Overlooked Groups Claim Their Rights in the US

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Both the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and Title IX passed Congress in 1972. However, if the latter document was eventually signed into law, the former failed to be ratified by three-fourths of the States. Although these documents address women’s rights, the difference in their destiny sheds light on the prevailing perceptions of women’s role at that period of time. On the one hand, ERA was actively opposed by many men and women as it was considered that such a law would destroy femininity and disturb the balance regarding defined sexes’ roles (Blakemore). For them, the words “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied…on account of sex” meant losing privileges rather than gaining them. For instance, some activists argued that equal rights would eventually lead to women’s equal military responsibilities as those of men and loss of maternity protection.

On the contrary, Title IX shows that society has already accepted the idea that women can and should be as educated as men, which was highly debatable at the beginning of the 20th century. Interestingly, people who were against granting women equal rights in education used quite similar arguments as ERA opponents in the 1970s. Therefore, the contrast in the destinies of the two discussed documents shows that public opinion is very inertial, meaning that people would rather accept small changes step by step than radical ones at once.

George H.W. Bush’s remarks in Document 9, I would hypothesize that it took the U.S. to acknowledge the rights of disabled people quite a long time because of the ignorance and stigma. Indeed, the ex-president claims that “the thousands of people across the Nation…have given so much of their time, their vision, and their courage to see this act become a reality”. These words clearly indicate that a lot of people had to unite their efforts in order to make the general public aware of the discrimination that disabled people encounter daily. Moreover, those people also needed to fight against the common stigma toward disabled people. Northeast ADA Center maintains that many people in the first half of the 19th century considered the latter as cursed by God for their moral impurity. Even though the medical paradigm substituted that view, disabilities were still considered bad.