The Sisters of Abigail Adams

"Remember the ladies," Abigail Adams wrote to her husband when he went off to help write the Declaration of Independence. "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion." John Adams and the other signers did pretty much forget the ladies--but the ladies did not forget. Last week the sound of rebellion trilled across Capitol Hill. With banners flying, the not-to-be-forgotten sisters of Abigail Adams were on the march.

The nub of their demands was that women's suffrage was not enough. They demanded a constitutional amendment which declared: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex." The battle was joined when Iowa's earnest, white-haired Guy Gillette introduced the amendment on the floor of the Senate.

With Every Weapon. The ladies-moving spirit was an invincible feminist, wan, whisperingly insistent, 65-year-old Alice Paul. During World War I, she had been thrown into jail for picketing the White House; she was forcibly fed when she declined to eat. She helped found the National Woman's Party. She was the spiritual sister of Abigail Adams, of Amelia Jenks Bloomer, the first bloomer girl, of those heroines of women's rights--Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott--before whose statue in the crypt of the Capitol she had posed, tight-lipped and purposeful.

Behind her and the proposed 22nd Amendment were Bess Truman, Perle Mesta, women's organizations by the score--her own National Woman's Party, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the 'American Medical Women's Association, the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, the National Association of Colored Women. Miss Paul and her cohorts rapped on Senate doors, buttonholed Senators. Their weapons were whatever came to hand--documents, dialectics, plain talk and implied political threats. Some, like Ernestine Bellamy, distant relative of Edward (Looking Backward) Bellamy, splendidly flashed the most invincible feminine weapon of all (see cut).

Aren't Women Persons? They argued that the whole body of English common law tended to relegate women to the class of chattel. As the redoubtable Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, sister of ex-Senator Joe Guffey, had pointed out during earlier Senate committee hearings: "We women want to be persons now because we are still not persons in the Constitution."

They argued that in some states women were not allowed to serve on juries, or to run a business and keep the profits without their husbands' consent. In some states a husband might get a divorce from an unfaithful wife but not vice versa. In some states women might not handle baggage, mix strong drinks in public places, work in blast furnaces, bowling alleys or shoeshine parlors. It was not a question of whether they wanted to do these things; they just resented the implication of inferiority. The proposed amendment would wipe out all such strictures at one stroke.

But the Senate (95 men, one woman) did not stampede. It had voted down the amendment regularly since 1938. Despite the fact that both political parties had included a thought for equal rights in their platforms, there were still ifs, ands & buts to be debated. One difficulty was that there were probably just as many women against the whole idea as there were for it.

No More Rape? Emphatically against it were Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, women in the C.I.O. and the A.F.L., women's organizations by the score--the National League of Women Voters, the Y.W.C.A., the American Association of University Women. Such opponents feared that equal rights might cut two ways: it might also deny them certain privileges of their sex.

The amendment, they protested, would wipe out the whole intricate structure of laws set up to protect women in a world where--they faced the truth--men largely ran things and women had to cope with physiological fact. There were laws to protect pregnant women in employment, laws to protect women workers from exploitation. Men, but not women, were required to pay alimony. A man could be jailed for nonsupport, but not a woman. Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver thought that under the amendment rape might no longer be a crime. "A law," he suggested, "which defined an act of aggression on the part of a man, as distinguished from a woman, would automatically be repealed." The nation's courts would have a pretty time trying to thrash out points like that.

Inherent Difference. Hollywood gagwriters warmed up. Actress Shelley Winters said: "I don't want to smoke cigars or go to stag parties, wear jockey shorts or pick up the check." Bob Hope cracked: "Maybe now women will drive on the same side of the street as the men."

But for Senators, forced to decide something, it was more than a laughing matter. They tried to grope their way out. "No one can be born without a father and a mother," Arizona's old Carl Hayden ruminated on the Senate floor. "My mother did for me what my father could not do . . . My father did for me what my mother could not do." Thus convinced in his own mind that men & women "are inherently different," he offered a rider to the ladies' amendment which would simply state that nothing in the amendment would impair any "rights, benefits, or exemptions now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex."

To most of the Senate, it seemed a solution that women could go for: more equality without loss of any of their special advantages. The Senators whooped through the amendment with the Hayden rider attached, 63 to 19, and sat back with relief. But there were indignant sniffs from indomitable Miss Paul. As long as any qualifications whatsoever dangled from the bill, she was not going to be satisfied. Banners still flying, weapons at the ready, the sisters of Abigail Adams advanced on the apprehensive members of the House.

* Maine's Margaret Chase Smith, who was emphatically in favor of the amendment.

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