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Nine years ago today, the RN&R‘s lead news story was about a symbolic vote by the Nevada Legislature to finally ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
The piece, like so many by the late Dennis Myers, went beyond the “news hook” to guide readers through Nevada history—telling the nuanced tale of why the state didn’t ratify the amendment back when the vote would have been meaningful rather than symbolic, and explaining how the presence of the ERA nonetheless forged meaningful changes here in the Silver State.
In that piece, Myers quoted one of the ERA’s strongest proponents in Nevada: Sue Wagner, who was in the Assembly when the ERA first came up for a vote. She would later go on to serve as the lieutenant governor from 1991 to 1995—the first woman in Nevada history to do so—even after surviving a plane crash two months before the 1990 election.
In 1973, the Nevada Legislature rejected the proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would have guaranteed equality of rights under the law no matter a person’s gender.
After languishing in Congress since 1923, the amendment—known as the Equal Rights Amendment—was finally approved and sent to the states for ratification in 1972. Twenty-two states ratified that year. When more state legislatures went into session in 1973, small Western states—Wyoming, South Dakota, Oregon and New Mexico—were among the first to approve it.
But a backfire had been building. Right-wing women, evangelicals and other groups that would become more influential in the years ahead got organized and slowed the ratifications to a trickle. After the Nevada Assembly approved it and the Nevada Senate rejected it in 1973 and 1975, the Nevada Senate approved it in 1977 only to see the Assembly reject it. A 1978 advisory ballot measure put an end to the ERA in Nevada when it lost in a massive landslide, 67 to 33 percent.
Meanwhile, at the national level, by the end of the seven-year ratification period, the Amendment stopped three states short of ratification, 35 of 38. A three-year extension by Congress—opposed by some women’s rights organizations—did not result in any more ratifications.
There was an occasion during the ratification fight when the U.S. Supreme Court came close to ruling that the intent of the Equal Rights Amendment was already in the law. In their book, The Brethren, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong revealed that the justices nearly ruled that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which says no state can “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—applied to women. But the justices were unable to agree on a pace at which to apply the change, and it never happened. Years later, it did happen.
In Nevada, on March 1, one Republican, 11 Democrats and one Independent voted for the ERA in the Senate by a 13-8 vote. On March 20, the Nevada Assembly approved Senate Joint Resolution 2 as well, on a 28-14 vote. The two votes have no legal effect, but were seen as a gesture toward equality 35 years after the ERA expired.
“If it is only a symbol, it is a good one,” said former Nevada lieutenant governor Sue Wagner, who as an assemblymember fought hard to pass the ERA. She was on hand for the Assembly vote this week.
What few of the younger legislators supporting the ERA knew is that Nevada did benefit from the impact of the ERA. Because of it, numerous sexually discriminatory laws were cleaned up and corrected.
They included, for instance, a law that treated widows and widowers differently in state pension matters, prompting one legislator—Carl Dodge of Churchill County—to refuse to support the ERA for fear he would be cutting widows off from their support, though other legislators pointed out that the same treatment could be accorded both widow and widower.
Another measure dealt with a bar on women being bartenders. As late as 1973, Republican Assm. Randy Capurro said he had supported the measure on grounds that it would subject women to “moral” difficulties. He did not explain why men were not similarly challenged by barroom climates.
In the early Nevada battles, opponents said that the states could do the job better than a federal amendment. After a couple of ERA defeats, by some accounts, Republican U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt—who had run for Senate as an ERA supporter, then switched to an opponent after taking office—advised opponents to get to work and start reforming state laws.
A legislative staffer, Audys Dodge, was assigned to identify the discriminatory laws in Nevada Revised Statutes, the state’s body of statutory law, from agriculture to zoning. She produced a report naming many laws that needed correcting.
The initial corrective measure was sponsored by Assm. Karen Hayes, a right wing Democrat from Clark County who served from 1974 to 1982 and who opposed the ERA.
But it didn’t happen quickly, or in a single legislature. There were numerous bills over the years. Steadily, methodically, the legislators cleaned up one statute after another. Within about a decade every statute but one had been corrected. It’s not clear what that last one was, but some remember it as applying to firefighters. Wagner does remember complaints from spouses of firefighters—“Those damn women are going to become firefighters and sleep in the station house with my husband.” Whatever that last law was, it may finally have been corrected.
It was a major sea-change, a sweeping corrective in one state’s laws.
Today Wagner says while she was pleased the project got done, it did not redeem the claim that the ERA was unneeded. Other states did not undertake similar projects, she said, and Nevada has had many laws written since the 1970s that may not have been written with the same sensibility.
“Every state has not cleaned up their statutes,” she said. “There are things now that are not equal and that need to be changed. You really need a national standard. You can’t have pay equity in Nevada and not in New Mexico.”
It is reminiscent of an encounter between Nevada suffrage leader Anne Martin and President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. A month after Nevada voted for women’s suffrage, Wilson told Martin, “That is the way suffrage should be won, by the states.” She told him that doing it state by state is burdensome.
Even more burdensome is correcting every state’s whole body of laws, one at a time.
Sue Wagner died last week in Reno, at the age of 86. She was something that’s basically extinct today—a true moderate Republican. In addition to advocating for the ERA, she was a staunch supporter of abortion rights.
Here are some paragraphs from The Nevada Independent’s obituary:
Although she survived a 1990 plane crash and served out her term as lieutenant governor, her injuries from the accident effectively ended her political career. She later served on the Nevada Gaming Commission for 12 years.
“There’s just no question in our mind that she was going to be the first female governor,” said Stephanie Tyler, a former aide and close friend of Wagner’s who survived the plane crash alongside her.
The crash transformed Wagner’s life, Tyler said, and left her with chronic pain.
“The legacy that she would have created, given her tenacity and her vision for what she felt Nevada could and should be — it would have reshaped the future of the state.”
Born in Portland, Maine, in 1940, Wagner moved with her family to Arizona when she was 10 and stayed out West for the rest of her life. Her father had served as chairman of Maine’s Republican Party, which Wagner credited with her own early interest in politics.
Another source of inspiration for her as a child was strong female political leadership. In a 2017 interview with the Nevada Women’s History Project, she named the pioneering Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) as one of her early role models.
Before venturing into politics, she worked as a reporter and as a schoolteacher after her graduation from the University of Arizona. Friends and colleagues say both experiences made her more aware of the importance of questioning dominant narratives and seeking out the truth.
Wagner was elected to the state Assembly to represent a Reno-area district in 1974 while raising her two young children, a decision that she said drew ire from critics who did not see a place for mothers in politics.
Wagner may have lost the ERA-ratification battle, but in many ways, she won the war: In 2022, Nevadans voted their own version of the Equal Rights Amendment into the state’s Constitution. At the time of passage, The Associated Press said the amendment was “widely considered the most comprehensive state version of the Equal Rights Amendment in the nation, a sweeping update that puts protections in the state Constitution for people who have historically been marginalized.”
—Jimmy Boegle
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