Women are still being erased

I remember the national push during the 1970s to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Even as a child, I understood that women deserved equal rights. I couldn’t understand why people considered this effort controversial. But controversial it was. It didn’t pass.

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Columnists

September 13, 2022 - 4:56 PM

Calley Malloy, left, of Shawnee, Cassie Woolworth of Olathe and Dawn Rattan of Shawnee and supporters celebrated during an election watch party on Aug. 2. The group backed a “No” vote on the constitutional amendment, which, if passed, would have removed a woman’s right to an abortion as provided in the Kansas Constitution. PHOTO BY TAMMY LJUNGBLAD/TNS

The busloads of men I had accompanied as a journalist to 1995’s Million Man March seemed stunned by the news media count of only 400,000 men on Washington, D.C.’s mall the previous day. I wrote that journalists at the march must have used the three-fifths compromise in calculating the size of the crowd.

Aerial estimates put attendance between 800,000 and 1.2 million.

The idea of counting a human being as three-fifths human has its own horrors, but at least we were counted. Women don’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Their unenumerated existence explains for some why guns have more rights than the women in our lives.

The historic vote Aug. 2, however, could mark the beginning of the end of the systematic erasure of women in this nation. Kansas women likely looked at the results of the vote and wondered if there was anything they couldn’t do.

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