4-3 Discussion: Thesis Statements
Human rights advocacy includes the fight for equality in society. Feminists and other constitutional activists have fought for years for the rights of all genders, but more focus has been on those of women. Women and other like-minded advocates have fought for equality in employment, political rights, and the role of women in society in general (MindEdge, 2017. For instance, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and women’s suffrage movement are examples of efforts in the U.S. to champion for the equal rights of women. The discussion post explains the concept of historical causality using an excerpt on ERA.
The Congressional champions of ERA contributed to the collapse of the amendment due to inexperience on the legislative process. “A prime reason for such inattention was a misreading of the history of constitutional amending” (Kyvig, 1996). From the sentence, one can decipher the concept of historical causality by highlighting the phrases ‘a prime reason’ and ‘misreading’ because the concept focuses on the causes, which can only be determined with a thorough interpretation. The author is proving that members of congress, who sponsored the bill, failed to identify and interpret historical data on why amendments are defeated in the house. Another aspect in the sentence to explain the concept is the contributory cause of the defeat of ERA. The author implies that learning from the past constitutional amending, Senator Birch Bayh and Representative Martha Griffiths would have achieved their goals in the house.
The author illustrates that though ERA had significant support over the years across the political divide, its principal sponsors lacked adequate experience about constitutional amending. One of the significant historical accounts of defeat or passage of amendments in the U.S. highlighted by the author is the significance of taking the Southerners seriously. “Every constitutional amendment proposal with southern backing had to be taken seriously; without such underpinning any amendment became problematic and required almost universal endorsement from nonsouthern states for adoption” (Kyvig, 1996).
References
Kyvig, D. E. (1996). Historical misunderstandings and the defeat of the equal rights amendment. The Public Historian, 18(1), 45-63.
MindEdge. (2017). Theme: Approaches to history.
Excerpt “Historical misunderstandings and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment”