ERA Now! Interview with Zoe Nicholson.

In late December, editor Wesley Bishop sat down with long time activist Zoe Nicholson to talk about her life, work, and the Equal Rights Amendment. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Wesley Bishop: Thank you so much for joining me today. If you could Zoe, can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and background?

Zoe Nicholson: Well, I was eight years old when I told my mother to put the grapes down [and] that we weren't buying grapes. And she said, ‘well, why not?’ And I said, ‘because of the farm workers’—they were trying to unionize at the time. And my mother, who was working hard in the Barry Goldwater campaign said, ‘where did you get that?’ And I said, ‘well, Girl Scouts, of course,’ because of the time.

I was born in 1948, so I was right there at the brink of so, so, so many events. And certainly the one that got me on fire the most was the Vietnam War. And when I was 18, I was working with conscientious objectors. When I was 21, I taught in an all boys high school, as you can only imagine in that year, trying to keep all these boys from going to war and dying.

And then Kent State happened, and that probably threw me right into the fray of it all, but then it became women's rights and queer rights. And I then started working most recently with Unite Here and picketing with housekeepers.

So I asked myself a while ago, ‘Zoe, can you pick a topic and stick to it? What's the problem?’ And then I realized I had stuck to one thing, which is how does society change? How does it happen? And what needs to happen for people to become aware? How can people come up with ways to counter the oppressor? Certainly reading the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Dialectics of Sex influenced me too.

WB: Thanks for sharing that. So, you have told us a little bit about how you were politically conscious pretty early on and an activist. Could you maybe tell us a bit about some of the actions you have been involved in? For example the fasting in 1982, the challenging of Obama on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the opening of your bookstore, etc.

ZN: I'm going to reverse the chronological order there for you a little bit. I really became entranced with Mahatma Gandhi when I was eighteen years old. And I read him by immersion. [Reading by immersion is] a different style of reading. You pick an author and you read everything they wrote in the order, they wrote it. So, you have an experience with the author, not just with the books. And I've done that with several writers and activists, not the least of which of course was Mahatma Gandhi.

I became really fascinated with how he did what he did. He effected huge change with minimal damage at the time when he was alive (of course a lot of the damage happened after he died). I was curious how he changed the minds of the people and in particular the minds of the oppressor? So that has been always my interest. And one does it usually through high-risk action.

To do a high risk action is where if something dangerous was going to happen, if someone was going to hurt, it has to be [you who is doing the action]. That is the commitment. [You commit to the idea] that it isn't others that gets hurt, it's the doer of the action that gets hurt. That is the risk. So, the first time I heckled anybody was George Wallace in public.

The Secret Service then was pretty much, ‘oh, that's interesting. Who's this person?’

And as time progressed, I interrupted Sarah Palin several times and I finally had it with Bill Clinton [over his support of] “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.”

[After getting involved with repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] I was contacted by a friend who said, you need to meet Dan Choi. So, I did. I went to hear him speak and I went out to dinner afterwards with him. Dan Choi is the young man who was a lieutenant in the army and a translator who was unintentionally outed. I don't know how many people know that he didn't intend to come out on the Rachel Maddow Show.

But he got wrapped up in the conversation and he did come out. He had grown up in Orange County, his father was a pastor, and he was shown the door. He was not welcome at home unless he would practice a kind of “Don't ask, don't tell” inside the house. And for people following that movement, a group of military people and clergy chained themselves to the White House fence.

And Dan got arrested for the same reason Alice Paul got arrested, which was obstructing the view of the White House.

[Laughs] That's a crime by the way. And that's why they tell people you have to ‘move along’... So they always have a reason for arresting you.

[After the 2008 election] a group of people decided to heckle Obama publicly. And I did it. I have to say, of all the things I've done, I think that was the scariest. I was in a room of three thousand Black people celebrating their new Black president and everyone was so happy.

Three of us started shouting independently. It was all in unison to repeal, ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell.’ We were all escorted out by the Secret Service.

Obama was furious. He basically said, ‘how dare you interrupt my event.’ It was a fundraiser for Barbara Boxer here in the state of California. And I had no idea what was going to happen. I just simply said to the two agents that were gripping my elbows, ‘I'm not going to fall limp, so don't worry, but I am going to shout till we get to the door.’

And I did. And I think at that time it became apparent that you have to break the social agreement somehow. [The protest] has to be loud enough, not in volume, but in effect. And all what Gandhi taught me is down to one sentence, which is— ‘you have to embarrass the opponent.’ Nonviolent direct action often relies on embarrassing the opponent. [As a side note that is] the problem with Donald J. Trump. He really doesn't know what embarrassment is. And so, he's not a good subject for nonviolent direct action, but Obama certainly was. And three weeks later, he literally rescinded, ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell.’

In an interview… he said that he just [did not want to] take the embarrassment of Get Equal, which was the name of the organization protesting, to follow him around the country, which we did, and harass him.

[Of course Michelle Obama] had already made the change in position, and the people around him, had already made the change too. He was just the last to join in.

But he repealed, ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell’…

So, you can see the possibility of high risk action. It's not going to harm anybody else, but it may create change. Once you understand that, it becomes irresistible.

WB: Thank you for sharing that. Can you tell us a bit about your work in the ERA campaign?

ZN: Sonia Johnson had ascended to national prominence because she was excommunicated from the Mormon church, which is different than the Catholic church for example. When you're excommunicated from the Mormon church, it means that you cannot unite with your family in the afterlife and your children are taken away from you in this life. So, it's family oriented, which is really frightening.

And the Church excommunicated her for her stance on the Equal Rights Amendment. She was on the cover of Ms. Magazine in late 1981, and a book of hers called From Housewife to Heretic was published. She was on a speaking tour and my bookstore, which was a small independent bookstore specializing in lesbian literature and music and so forth.

[When Johnson] came through the bookstore I said, ‘what are you going to do with the deadline next summer on the Equal Rights Amendment?’ And she said, ‘I don't know, but I will call you.’ And I said to her, this was December of 81, I said, ‘Sonia, whatever it is, the answer's yes. So don't worry about what it is. The answer's yes.’

She called me in April and said, ‘we're going to go on a fast. We're going to start the fast 40 days out from the deadline, I will let you know when and where to be.’ And I said, ‘great.’ And I hung up the phone and that was that.

So, I knew that we were going to meet in May of 1982, and I was hoping for seven thousand people. And then a friend who went with me on the plane said, ‘Zoe, I think you better cut that down.’ And I said, ‘okay, I'll expect seven hundred people.’

When I got there, there were seven.

I will tell you that it is a life-changing situation, deciding to fast like that. It's a level of rareness that I value, and I think it has great meaning. I use it every day of my life because now I have crossed this Rubicon, this strange Rubicon that says ‘I'm all in.’

Some people sort of do a drive-by with their activism. Maybe they sign a postcard… or they try to do something that has minimal impact in their own life, but still, they participate and enact change in some way.

Maybe like campaigning for somebody or voting for somebody. It’s still volunteer work and it's still public engagement. But once you pass that and you make a public statement with your life—once you say you are willing to die for something— I got to tell you, the earth moves and it's forever.

No one can question your level of commitment.

A lot of people don't have that. It's pretty extraordinary.

But after that fast, I have never questioned my level of commitment… [It’s] just a done deal. People know already if I say it, I mean it.

I'm kind of glad that I have that on my Girl Scout banner. [The fast], it was an exquisite time. Dick Gregory, who used to go wherever people in the world were fasting, showed up, he flew to Springfield, Illinois from Ireland.

He was with the men in Ireland and those in prison who were fasting. Several of them died because of unhealthy water and toxic water. And so when he got to Illinois, he brought a doctor with him and said, ‘she's here for the duration, whatever you need.’ And then he said, ‘I'm paying your water bill starting today.’ And then he sat with us for a week… he sat next to me and I thought that was thrilling.

I had a thousand questions. But he also loaned us his fame for the week. So that's why we were picked up by People Magazine and Time and on the Today Show was because famous people were paying attention. And sorry to say, but that's how it really actually works. So, we started a 40 day fast, and in the course of that fast, a man in June was arrested with seven knives with our names carved on them.

Well, I should say he was apprehended. The police did not formally arrest him or book him. He was in holding for the duration, but they never actually arrested him, never booked him. They simply held him.

And there were police who had bumper stickers on their cars that said we needed to lose weight.

Anyway, so let me say simply, the police were not supporting us.

And that's what you want. It seems obvious when you say it. Rosa Parks needed somebody to arrest her on that bus. And what happened crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the protesters needed German shepherds and people visible on the other side.

When we were moved out of the way during the Vietnam War in the streets of the 1968 Democratic Convention, we were moved out of the way by Mayor Daley having the police— for the very first time, walking in formation and carry shields— you need to someone to escalate the situation so you can continue in a nonviolent way.

That itself is really a fascinating study. It's very interesting. I could talk about that for five hours, but let's not.

WB: [Laughs] Sure, let’s move along a bit. Could you explain just briefly to the readers where in Illinois you all chose to have the fast and why?

ZN: We were very close to crossing the finish line for the ERA and approaching the very unconstitutional deadline that had been superimposed on the Amendment itself when it went out of Congress in 1972.

[Frustrated sigh] The Congress, as a last thought, they tacked on a deadline for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. No other amendments have had deadlines. They just did this to the one that was going to give rights to women.

[Sits quietly for a moment thinking]

I'm sorry, could you ask me the question one more time?

WB: Of course. I asked where and why in Illinois the fast was held?

ZN: Oh yes… so we had three states left where we were doing actions to try to get the state legislatures to pass the ERA before the deadline.

One was Springfield, Illinois. It was chosen because it was the largest industrial state, and we also had a lot of Democratic support in the legislature. So, when we got to Springfield, Illinois— which of course is the capital of Illinois— we had got permission to have seven folding chairs in the rotunda marble floor, big building. They all have domes, the state houses, they're all very similar.

It was also that time of year in mid-May where eighth graders come through and kids see how government works. And it was also, isn't this interesting, driving distance from the home of Phyllis Schlafly, the famous woman who founded the American Eagles and was our primary female opponent in the fight for equal rights for women.

So that's why we were in Springfield, land of Mr. Lincoln.

WB: Could you explain what the ERA is historically, where it came from, what it aims to do, and what it would achieve?

ZN: This may sound like I'm going way too far back, but I'm not.

In the Revolutionary Era, when the men in charge decided, all white men by the way, that they were going to build their own little kingdoms when they left the King of England, they also continued to colonize America totally.

They decided that they were going to build fences and own land, which wasn't how people lived here before them. So they created little kingdoms and built fences and you could own land and it'd be yours. And inside that fence you owned everything, which is the whole point. Everything in there, the crops, the harvest, the profits, the slaves, the cattle, the chickens, the ducks, whatever they had, whatever they were farming, they owned. They owned the cattle, they owned their children, and they owned their wives.

All this time, 1787 to right now, we have watched various movements try to grant rights to people who are inside these men’s fences.

The one we're working on right now is twenty-four very simple words.

I will tell you what they are—

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on accounts of sex.

Without this we have a problem. Because we are increasingly seeing rights repealed. I live in California and a young woman in California, for whatever reason she chooses, can abort a pregnancy.

But my sisters, my daughters, my friends cannot if they live in Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, etc. With the Equal Rights Amendment, there would be universal freedom of reproduction in all fifty states.

This is the same issue with marriage. You may recall when it came to marriage equality, one of the concerns is that same sex marriage is not actually codified in the Constitution.

So, when same sex couples travel between states they could end up in a state where it was illegal to be married. States and cities can pass a bill, they can repeal a bill. Supreme Court decisions can be overturned. But with an amendment in the Constitution, that carries more weight.

The Equal Rights Amendment is proposing that we finally, after all these years, decidedly state that every American, every person who was an American citizen, would have full protection and equal rights regardless of gender.

This fight has been going on since Alice Paul announced the ERA in 1923 in Seneca Falls.

July 21st, 1923, Alice Paul presented to the world the Equal Rights Amendment. And we have been working on it now for 102 years trying to get this done and try to assure that people of every race, every ability, every age, every sex and gender have full Constitutional protections.

WB: Can you explain how you think the ERA would help specifically?

ZN: It would change everything… There is a lot of talk about what the ERA would and wouldn’t do. For example, this worry about bathrooms is insane. I mean, bathrooms are just not the issue.

We are not fighting for gender free bathrooms. Gender free bathrooms are already legal. I have a gender free bathroom here in my home. If you've ever been on an airplane, you have used a gender free bathroom there.

We just don't have a lot of problem with what goes on in gender neutral bathrooms.

In reality, what the ERA would really do, and where the biggest hit would be is money. Salaries. Benefits.

In my opinion, I would say the top three in terms of money are number one— the insurance industry has the most to lose because right now they're charging women infinitely more than men. Number two would be big pharma. Big pharma would have a real hit if they could not charge more to women than to men. But mostly I think the overwhelming place would be that it would be illegal to pay a man and a woman differently for the same work.

WB: [Nods] Can you elaborate there a bit more?

ZN: Yes. It means that the billionaires— and I say that like a swear word among progressives— the billionaires, and those who want to be oligarchs when they grow up, get rich by not paying people.

They can pay women less.

The fact of the matter is, and don't forget this, why the Equal Rights Amendment fails again and again and again is because women are the cheapest labor force on earth. This is true everywhere except those countries that have legal protections.

Can you imagine if Goodyear had to pay Lilly Ledbetter $3,000 a month more than they did? Because that's what the men earned for the same job.

There were four men and one woman in the same position, and the men got paid $3,000 a month more for twenty-five years.

And the Supreme Court validated that difference in taking away the award she got in the lower courts. She failed in the Supreme Court and the government blessed the practice of paying a woman less for equal work.

WB: Right. And the justification has been historically that women work in the home raising families. Men have families to support. This is all historically false, of course, especially with working class women, and women of color.

ZN: Yes. We as a society are still are paying women less. With the ERA, that would end.

And who would have to cough up that money which is owed?

Now, that is one of the misunderstandings here. So, you have the four men getting paid more, and the one woman getting paid less. The ERA doesn't mean that the men would have to get paid less. They're not going to level it down. What they're going to do is take the money away from the profit margin.

The issue is that the billionaires will actually have to pay people.

WB: So, the biggest stumbling block to the ERA in your opinion is with pay equality? And that corporations would not be able to legally deny pay to women. They would have to pay equally for equal work, regardless of gender and sex.

You talked a little bit about Lilly Ledbetter. North Meridian Review currently publishes out of Calhoun County, Alabama around where Lilly Ledbetter worked. Could you tell us a little bit more about her case, and the bill that is passed in response to the Supreme Court Decision?

ZN: In the local courts, Lilly was awarded an $18 million award. Of course, Goodyear appealed. As you can imagine, Lilly didn't have the money, but Goodyear did.

So, Goodyear appealed the decision and it went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Goodyear, and therefore Lilly didn't even get the 18 million that had been awarded to her in the lower courts.

Ruth Ginsburg spoke to her, which is now a famous conversation, and it happened right after the ruling, not during the case.

Ruth met with her after the hearing and said, ‘go across the street and take this fight to Congress.’

So Congress's answer was to create two bills. One bill was the Fair Pay Act and one bill was the Fair Paycheck Act. The Fair Paycheck Act meant that all employers would have to be transparent on what they paid, and which is not done. I mean, in general, businesspeople don't want workers to talk about what they earn.

So, this would require the employer to make public what they were paying. And you would be able to see if men and women were paid the same amounts for the same work. The other bill became known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

That is the one that Obama signed. It was the first bill he signed when he was inaugurated.

If you can remember the photograph of all the ladies in red jackets standing around him as he's signing it. Now, the sad part was that bill had no teeth because it did not require disclosure. It did not require the employers to actually be transparent.

And that part of the law never got passed.

If you actually look at some of the photographs, you will see, and this is really, I will tell you this because you are in Ledbetter’s neighborhood, all the ladies are around Obama's, and he’s got the pen in his hand sitting at this desk.

It's supposedly a great and glorious day. ‘Let us all celebrate women being paid equally.’ And as he faced the photographer, you'll see Lilly and she is not smiling, she is not happy, she is not toasting. She has a grimace on her face.

And it isn't that she was rude. She was happy to be in the White House and meeting the President and shown this honor of the bill being named after her, of course.

But it meant nothing to her in terms of pensions, of 401Ks, or women actually getting paid equally.

[Thinking about Ledbetter] To this day, we do not have what we need for equal pay. I was by accident a close friend of Lilly's. We shared so so much, and I mean secrets and knowings and understandings…

I am now, and I will tell you this is the first time I ever said this publicly… We sat in a restaurant…

[Cries softly. Takes a moment.]

I am going to back up a bit. I got told that the directors of Still Working Nine to Five had a surprise guest for me. They called me and said, ‘Zoe, we're so excited to tell you we were bringing a surprise guest to Virginia during Centennial.’

This of course was before the breakout of Covid, which was March 16th, but this was in January… of course I thought the celebrity might be Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, or Lily Tomlin, or other people in the movie.

And I said to them, ‘guys I have a confession to make. I'm not a person that's wowed by celebrity, but I appreciate you and I appreciate you telling me that you had somebody in mind to come and spend this time with me.’ And they said, ‘no, no, no, no. Zoe we're bringing Lilly Ledbetter to town.’ And I burst out in tears like I am right now.

She is the celebrity of my life. She is and was at the time the most important feminist in my opinion.

And there she was, and I spent a lot of time with her. We were thrown into this intimacy because of our shared experiences in activism, and in our lives, and by living alone.

So, I'm sitting at a diner with her, and she leans in and she says to me, ‘oh, you have no idea how it felt.’ And she whispered, ‘I had to sell my tractor today.’

Now I grew up in Wisconsin. I know what that means when you're selling off the actual functions, the actual machinery that kept your life in profit.

It was such a moment. It was such an intimacy that she trusted in me.

To know that this went to the Supreme Court.

If the Equal Rights Amendment had passed in 1982 none of this would have happened.

But the thread that moves through our lives is breathtaking. And so we spoke often, often on the phone. We both being single woman, head of households, we spoke often.

And of course, because of Covid we only had our phones for intimacies because of Covid, and then because of Still Working Nine to Five entering the film festival circuit we saw each other and we spent time together in Austin, Texas.

But I think that the reason we became so close in such a short time was because of our shared experiences.

WB: Thank you for sharing that. Can you tell us anything else about filming Still Working Nine to Five?

ZN: [We shot in many locations], we were shooting in the Lucy Burns Museum, which is in the building of the workhouse where the suffragists had served time.

We were also filmed independently in a hotel room. They were doing interviews for the movie there. And if you see the movie, some of the shots are there. [Lilly and I] were also in D.C. for the Women's March and we went to Washington and it was quite a time.

The Me Too movement was just really getting some traction and Black Lives Matter. And this is before the Lafayette Square incident, so it was jam packed. Shall I say, it was a rich experience.

WB: Can you explain what the Lafayette Square event was?

ZN: Oh, certainly. There were people protesting in Lafayette Square because of the murders of unarmed Black people and certainly George Floyd. And they were practicing not violent direct action.

Isn't that beautiful? I mean, they were there at peace. They were there protesting. Lafayette Square is directly across the street from the White House, Alice Paul herself, the author of Equal Rights Amendment had two residences on Lafayette Square. The first one is so delightful. 29 Madison was the Cameron House. And the ladies were evicted… by the landowners who were embarrassed by the ladies' protests. So, they moved directly across the square to the other side, to Jackson Place, and their headquarters was there throughout the rest of the work for the 19th Amendment campaign.

For the incident we are talking about here, Trump, and I'm sure you remember all his military officers headed across Lafayette Square over to St. John Church, and that's where President 45 held the Bible upside down. And he asked the military leaders, ‘can't you just shoot all the protesters legs?’

[Thinks for a moment]

Can you just open fire on all their legs? And that was in Lafayette Square and yikes. And now I want to tell you that today, today I'm looking at the calendar, December 16th, 2024, there are pickets in front of the White House. There is an RV painted that says Public Equality. There are women picketing in Lafayette Square. There are women breaking the law and getting arrested in front of the White House. Today they just sent me a video of what's going on today. I know that people have been riding around on bicycles and doing projections calling for Biden to publish the Equal Rights Amendment right this minute.

So, Lafayette Square is famous for its organizing, well even before suffrage in 1918. And now it is still going on today. And of course, who knows what Trump will do once he gets in. Will he have military officers that will follow all of his orders?

So, in the future when he says to his military officers, ‘could you just shoot the legs of all the activists,’ I am on tenterhooks wondering what is going to happen. I don't know…

WB: Backing up just a bit, you mentioned of course equal pay as a stumbling block for the ERA but also the insurance companies, medications, etc. are issues too. Can you explain that  a little bit more?

ZN: I'm so glad you asked that. The fact is the biggest investor, the biggest contributor to Congress people running for office is big pharma and the insurance companies. Elected officials get their biggest checks, they have their deepest transactions— and all politics is transactional, everybody needs to write that down somewhere— If somebody gives you something and you're a politician, you are expected to give something in return.

We see this with Sandra Fluke and efforts to get equal coverage of medications. So one of the hearings that showed this is when a student from Georgetown, Sandra Fluke, was asked to be a witness in a hearing on why women on college campuses would want to have coverage for birth control pills in their student insurance.

[Laughing] I dunno what planet some people are on, but usually people from 17 to 25 are farily sexually active. If I had to pick a group of people who were interested in contraception, that would be the group I would pick.

And so, Fluke was asked her to testify and the group of people that were there, you can find the photograph on the internet if you just goggle ‘fluke hearing’ that it was a rabbi and a priest and a member of the Protestant clergy who were present.

And these people who were questioning her were not even elected officials. Certainly, they weren't doctors, they weren't nurses, they weren't women, they weren't people who actually could get pregnant, which I suppose is the bottom line here.

And Sandra, there she was, she probably thought there'd be a whole panel of people testifying and it was only her… Six men actually asking her questions. And then Sandra's sitting at the table for one… just imagine these are congressional hearings. I think that it is in one still photograph that tells the story and it's just an outrage.

And when I saw this, I thought it was interesting that a man could, in the course of nine months, create countless numbers of children and a woman could only have one pregnancy. Aren't we worried about the wrong person? Don't you think we might discuss how to manage the male counterpart of procreation? But that's too sensible, I guess.

WB: Thank you for explaining that. So, the ERA could, theoretically, protect people to get access to contraception, and not be denied it or charged a different rate.

Could talk a little bit about the specifics of the ERA passing, because you've talked about it a bit? What I find really interesting is there is this whole legal holdup with the ERA about the conditions that the Congress made when they initially passed it and sent it out to the states for ratification. Specifically, the Congress tacked on a time limit that is arguably unconstitutional, correct?

There are legal experts who say they can't do that. Once Congress passes an Amendment it goes out to the states for ratification and is either ratified or not. And once a state ratifies the amendment, that state cannot then change its position later. Once the vote has been held, its done. Correct?

ZN: Yes. The forefathers, when they wrote the Constitution had very specific guidelines for how to create an amendment and the ability to vote on that amendment.

All of the amendments we have had to the Constitution have had to follow the same process…

Now just before it was passed by Congress, if you read the transcripts from where Shirley Chisholm and Aileen Hernandez, who was the president of NOW [National Organization for Women], you see how the ERA was held up and how members of Congress tacked on at the end a time limit, which is not part of the direction by the Constitution itself, nor was the time limit part of the two sections of what went out to the states for ratification.

But nonetheless, Congress said put a seven year limit on the ERA.

Now I just want to back up and tell you that the current 27th Amendment, which is the most recent one that's been published, took 203 years to pass. There was no deadline and it was written by one of the forefathers, and it's about getting salary raises for members of Congress.

That took 203 years for a super majority of states to ratify it and the National Archivist to publish it.

[Laughing.] Follow me now, this is about to get complicated.

The second thing is that the last state that did ratify in the context of the deadline was Indiana in 1977. And then nothing really happened for a while.

But then in 2017 the state of Nevada ratified the ERA, and the Attorney General of the state signed it. At that point, a super majority of states had voted on it. So, the ERA was sent it to the archivist and the archive has signed it.

Then in 2018, Illinois did the same thing. Illinois voted by a super majority to ratify. It got sent to their state Attorney General and the Illinois Attorney General signed it and sent it to the National Archivist.

At that point, David Ferriero, the National Archivist, signed it and published it.

We then had thirty-seven states and two had broken through this hiccup of this artificial deadline.

So, follow me one more time, and that's Virginia. January 27th, 2020. I was there. I was in the balcony that they voted by super majority to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

It went to the Attorney General. The Attorney General signed it. And before Ferriero signed it and published it, Donald J. Trump told Bill Barr to stop it from being published.

And that is where we are right now. Right this minute.

WB: Hmmm. So, Congress, in violation to what the Constitution says on how amendments are added, put on this artificial deadline. But there is a question over the legitimacy of that. Then, states after the artificial deadline did ratify the ERA. And the National Archives have published it. With these states enough states have now ratified it, the Congress has passed it, it is part of the Constitution.

ZN: Yep. Enough states have ratified it. And so we are now waiting for the National Archives to publish Virgina.

And what's happening right now, this is the focus of the protests and demands for Biden and the National Archives to publish the ERA.

Just last week, one hundred and twenty-four members of the House of Representatives United, and forty-six Senators sent a letter to Biden saying, ‘publish this, lift the ban.’

And there was a big article with Senator Gillibrand in the New York Times a couple days ago. So now Biden has a letter from the House and from the Senate Democrats. And moreover, I mean another really dazzling event happened on August 4th that 400,000 attorneys, members of the American Bar Association said that it went into effect January 27th, 2022. And now they made a resolution calling on the government, the United States Federal government, to uphold the law that the Equal Rights Amendment was law as of January 27th, 2022. And that the Federal Government is breaking the law right now by not upholding it.

WB: In your opinion, why do you think Joe Biden has been unwilling to contact the National Archive to publish the 38th State to ratify?

And on top of that, why did people like the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg say that the deadline was correct? Because that counters what all of these lawyers, members of Congress, and large swaths of the public have said.

ZN: Well, everybody has a different opinion. Ginsburg…. she said she wanted the ERA to go out to the states and start over. And when Ginsburg said that, I think we were in a much more liberal place where she actually thought that the super majority of states within a very quick amount of time would do that.

It was a different time than it is now. If it went out to the states, two states have already requested that their ratification be rescinded. And that is against the law. The founders were very clear about that you cannot rescind an amendment, you can only create another amendment to affect the previous ratified amendment.

WB: Right. Because if states could rescind their ratification, the Deep South would've rescinded the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments as soon as Reconstruction ended.

ZN: Absolutely. Oh, no doubt about that. Yes, you are correct.

With Biden…

[Pauses and thinks]

What you asked for is my opinion, so that's what I'm going to give you. My opinion is two pronged.

One is transactional. I think for Biden to do this… there is a concern about losing funding for Democrats at exactly the time that Trump arrives and begins unraveling our flag.

The other is, and this is my feelings, Joe Biden is an old fashioned, God loving family man who believes in ‘we the people.’

And maybe Biden feels that the American people en masse have not risen up. That he does not have a majority of citizens calling for it.

And the reason why the majority of citizens are calling for it is if you poll them, you will find that the overwhelming majority, more than 76% of America, is in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.

But they aren't clamoring for it. They aren't giving Joe the cushion he needs for this bold of an action in these last days. He took some heat about pardoning Hunter, he took some heat about the commuting of those on death row.

I hope he gets everybody off of death row. I mean, there are a whole list of things this man is trying to get done, but he needs the support of the public. And right now, I believe that he feels that he doesn't have it.

That's why the American Bar Association and the Senate and the House and the people in the street and the women's marches— I am hoping somehow—  will break through to him. for.

WB: Are there any closing words that you'd like to end on?

ZN: Yes, please. Right now if you can call as many times as you wish to call on Biden to direct the National Archivist to publish the ERA. I'm going to give you two numbers. One is Joe Biden's text message line, which is 302-404-0880. Text—‘Mr. President, call the archivist and tell her to publish the Equal Rights Amendment.’

The other is 202-456-1111. And when you call that, you're going to get the opportunity to leave a voicemail, say ‘Joe publish the ERA, women and minorities need to be in the Constitution,’ or say anything you want to say.

We have just days left. Everyone knows that once Trump is inaugurated, if the ERA has not passed, it's going to be taking a political backseat for a while.

WB: Thank you so much for sharing all of this Zoe.

ZN: Thank you!