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"The
Equal Rights Amendment:
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NOW ON DVD AND VIDEO! DVD: $15, $12.50 each for two or more VHS: $12.50, $10 each for two or more Shipping/handling
included. |
"The Equal Rights Amendment: Unfinished Business for the Constitution" is a 17-minute educational documentary that premiered in July 1998 in Seneca Falls, NY, as part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention.
Ruth Pollak of Educational Film Center (EFC), producer of the award-winning "One Woman, One Vote," produced the video as an educational project of the Alice Paul Institute, the ERA Summit, and the National Woman's Party.
The film, which is appropriate for classroom use, organizational programming, and personal viewing, contains a printed insert with "The History Behind the Equal Rights Amendment" and a list of discussion questions.
What the documentary is about:
Why have supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment worked for over 75 years to add the ERA to the United States Constitution?
Since its adoption in 1789, the Constitution has never granted all rights equally to women and men. Women have had to fight politically to win many rights that men possessed automatically because they were male. After women's right to vote was guaranteed by the 19th Amendment in 1920, suffragist leader Alice Paul wrote the ERA in 1923 as the next step toward women's equality.
The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972 and ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states - but political opposition stopped the amendment short of its goal at a 1982 deadline. The ERA has been reintroduced into every Congress since that time. Recent legal analysis suggests that the existing 35 state ratifications may still be valid.
This film portrays the Equal Rights Amendment as a legacy from the equality fighters of the past:
 | Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth, who dedicated their lives to racial and gender justice; |
| Alice Paul and her National Woman's Party colleagues, who were jailed and force-fed to gain women's right to vote and who worked since 1923 for the ERA; |
| the millions of supporters who, beginning in the 1960s, put ERA ratification at the center of the modern women's movement. |
The story recounts both women's significant advances and the ongoing effort to gain a clear and permanent guarantee of equal constitutional rights for women and men.
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Produced by Ruth Pollak, Educational Film Center, 1998
Running time: 17:27
Grades 6-Adult
©1998, The Alice Paul Institute, Inc. For information, contact the API, 856-231-1885.
Cover photo: Alice Paul, author
of the ERA, celebrating ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (Library of
Congress); Section 1 of the Equal Rights Amendment.
