Alice
Paul, a pioneer of the women's suffrage movement, first proposed the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1923 as a way to guarantee equal legal rights for all
American citizens, regardless of sex (Baker, 2022). It was proposed about a
century ago, but it has not yet been included in the US Constitution. The
Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted in 1868, on the other hand, refers
explicitly to citizen rights and equal protection under the law. Equal rights
are a topic covered by both the ERA and the Fourteenth Amendment, although they
focus on distinct subgroups and facets of equality. The Fourteenth Amendment
largely protects the rights of former slaves and prohibits state governments
from treating them unfairly (Baer, 2018). It ensures that all people have equal
rights under the law, but it makes no mention of sex or gender in particular.
The ERA, on the other hand, attempts to rectify how women have been
deliberately excluded from the protections provided by the Fourteenth Amendment
and to grant them equal rights and protections.
The
political science idea of "formal equality" and "substantive
equality" can also be used to compare and contrast the ERA and the
Fourteenth Amendment. Formal equality is the notion that everyone is treated
equally by the law, regardless of their attributes (Dorfman, 2018). Contrarily,
substantive equality refers to the concept that laws and policies must consider
how different people may be affected by them in various ways (Khanna, 2022).
The original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to ensure that all people
were treated equally before the law, regardless of their race (Baer, 2018).
Contrarily, the ERA emphasizes substantive equality, acknowledging that women
have traditionally received different legal treatment than males and as a
result need certain protections to guarantee that they are genuinely equal
(Baker, 2022).
The
idea of "collective rights" and "individual rights" is
another political science concept that may be used to analyze the ERA and the
Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment is mainly concerned with
individual rights, making sure that everyone is covered by the law and that the
state does not discriminate against them (Baer, 2018). It applies to everyone,
regardless of ethnicity, religion, or other traits, and is intended to ensure
that citizens are not subjected to discrimination by state governments. This
amendment is based on the idea of "formal equality" in political
science, which maintains that everyone should be treated equally by the law
regardless of their characteristics.
The
Equal Rights Amendment, on the other hand, is more concerned with group rights
since it emphasizes that women have been left out of the Fourteenth Amendment's
protections as a group and as a result need their own set of protections to be
treated equally. The ERA is a proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to
give women legal protections and address how they have traditionally been
excluded from the protections provided by existing amendments (Baker, 2022). It
is based on the political science idea of "substantive equality,"
which acknowledges that women suffer particular difficulties and barriers that
call for certain preferential considerations that would apply to women without
necessarily applying to men.
In conclusion, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment both address the idea of equal rights, but they do so in different ways and with distinct groups of individuals in mind. While the ERA aims to give women equal rights and protections and address how they have been specifically excluded from the protections provided by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment primarily addresses the rights of former slaves and ensures that they are not discriminated against by state governments.
References
Baer, J. A.
(2018). Equality under the Constitution : Reclaiming the Fourteenth
Amendment. Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722745
Baker, N. E. (2022).
Gendered citizenship: The original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963 by Rebecca
DeWolf (review). Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 126(2),
276–278. https://doi.org/10.1353/swh.2022.0097
Dorfman, A. (2018).
Private Law Exceptionalism? Part II: A Basic Difficulty with the Argument from
Formal Equality. The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 31(1),
5–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/cjlj.2018.1
Khanna, V. (2022). Indirect discrimination and substantive equality in Nitisha: Easier said than done under Indian constitutional jurisprudence. International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 22(1), 74–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/13582291211062363
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