The Maryland senator was a young legislator in the Maryland House of Delegates when Congress first passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.
Thursday’s vote on the amendment. “There is no time limit on equality.”
The Equal Rights Amendment would be the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, enshrining a protection against sex discrimination. Cardin’s resolution would remove a deadline for states to ratify the amendment that Congress created in 1972 and extended once. But in an interview with The Washington Post ahead of the vote, Cardin was anticipating difficulty getting enough Republicans to vote for his resolution — creating a sense of disappointment for the senator that it was easier to build a large bipartisan coalition to support an amendment against sex discrimination in 1972 than it has been in 2023.“I think we all felt that this would be ratified. We didn’t know how long it would take, but we knew this would happen,” Cardin said, reflecting on 1972.
The ERA was initially introduced in Congress 100 years ago, though it did not go anywhere until the ’70s. Cardin was 28 years old when Congress initially passed the ERA in 1972 and sent it off to state legislatures across the country for ratification, with Maryland being in the early batch of states that quickly ratified it.
At the time, sex discrimination abounded in Annapolis. The House speaker had refused to allow a female delegate to attend meetings with House leadership, and had appointed her the “chairman of the ladies’ restroom committee,” as The Post reported in 1972. The House refused the introduction of a bill to amend Maryland’s motto, which translates to “manly deeds, womanly words” .
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