DeWolf, "Gendered Citizenship The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963"

The University of Nebraska Press has released Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963, by Rebecca DeWolf. A description from the Press:

By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this study grapples not only with the battle over women’s constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen.

Through an examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize citizenship to correspond with women’s changing status after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Finally, Rebecca DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment, but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.

Advance praise:

“Like the sun peeking through the clouds, Rebecca DeWolf’s groundbreaking book clears the fog that has long surrounded the Equal Rights Amendment. . . . Anyone who wants to understand why the ERA is not yet law would be well advised to read this book.”—Johanna Neuman

“Rebecca DeWolf has brought us a meticulously researched and vividly detailed account of the original ERA conflict that provides readers with rich context to trace how the arguments against gender equality of nearly a century ago continue to shape our cultural attitudes about the role and duties of women in the domestic sphere today.”—Betsy Fischer Martin

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani