Jane Fonda: My question for the candidates

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Last edited Tue Sep 22, 2015, 12:00 AM - Edit history (1)

(CNN)Over the past year, the ERA Coalition has launched a renewed campaign to put women into the Constitution. Thursday is Constitution Day, marking the day our Constitution was signed in 1787. Our founders wrongly denied women full citizen status despite the plea some years earlier from Abigail Adams to "remember the ladies."

It took more than 100 years for women to get the right to vote in 1920 through the 19th Amendment, and nearly a century later women still do not have equal rights under the Constitution. I would like to put a simple yet fundamental question to candidates in the upcoming CNN debate: Do they support the Equal Rights Amendment?

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~Malala



~Gloria Steinem and Kierra Johnson


~Sunny Clifford


The ERA was originally drafted by a Republican woman, Alice Paul. In the campaign for its ratification, the ERA was supported by Republican and Democratic presidents alike: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. I remember Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter all in Houston in 1977 joining together for women across the country at the National Women's Conference.

We came so very close to success, with ratification by 35 of the 38 states needed, when the deadline expired in 1982.

Today, both parties are courting the women's vote. We have shown that women can make a difference at the polls, and as voters I think we should know where all the candidates stand on constitutional equality for women. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said it is one of her greatest wishes to see the ERA in the Constitution in her lifetime, for the sake of her granddaughters.

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It's time to take a stand and establish the fundamental principle of sex equality in the Constitution. What I want to know from the candidates running for president is whether they stand with us.

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