The Pittsburgh Press (August 2, 1944)
Background of news –
The equal rights plank
By Bertram Benedict
The 1944 Democratic Convention caused surprised by following the lead of the Republican Convention and coming out for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. This action was taken in spite of the opposition of Secretary of Labor Perkins. Mrs. Roosevelt has also long opposed an Equal Rights Amendment. In 1940, the Republican accepted, the Democrats rejected, a plank for an Equal Rights Amendment.
The advocates of an Equal Rights Amendment are led by the National Woman’s Party. This group insists that special protective laws for women make it harder for many women to get jobs. It calls such laws unnecessary in this day and generation, and maintains that by discriminating against women they deprive them of their full rights as citizens.
The opposition is led by the Women’s Trade Union League, supported by the AFL, the CIO and many social welfare organizations. This camp argues that legal restrictions on hours, pay and other conditions of employment are still needed to safeguard the health and prevent the economic exploitation of women.
Some privileges suspended
The traditional lines of cleavage between the two schools of thought have been blunted by recent developments. The Wage-Hour Act of 1938 sets up minimum wages for all employees on interstate commerce goods, requires time-and-a-half for hours worked above 40 a week or eight a day. Also, as a result of the war emergency, some states have suspended some or most of their protective legislation for women.
In May 1943, the Senate Judiciary Committee (three Southerners, 15 non-Southerners) reported favorably on an Equal Rights Amendment, but in the following October, the House Judiciary Committee (nine Southerners, 18 non-Southerners) voted 15–11 against the proposal.
By adopting equal rights and equal pay planks, also by giving women an equal number of seats with men on the platform committees of the national conventions, both parties have testified to the importance of the women’s vote in the 1944 elections.
In the years immediately following the ratification pf the federal woman-suffrage amendment in 1920, studies were made in various localities of how women were using their new right. The studies agreed that more women than men were keeping away from the polling booths. Women were timid, or they didn’t believe in voting, or their husbands or fathers didn’t want them to vote.
The studies also agreed that these deterrents affected older rather than the younger women, also that more women would vote as they became more accustomed to the idea. Nevertheless, even the Prohibition issue failed to bring as many women as men to the polls.
More women may vote
In view of war casualty lists and of difficulties in the way of soldier voting, it is possible that more women than men will vote this November. The Census Bureau reports that as of Jan. 1, 1944, 579,137 more women than men are of voting age – 44,622,806 women, 44,043,669 men (7,860,000 in the Armed Forces).
Great Britain first gave the franchise to women during the last war, in 1917. The voting age for women was put at 30, to prevent women voters from outnumbering men; it was made the same for women and men in 1928. In 1935, the voting lists in England and Wales showed 1,571,000 more females than males.
“Suffragists” 25 or 30 years ago predicted that votes for women would prove a wholesome force in American politics, but whatever data exist indicate that women tend to vote about the same way as men.