With her soft voice and steely will, Rosalynn Carter was an inspiration and a gentle goad to millions upon millions of girls and women around the world. When asked about events in her lifetime she most regretted, she said,
“My greatest disappointment in all the projects I worked on during the White House years was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified…Why all the controversy and why such difficulty in giving women the protection of the Constitution that should have been theirs long ago?”
As she also said,
“There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.”
Congress could “get on with it” right now. Drop the irrelevant deadline in the introduction to the Amendment and publish the ERA immediately. By so doing, women will own equality for the first time in American history.
What could be a greater tribute to Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter than to publish the ERA in her memory?
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