Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: The legislation and reform efforts of the last decade directed at remedying this discrimination have been hopelessly piecemeal. That is why the Equal Rights Amendment is essential. If we content ourselves with piecemeal legislation or a court approach requiring that discrimination be challenged on a case-by-case basis, we will take forever to remedy existing injustices.

1923, three years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, the first Equal Rights Amendment was proposed. It is now 50 years later, and the Equal Rights Amendment is an issue whose time has come. The reason we're confident of victory is that the Equal Rights Amendment has developed a genuinely broad base of political support. I think you can sense that broad base as you look at the posters and placards in this audience-- the National Association of Education, the Association of University Women, the IUE, the Common Cause. You want to raise that Common Cause sign a little bit?

[APPLAUSE]

Last week, Common Cause passed 250,000 members-- a quarter of a million-- point. Women in every walk of life, women from all parts of the political spectrum, women representing the great middle range of American life are saying that it's time for full equality. The time has come, and men are saying the same thing. Today, on this platform, we see Democrats and Republicans, labor leaders and business people, young people and older citizens, Black people and white who've all come together to express our common support for the Equal Rights Amendment that the law must not discriminate against Americans of either sex. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: It has not even occurred, I believe, to Senator Ervin's committee to investigate and find out that there was perhaps a woman Watergate, a Watergate that strangely immobilized the emerging political force of women that only two summers ago seemed to be the basic new political fact of life in America and threaten to change the base of political power in one or both parties. I can tell you that there has been sabotage of women's political power, that there have been stolen records and tampered lists and stolen lists. There has been provocation and strange disruption, and it made no political sense at the time because sometimes and often, it appeared in radical disguise, and yet it seemed to be serving a purposes that was basically reactionary in state after state as women began to organize,

Well, I cannot give you the names of all the Watergate-type plumbers that sabotaged women's political power, but one thing we now know that one of the organizers of the Pussycat League that strangely emerged as their Equal Rights Amendment symbolizing women's demand for equality began to be ratified state by state, that one of the organizers of the Pussycat League that tried to make women believe that the Equal Rights Amendment would destroy their families, their support from husbands, and throw them out on the streets plus all sorts of bathroom atrocities that never were really implied by the Amendment that this woman was on the payroll of those who financed Watergate. And this one piece of evidence begins to make the whole thing much clearer. It will be a hallmark of our whole nation's ability to surmount Watergate, to transcend Watergate that we here shall be able to finish that unfinished business of our equality taking the legacy from Susan B. Anthony and the rest whose memory we honor today. And perhaps women finally will move into equal partnership with men of courage and goodwill of this land, old and young to rescue this nation from the morass of acquiescence in evil and the abortion of the political process that we have condoned for, too, long.