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JOHN MOREL: Although the official reason for the now regional meeting was to elect two members from the Midwest district to NOW's national board, there was an underlying theme stressing more and better organization to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. Virginia Watkins of Minneapolis is Minnesota's state coordinator for NOW and one of the two elected to NOW's national board. She explains how NOW views the campaign for the ERA.

VIRGINIA WATKINS: I think there have been some problems. I think, for one thing, pro-ERA people may not have realized the urgency until now. And I think that a lot of ratified states such as Minnesota have been turned to the issue of avoiding rescission, rather than raising money for unratified states, which is what they should have been doing. And of course, the rescission issue is important too, except there are even legal questions about whether it would hold up in court or not. In fact, it's doubtful. So for that reason, I think that maybe we have focused on the wrong tactics somewhat.

JOHN MOREL: To help correct those wrong tactics, the meeting held workshops in fundraising, planning recruitment, leadership training, and other organizational skills. Dr. Linda Reiser, NOW's South Dakota coordinator, was also elected to the board. And she explains how the organization will change its strategy for the states who have yet to vote on ERA.

LINDA REISER: We have to be much more organized in ascertaining who has voted against us, and simply removing them from office, and replacing them with people that we can count on. So we're now beginning to organize precinct by precinct and to build much bigger coalitions for fundraising purposes as well as lobbying purposes.

JOHN MOREL: So you're talking about using much of the same tactics that the opponents of ERA are using.

LINDA REISER: Well, in terms of organization, yes. But I don't think that we will stoop to the kinds of scare tactics that we've seen on the part of Phyllis Schlafly. Her effectiveness in the short-term basis has been on the basis of scare tactics, lies about what the ERA will mean. And we have to counter those lies. So we will not stoop to that.

JOHN MOREL: NOW hopes that the fight for ERA will help to boost membership for the organization, which has lost about 15,000 members in the last two years. Reiser attributed the loss to gains in women's rights within the last few years. She noted, however, that the Midwest had the highest percentage of members who remained within the organization and the strongest membership overall. Reiser also said that the ERA wasn't the only reason why women were becoming interested again in women's rights.

LINDA REISER: My feeling is that more and more women are being touched by the women's movement. I really felt that last week at the South Dakota IWI meeting. There were these hordes of women coming in, and we didn't know who they were. But they were voting with us on everything.

And it turns out that they are people who have been interested, who have learned, for example, as homemakers that they don't have a secure future if their husband dies necessarily, who have heard something about Title IX. Maybe their daughters are getting into basketball for the first time. Something has clicked with a lot of them, and they're coming. I think NOW's job is to invite them to come even more and to become involved in it.

JOHN MOREL: Leaders at the meeting said that if the ERA is passed, it won't mean that the fight for women's equality will be over. NOW Action vice president, Arlie Scott.

ARLIE SCOTT: ERA is just the constitutional underpinning. We're going to be around for a long time. Because it's going to involve a lot of more political action and consciousness raising. We'll be here until women have total control over their lives in a political sense, and economic sense, and the social, and biological sense.

JOHN MOREL: In Worthington, this is John Morel.