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90 5 The ERA v. Women’s Minimum Wage The Legal Debate Between Paul and Smith, 1921–1923 From the preceding chapters in this book, we already know that between 1921 and 1923, Smith emerged as a seasoned lobbyist who was recognized for her expertise on such issues as civil service reform, equal pay in public and private employment, and women’s minimum-wage. She also had built a reputation for her trade union activities, commitment to collective action and media talents. During this same period, Paul struggled to build a solid membership base for the NWP, with a focus on garnering support from the nation’s wealthiest women. With the backing of Alva Belmont, the NWP purchased a headquarters on Capitol Hill, and launched a series of extravagant public pageants to celebrate the history of the equal rights movement. Behind the scenes, Paul returned to law school, while her legal researchers compiled state-by-state documentation of discrimination that perpetuated women’s second-class status. We also know that Paul and Smith shared many of the same concerns. Both women were driven by their commitment to challenge cultural stereotypes that impeded women’s economic security and viewed legislation as a vehicle to equalize women’s social, political and economic status in society. They also wanted women to have the opportunity to demonstrate their capacities in the workplace and to compete on an equal basis with men. This only could be possible when women received equal pay for equal work, and were given the same opportunities for workplace advancement. The methods used to pursue their legislative objectives varied due to their different personal politics, organizational af¤liations, political philosophies and leadership styles. Paul was impatient, and wanted to immediately eliminate all remaining legal equalities that affected women. The solution, she believed, was simple. State and federal equal rights legislation would sweep away all Common Law vestiges that identi¤ed women as weak and dependent on men and set the country on a path toward establishing equal opportunities for men and women. Though elimination of sex-based discriminations dominated her goals, she advanced a legislative agenda that primarily accounted for the needs of professional and business class women. Because women doctors and lawyers, for example, had already broken through the gender barriers within such male-dominated professions , Paul worked to organize upwardly mobile working women to strengthen their demands for equal opportunity in the workplace, to showcase their accomplishments , and to eliminate all legal barriers that restricted their professional advancement. Though Smith agreed with the principles that Paul advanced, she believed The Legal Debate Between Paul and Smith 91 that there could be “no more complex issue under the sun than that of sex equality. . . . It involves the relationships of men and women as husbands and wives, as parents and children . . . personal liberty is involved, often in con¶ict with social welfare , property rights are at stake, child welfare, legal status . . . public health.”1 In her view, Paul advanced an exclusionary agenda that bene¤ted one class of women at the expense of another. Between 1921 and 1923, Smith spent an inordinate amount of time trying to reason with Paul and her supporters about the potential damage the ERA would pose to women’s eight hour, minimum-wage and health/ hygiene laws. She was not, however, opposed to state equal rights bills because they targeted speci¤c inequalities, indicating that Smith was willing to compromise with Paul and did not simply criticize all of the NWP’s legislative activity.2 Without a doubt, Paul and Smith believed that their approaches to equality would enhance women’s social and economic status if women worked together, as women, to demand the same rights and opportunities as men. Neither of their arguments was strictly limited to gender issues. Rather, women’s distinct class-based economic interests were at the heart of their legislative campaigns. The ERA dispute involved the larger question of how the state should balance individual rights with the economic interests of business. Therefore, it is important to integrate their competing perspectives into a larger legal debate that shaped the period. By doing so, we may understand the ERA debate beyond competing de¤nitions of feminism, while at the same time recognize how central these women were to the evolution of freedom of contract, the proper exercise of government authority, the changing role of the courts, and the gradual expansion of legal interpretations of individual rights. The ERA debate took shape at...

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