representation.” This effect is found among women legislators, BIPOC legislators, LGBTQ legislators, and more. Research also finds that women act differently than their male colleagues in legislatures. Women bring gendered life experiences to political institutions, ultimately reflecting different interests than their male counterparts. In state legislatures specifically, Holman and Mahoney (2018) find that the presence of a woman’s caucus leads to increases in women’s collaboration on women’s interest legislation (even across party lines). 

Interestingly, it is not just the presence of White and minority women alone that makes political institutions more responsive to women’s issues, but rather it is the organizational presence of minority men along with minority women whose ideals about women’s issues are similar or align with each other. Much of the liberalization of minority men is due to the existence of the interaction with minority women in caucuses (Minta & Brown, 2014, p. 257). Organizations such as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), and Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus (CAPAC) were formed by minority men and women legislators to represent the interests of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The result of this is that the presence of women in minority caucuses has an effect on the men in minority caucuses who become advocates for women’s issues. Intersectionality of gender and racial diversity in congressional action have led to more attention to issues that directly and indirectly impact women.

Conclusion

Studying these two areas will strengthen my knowledge on how to best effectively mobilize stronger advocacy and support for the Equal Rights Amendment today. A more actively engaged youth will draw more attention from legislators, which in turn could reshape the positions legislators hold on the issues, including the ERA. Given the large influence young activists have, this will help me understand how to push white and male legislator majority to weigh the benefits, such as electoral and informational, to work alongside ERA efforts. With Utah being one of the states that has not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, these efforts are worthwhile and will prove to be a historic step towards equality in the conservative state. 

Project Narrative

Key Partners

There are several key players that are critical for the success of this project. They include the Utah ERA Coalition and its members/affiliates. I reached out to this organization via email after I saw an event organized on Utah Capitol Hill and was connected with my future Community Partner (CP), Kelly Jones, who is the Co-Chair for the Utah ERA Coalition. The CP expressed a need for an individual with many contacts and ties to the youth population and experience with organizing, so my positions as a community leader with the SLC Women’s March and as a University of Utah student leader were opportune for the organization. My Faculty Mentor is Professor James Curry, an associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Curry’s research focuses on U.S. politics and policymaking, especially legislative politics.

Project Goals & Description

The overall goal of this project is to educate and engage youth about the Equal Rights Amendment through legislative advocacy. In order to do this, the smaller project goals were to create a comprehensive education curriculum in a social justice lens for youth (high school and college), develop toolkits about legislative advocacy for use in preparation for the next state legislative session, and to develop meaningful relationships between the youth and the Community Partner. 

First, I started with the education curriculum by creating appealing infographics and compiling these into readable files and posting them on the Community Partner’s website. For this, I worked closely with my Community Partner. Second, I started developing the toolkits, including, but not limited to, email/speech templates, general action and resource guides, and checklists for organizing. My FM helped me on effective methods to interact and engage with legislators. After the development stages (conducted during the summer), with the help of my Community Partner, we reached out to youth across school districts and colleges in Utah with an interest survey as the school year starts to begin around August. Those interested went through the entire semester of educational material and training I’ve developed beforehand. This segment began with recorded live webinars for youth to attend to learn from the presentations and infographics. Then, the segment shifted over to learning how to take action with the toolkits. There were also be other extraneous events organized by the Utah ERA Coalition leadership that will be incorporated into the semester-long training.

Sustainability

Once the youth education and engagement were completed, the materials would continue to be accessible on the Community Partner’s website and in possession of the Community Partner for their use in the future since these are the only pieces they will have to engage youth with. What was learned is also sustained because this newly acquired knowledge and skill sets that I’ve helped teach will be applied to legislative advocacy for the ERA in the next legislative session and can still be applied to other areas of activism. This increases the influence and popularity of the Utah ERA Coalition, which will help the organization gain more attention and connections. Another byproduct of my project is sustained youth engagement with the Utah ERA Coalition because the relationships and interests have been built. Future collaborative efforts and opportunities will build upon this foundation I’ve laid out in my project for both groups that drive ERA ratification efforts in Utah further. 

Assessment Methods & Expected Impact

This project was assessed in quantitative and qualitative assessments. I measured the quantity of my effort through time put in, number of connections made with youth, and number of educational resources posted on the Utah ERA Coalition website. I also measured the quality of my effort by examining whether youth have engaged with the curriculum and toolkits, whether the youth and the Community Partner enjoyed using these, and whether youth’s knowledge of the ERA and skills have changed. I measured the effect of my project by investigating if youth’s knowledge and skills have changed, if their interest is expressed to continue involvement, and if the organization’s efficacies to educate youth have improved. Taking the responses expressing interest, my Faculty Mentor and I created pretest to ask what knowledge these youth have about the ERA and what skills/experience they currently have with legislative advocacy. Another pre-test asked of the Community Partner’s level and efficacies of engagement/involvement with youth through the number of connections and interactions. Then, my Faculty Mentor and I created post-tests to ask if the material and training had helped their knowledge and skills. Another post-test asked if the Community Partner liked it as well, if they saw an increase in youth engagement and improved efficacies, and whether they’ll continue to use my material.

The expected impacts here were increased knowledge, connections, skills, and engagement youth will gain to further ERA legislative advocacy, and increased youth base and influence for the Utah ERA Coalition. The impacts were made conceivable and attainable by how my project established a baseline to start from and the infrastructure to coordinate collaboration between both groups. The overall long-term impact was that there is more of an organized, effective legislative advocacy for the ERA ratification in Utah from the efforts of youth activists.  

Works Cited 

Arnold, R. D. (1990). The Logic of Congressional Action. Yale University Press.

Broockman, D. (2013). Black Politicians Are More Intrinsically Motivated to Advance Blacks’ Interests: A Field Experiment Manipulating Political Incentives. American Journal of Political Science, 57(3), 521-536. Retrieved April 1, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23496636

Cohen, A., & Codrington III, W. U. (2020, January 23). The Equal Rights Amendment Explained. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/equal-rights-amendment-explained

Earl, J., Maher, T. V., & Elliott, T. (2017). Youth, activism, and social movements. Sociology Compass, 11(4), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12465

Fisher, D. R. (2012). Youth Political Participation: Bridging Activism and Electoral Politics. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 119–137. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071811-145439

Gay, C. (2004). Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes. American Political Science Review, 98(4), 547–562. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404041346

Holman, M. R., & Mahoney, A. (2018). Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Women’s Collaboration in US State Legislatures. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 43(2), 179–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12199

Mayhew, D. R. (1974). Congress: The Electoral Connection. Yale University Press.

Minta, M. D., & Brown, N. E. (2014). INTERSECTING INTERESTS: Gender, Race, and Congressional Attention to Women’s Issues. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(2), 253–272. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x14000186

Rosenstone, S. J., & Hansen, J. M. (2010). Participation. In K. Kollman (Ed.), Readings in American Politics: Analysis and Perspectives (3rd ed., pp. 399–415). W. W. Norton & Company.

Why We Need the Equal Rights Amendment. (2018). Equal Rights Amendment. https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/why

Wiener, E. (2020). Getting a High Heel in the Door: An Experiment on State Legislator Responsiveness to Women’s Issue Lobbying. Political Research Quarterly, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920939186