objected to the wording of the proposed amendment. They met repeatedly with NWP leaders in 1921 and
1922, hoping to persuade them to add language to the ERA exempting maternity leave and other
legislation deemed advantageous to women. They too failed to convince the NWP to change course.
Alice Paul, who drafted the ERA and was the driving force behind its passage, epitomized the ardent
individualism and single-issue focus of the NWP. Like the majority of other NWP members, she came
from a relatively privileged background. Raised in a wealthy Quaker family with a father who was a
successful businessman and president of the Burlington County Trust Company in New Jersey, Paul had
earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and three law degrees by the end of the 1920s. Like
many of the women grouped around her, she believed deeply in removing barriers to women’s individual
achievement and allowing women the same freedoms as men. Raising the living standards of workers and
ending race-based indignities were not her principal concerns. Rather, she maintained an unwavering,
resolute focus on winning women’s legal equality with men.
Animosity between NWP activists, often called “equal rights feminists,” and social justice feminists
worsened in 1923 after the Supreme Court overturned Washington, D.C.’s minimum wage law for women.
Women, like men, now enjoyed voting rights, the Court proclaimed, and as political equals they should be
subject to the same unregulated free market as men. The NWP applauded the decision. Social justice
feminists were appalled. Mary Anderson, a Swedish immigrant shoemaker appointed by President
Woodrow Wilson in 1920 as the first director of the U.S. Women’s Bureau, lashed out at the Court ruling
as well as the reasoning of NWP feminists. The NWP, she declared, was celebrating a false freedom. The
right of women to work for starvation wages was no right at all. The 1923 Court ruling, in her view,
merely gave employers the power to exploit the most vulnerable without oversight or restraint.
After 1923, social justice feminists formed a “counter-lobby” to the ERA, which included such
women’s organizations as the National Women’s Trade Union League, the largest U.S. labor women’s
organization of the day, the National Consumers’ League, the Young Women’s Christian Association
(YWCA), and others. Class animosities underlay and reinforced political disagreements. In the view of
feminists like Mary Anderson, who had washed dishes in a lumber camp and held a succession of low-
paying jobs as a domestic before finding steady work in a boot factory and a route to union office and
government affairs, the NWP’s approach to women’s rights, particularly its single-minded pursuit of the
ERA and of formal legal equality with men, was far too narrow. It promised “doctrinaire equality”
without any “social justice,” she explained to the readers of Good Housekeeping in 1925. The “woman
question” was interrelated with “other great social questions,” she added, and “to insist only upon
women’s legal rights no matter what happened to other rights could result in greater inequality.”^6
Passing the ERA, social justice feminists feared, would make it easier for the Supreme Court to
overturn not just Washington, D.C.’s minimum wage law but all woman-specific laws and policies.
Secured initially in the early twentieth century, state and municipal laws across the country regulated the
working conditions of millions of women in low-paid service, industrial, and agricultural jobs; social
justice feminists judged these laws as crucial in keeping women’s wages above poverty level, reducing
long hours, and offering women protection from dangerous and unhealthy work. Counted by some social
justice feminists as among their proudest reform achievements, these laws needed to be retained,
broadened, and extended to all workers, men as well as women.
As the battle over the ERA heated up after 1923, the NWP further alienated social justice feminists by
forming political ties with business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National
Association of Manufacturers and befriending conservative politicians in both the Republican and
Democratic parties. These were the very groups who had opposed labor rights, government regulation,
and social welfare programs throughout the Progressive Era and who would continue to do so into the