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This chapter connects the demise of exclusive religious establishments with the foundation of republican governments. It also traces the extension of equal recognition to previously marginal groups, such as Roman Catholics. Indeed, by the founding period, the wholesale condemnation of religious minorities had become quite rare and the presumption that faith of many different kinds was better than no faith at all had become widespread. James Madison’s struggle to extend the meaning of “religion” in the Virginia legislature and John Carroll’s efforts to ensure equal rights and recognition for Catholics highlight the widening scope of American pluralism.

This chapter focuses on the rise of feminism in the 1960s and the downfall of single-sex protective laws. Protection's downfall rested not on the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), but rather on the courts—on women employees who sued for equal rights in federal courts under Title VII and the lawyers who represented them; on pressure from feminist organizations, notably the National Organization for Women (NOW), that supported the plaintiffs; on a series of court decisions that upset protective laws; and on a mounting consensus among judges in favor of equal rights. Also important was feminist resurgence, which swayed conviction; shifts in public opinion culminated in the passage in Congress of an ERA in 1972. Single-sex protective laws were thus the first casualties of the new feminism. Once central to the women's movement, they became obstacles on the path to equal rights.

This chapter focuses on the fourth and final religious signal: engaging in morality politics. Morality politics is an approach that elevates political issues into symbolic, moral battles. The evidence in this chapter comes from Republican and Democratic party platforms since 1932. It considers five issues central to religious conservatives' political engagement: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, same-sex relationships, school prayer, and stem-cell research. Analyzing platforms language shows that since 1980 Republicans have increasingly aligned their issue positions with those of religious conservatives, while Democrats have done the opposite. Further, Republicans have elevated the importance of these issues by attacking the courts and calling for constitutional amendments, while also grounding their claims in the language of faith and family. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three Justice Sunday events, which showcase morality politics in its most overt form.

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

Mill's moral theory, which holds that an act or omission is wrong if and only if it is deserving of punishment for the kind of harm it causes to others without their consent, must be integrated with the rest of his utilitarian “Art of Life,” which aims to maximize happiness as Mill conceives it. He indicates that the kind of pleasant feeling associated with the moral sentiments is qualitatively superior to any competing kinds of pleasures. The upshot is that a social code of justice that distributes equal rights and duties has absolute priority over competing considerations within his utilitarianism. Even so, an aesthetic kind of utility may still be qualitatively supreme because it does not conflict with the moral sentiments. This highest kind of utility attaches to praiseworthy supererogatory conduct, where an agent chooses to waive his equal rights so as to promote the happiness of others.

This chapter explores the legal challenges that workplace pregnancy posed in the 1970s and 1980s. Debates about workplace pregnancy revived clashes about difference and equality that had vexed the women's movement for decades. Paradoxically, pregnancy, a badge of difference, served as a springboard to advances in equal rights. As that happened, the new direction in pregnancy policy underscored the doom of single-sex protective laws. The most enduring steps in shaping pregnancy policy were the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (PDA), which barred discrimination against pregnant workers; the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), which offered up to twelve-week unpaid leaves to employees in larger enterprises for family and medical emergencies; and the Johnson Controls decision of 1991, which barred fetal protection regulations as a form of sex discrimination.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the women’s equal rights movement, and then explores women’s responses to the issue during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the women examined here were right-wing and actively opposed the ERA, but some supporters are included in the chapter. It explores the clashes between those women who favored the amendment, and those who opposed it. It looks at the reasons why many women joined together to campaign against the ERA, examining such demographic factors as age, social status, and occupation. The chapter ends with a sampling of baby boomers’ reflections on what the conflict over the ERA meant for them.

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

Even without encouragement from Republican politicians, Christian activists in the mid-1970s launched campaigns against cultural liberalism, uniting evangelicals with conservative Catholics and reshaping the Republican Party. In the early 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, led evangelical women in a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Evangelicals’ opposition to feminism and the sexual revolution also prompted them to join Catholics in speaking out against abortion. During the presidential election of 1976, cultural conservatives forced Gerald Ford to move to the right on abortion and challenged Jimmy Carter after his controversial interview with Playboy. Though an organized Religious Right had not yet developed, evangelicals were discovering their power to influence national politics.

This chapter analyzes claims made by the Tea Party's critics, who argue that the movement is one rooted in bigotry. The minority and immigrant population in America has grown dramatically, eventually leading to the election of many prominent African American, Latino, and Asian American candidates to office. At the same time, minority groups have continued to promote equal rights, especially civil rights for a range of groups, including racial/ethnic minorities, women, and sexual minorities. Yet, American history is filled with periods during which increasing visibility and calls for equal treatment among out-groups has been repeatedly met with opposition from dominant groups. The chapter calls into question whether or not Tea Party supporters see all Americans as equal members of society entitled to the same access to the American dream.

During the 1910s suffragists followed closely the congressional debates over political independence for men in the Philippines and Puerto Rico and were intent on juxtaposing national legislation that expanded political autonomy for men in these U.S. island possessions against Congress's failure to pass a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. constitution. By 1916 it seemed, ironically, that the U.S. colonial possessions might be the next site for woman suffrage victories. The revival of the push for the federal woman suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), took place in the context of U.S. efforts to resolve the political status of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

This chapter looks at the growth of suburban feminism as a means to consider the persistence of certain elements of suburban liberal activism and ideology in a changed political and economic climate. The increasing wedding of feminism with suburban politics had key trade-offs for the larger cause of women's equality. The sensibility and organizing strategies of suburban liberal politics were both crucial to the success of several campaigns, especially the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The pivot also helped the movement further earn the notice and attention of politicians eager to win suburban votes. Yet the relationship hardened the middle-class orientation of second-wave feminism and elevated class-blind and consumerist ideas of choice.

Chapter 8 follows Breckinridge to the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she and other women activists in both the United States and Latin America vigorously debated the meaning of women’s equality. Breckinridge’s clashes with Doris Stevens, the U.S. leader of the Inter-American Commission of Women, over the proposed Equal Nationality Treaty and Equal Rights Treaty laid bare the conflicts inherent in Pan-American feminism. At the same time, U.S. and Latin American women’s activists’ diverse understandings of feminism helped to lay the groundwork for the idea that “women’s rights are human rights.”

Despite the perception that the national women's movement was moribund, a promising Left Feminist movement was emerging when World War II ended. Cunningham was a leader of this movement in Texas, fighting for women's employment opportunities, equal pay, price controls on consumer goods, and sharing its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment because it would invalidate protective legislation for women. Cunningham established new organizations such as the People's Legislative Committee and the Texas Democratic Women's State Committee and, with Frankie Randolph, founded the Texas Observer, in an attempt to elect left-liberals like Bob Eckhardt and Ralph Yarborough to office, who would support reform. Cunningham felt betrayed by Lyndon Johnson when he joined with conservative Democrats in 1956 to prevent the left-liberals from gaining control of the Texas Democratic Party.

Chapter 6 explores the “equality versus difference” debate--a defining feature of feminism in modern America--through the lens of Breckinridge’s work in both the national suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and its successor organization, the League of Women Voters. By exploring Breckinridge’s work with national feminist organizations during and after the suffrage struggle, this chapter highlights both women’s continuous activism and their ideological differences, especially their debate over the Equal Rights Amendment and so-called “protective legislation.”

Chapter 5 turns to an era slighted by many constitutional studies: the suffrage movement and its national reconstruction project. Suffragists reinterpreted essential elements of fundamental law through gender justice constitutionalism: a set of innovative arguments that women must be recognized as free and equal citizens. Emphasizing a broad tapestry of voices seeking women’s rights and empowerment, the chapter develops the argument that suffragists are civic founders of the Nineteenth Amendment and a transformed political community. For decades before they persuaded Congress to propose the Nineteenth Amendment, suffragists challenged the dominant constitutional order and showed, through practices of claiming rights and justice publicly, that women could not be cordoned off into a separate female sphere. As they worked to identify contradictions between espoused national ideals and practices of gender exclusion and discrimination, suffragists enriched civil rights and liberties and cultivated new conceptions of suffrage, representation, civic equality, and political power.

This chapter analyzes the development of the contemporary conservative movement from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In the 1970s, neoconservatism played a particularly important role in fashioning a new brand of racial conservatism with a powerful cultural resonance. Framed in the liberal language of non-discrimination and equal rights, this position denounced race-conscious policies and equalitarian politics more broadly as politically illegitimate and socially destructive. During the same period, veteran conservative activists regrouped to organize the New Right, which combined a powerful appeal to the intertwined racial and class identities of working-class whites with innovative and effective techniques of political organizing. Together, the neoconservatives and the New Right laid the foundations for a new conservative political establishment with the organizational muscle to systematically market conservative ideas, engineer a conservative takeover of the Republican Party, leverage a more conservative federal judiciary, and mobilize grassroots support for conservative causes. While encompassing a wide range of issues, a central—and ultimately successful—goal of the movement was to banish socioeconomic equity issues from the forum of legitimate political discussion.

This chapter discusses an argument that we should nevertheless be committed to equal property rights in external resources, on account of our (broadly liberal) commitment to freedom as a fundamental value. In order to demonstrate the problem with this argument, we have to return to the original egalitarian Robinsonade that was invoked to make the case for basic income.