As most students headed for home or hit the beaches during the recent spring break, students from the West Virginia University Center for Womens Studies and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance took part in a groundbreaking legislative activity in the nations capital: the reintroduction of the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Feminist Majority Foundations National Young Womens Leadership Conference: From Campus to Congress was held this past March 24-25 in Washington. Nearly 400 women and men from 36 states attended the two-day event that featured speakers, workshops and a reintroduction of the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA .
WVU s Lauren Wallace, president of FMLA and the 2007 Outstanding Senior in the Womens Studies Program, was a speaker at the press conference for the reintroduction of the bill. Her comments are featured in this monthsChoices E-Zine,the electronic newsletter of the Feminist Majority Foundation (http://www.feminist.org/).
Wallace is from Huntington.
It is incredible to be a part of the modern movement for the passage of the ERA ,Wallace wrote.I hope this amendment does more than eradicate discrimination that has plagued America, I hope it becomes an icon for equality in the new millennium and bridges all Americans together under the U.S. Constitution.
The ERA is an amendment that was first proposed in 1923 that statesequality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
It was passed by Congress in 1972, but it expired in 1982 because it had not yet been ratified by the needed two-thirds majority of states in order to be passed. It has been reintroduced in Congress every year since then.
Other WVU students attending the conference: Jennifer Stiles, of Burton; Brittany Nichols, of Clarksburg; Rita Snyder, of Stow, Ohio; Gibran Mancus, of Morgantown; Maggie Sherry, of Farmington; and Yolanda Wiggins, of Hyattsville, Md.
For more information, contact Dr. Barbara Howe, Center for Womens Studies, at
barbara.howe@mail.wvu.edu or 304-293-2339, ext. 1155.
