NOW Hear This: July 5, 2024 Newsletter
Message from National NOW President Christian F. Nunes
Greetings Feminists,
This week’s holiday is a good moment to reflect on the issue of freedom and liberty for women. We’re still a long way from full equality, starting with constitutional equality.
The word “woman” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, and to the privileged white men who wrote it, many of them slaveholding, that was just the way they wanted it.
These men didn’t want women to own property, vote or have bodily autonomy. They saw women’s rights and status as secondary to men’s, and they wanted to keep it that way.
Generations of women have endured a system that generally pays them less, values them less, respects them less and treats them as second-class citizens. The principles of democracy, equality and justice we revere are made hollow by the systemic, sex-based inequality and structural gender discrimination baked into our laws.
NOW’s core issues include Constitutional Equality, Ending Violence Against Women, and Racial Justice, among others. As this article from Ms. Magazine reports, “The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) will provide an explicit guarantee of sex equality in the Constitution and empower Congress to enforce it and address gender-based violence.” And the ERA Coalition explains how the ERA will empower survivors of domestic violence:
“The Equal Rights Amendment holds the potential to be a powerful catalyst for cultural and political change in the fight against domestic violence. By establishing sex equality as a fundamental constitutional right, the ERA will help challenge harmful gender stereotypes, ensure equal access to resources and legal protection for all survivors, and ultimately eradicate domestic violence.”
“The Equal Rights Amendment holds the potential to be a powerful catalyst for cultural and political change in the fight against domestic violence. By establishing sex equality as a fundamental constitutional right, the ERA will help challenge harmful gender stereotypes, ensure equal access to resources and legal protection for all survivors, and ultimately eradicate domestic violence.”
The ERA Coalition also reports on how the ERA is at the intersection of gender and race and why it’s such an important step towards racial justice, quoting the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray:
“Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow.”
While we celebrate this week’s holiday and think about the meaning of liberty, we can’t forget how much more needs to be done before we can fulfill the promise of “liberty and justice for all.”
In Solidarity
Christian F. Nunes
President
