Episode 14: The ERA in the U.S. West

Our guest this episode is WT history professor Dr. Chelsea Ball, author of “‘I Oppose the ERA, but I Do Approve of Equal Rights for Women’: Gender and Politics in the Aftermath of the Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in the U.S. West.” This piece can be found in The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (2022), edited by Brenden W. Rensink and published by the University of Nebraska Press. In our talk, Ball explains how the ERA came to symbolize more than just “equality” and how this symbolism prompted resistance among ‘70s-era conservatives, especially in the West. She also describes the aftermath of the ERA’s defeat in 1982, when the broader backlash against feminism intensified and Western activists turned their attention to state- and city-level equality campaigns. Finally, we discuss the current, uncertain status of the drive to ratify the ERA — recently reignited in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and Nevada — and how studying these developments can help us rethink traditional histories of both Western women and contemporary feminism.