By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well
as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered
Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original
struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As
the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this
study grapples not only with the battle over women's constitutional
status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate
the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen.
Through an
examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered
Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best
understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize
citizenship to correspond with women's changing status after the
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Finally, Rebecca
DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing
not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment,
but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus
conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The
conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative
for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.