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Biography

Twiss Butler became active in the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s while raising five children in Texas. Through phone and letter lobbying, she and Roxcy Bolton in Florida, working independently, got hurricane names changed from all female names—used because “the storms like women are vicious and unpredictable”—to the current alternation between female and male names. Next, through a coalition led by Texas NOW, she worked to get sexist bias removed from state-wide subsidized school textbooks. She continued writing on the importance of words and language in working on sex discrimination in insurance and abortion rights. She volunteered at the National NOW office in Washington, DC, for two decades with the title Reference at NOW.org. She answered inquiries from the public and prepared testimony for NOW officers and state chapters. Her current interest in words and language is in opposing laws that authorize legal sex change. Her website www.equality4women.org, posts her writings on these and other issues of sex discrimination. She earned a BA in English at Vassar College and worked as a division librarian at the headquarters of two national companies.

Patrick Butler retired from the National Office of the National Organization for Women (NOW) staff in Washington, DC, where he was the director of an insurance project. He was responsible for research, writing, and testimony on the economic harm done to women through sex discrimination in insurance. He continues to research issues of discrimination against women. Before joining the national staff at NOW to work on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, he was a research scientist and for three years held the unique position of Curator of Lunar Samples “(“Moon rocks”) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Previously, he taught geology at the University of Pennsylvania, worked as a minerals exploration geologist, and served two years in the Army. He earned an AB and PhD at Harvard and an MSc at New Mexico Tech, all in geosciences.

Abstract

This article reviews how Supreme Court interpretations of the 14th Amendment have allowed laws to discriminate against women. It aims to show that the Equal Rights Amendment, ratified as the 28th Amendment in 2020, offers a constitutional basis for eliminating all forms of legal sex discrimination against women. These forms include discrimination based on pregnancy and abortion, commodifying women’s bodies, and allowing men to intrude into women’s protected spaces. The review starts with the denial of protection for women by America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, denounces the Supreme Court’s precedent-setting 1974 Geduldig decision, which ruled—quite illogically—that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not sex discrimination, and ends with the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision which overturns the constitutional protection under the 14th Amendment for the circumscribed abortion rights women have had since the Court’s Roe decision in 1973. The review also notes that without the constitutional backing of the Equal Rights 28th Amendment, President Trump’s Executive Order on his Inauguration Day in January 2025 prohibiting men from changing their legal sex can be repealed instantly by any successor president. The authors hope this review will help to accelerate the use of the 28th Amendment on behalf of women and girls.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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