Editing Equal Rights Amendment (section)

==== Support from the Democratic Party under Kennedy ====
Presidential candidate [[John F. Kennedy]] announced his support of the ERA in an October 21, 1960, letter to the chairman of the National Woman's Party.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=74146 |title=Letter to Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, Chairman of the National Woman's Party |last=Kennedy |first=John F. |author-link=John F. Kennedy |date=October 21, 1960 |publisher=University of California at Santa Barbara}}</ref> Ultimately however, as president, Kennedy's ties to labor unions meant that he and his administration did not support the ERA.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PEojQDou7MIC&pg=PA864 |title=Encyclopedia of the Kennedys: The People and Events That Shaped America |last=Siracusa |first=Joseph M. |publisher=[[ABC-CLIO]] |location=Santa Barbara, California|year=2012 |isbn=978-1-59884-539-6 |page=864}}</ref>

Kennedy did appoint a [[Blue-ribbon committee|blue-ribbon commission]] on women, the [[Presidential Commission on the Status of Women|President's Commission on the Status of Women]], to investigate the problem of sex discrimination in the United States.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Harrison |first=Cynthia E. |date=1980 |title=A "New Frontier" for Women: The Public Policy of the Kennedy Administration |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1889871 |journal=The Journal of American History |volume=67 |issue=3 |pages=630–646 |doi=10.2307/1889871 |jstor=1889871 |issn=0021-8723}}</ref> The commission was chaired by [[Eleanor Roosevelt]], who opposed the ERA but no longer spoke against it publicly. In the early 1960s, Eleanor Roosevelt announced that, due to unionization, she believed the ERA was no longer a threat to women as it once may have been and told supporters that, as far as she was concerned, they could have the amendment if they wanted it. However, she never went so far as to endorse the ERA. The commission that she chaired reported (after her death) that no ERA was needed, believing that the Supreme Court could give sex the same "suspect" test as race and national origin, through interpretation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=55XG0oS3XyYC&pg=PA184 |title=Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-fulfillment |last=Beasley |first=Maurine Hoffman |publisher=University of Illinois Press |year=1987 |isbn=978-0-252-01376-8 |page=184}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://guides.loc.gov/american-women-essays/era-ratification-effort |title=Research Guides: American Women: Topical Essays: The Long Road to Equality: What Women Won from the ERA Ratification Effort |last=Berberian |first=Laura |website=guides.loc.gov |language=en |access-date=November 5, 2019}}</ref> The Supreme Court did not provide the "suspect" class test for sex, however, resulting in a continuing lack of equal rights. The commission did, though, help win passage of the [[Equal Pay Act of 1963]], which banned sex discrimination in wages in a number of professions (it would later be amended in the early 1970s to include the professions that it initially excluded) and secured an [[executive order]] from Kennedy eliminating sex discrimination in the [[civil service]]. The commission, composed largely of anti-ERA feminists with ties to labor, proposed remedies to the widespread sex discrimination it unearthed.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EDd2aNCoGlYC |title=Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, Volume III: 1960 to the Present |publisher=[[Rowman & Littlefield]] |location=Lanham, Maryland|year=2005 |isbn=978-0-7425-2236-7 |editor-last=Keetley |editor-first=Dawn |page=251 |editor-last2=Pettegrew |editor-first2=John}}</ref>

The national commission spurred the establishment of state and local commissions on the status of women and arranged for follow-up conferences in the years to come. The following year, the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] banned workplace discrimination not only on the basis of race, religion, and national origin, but also on the basis of sex, thanks to the lobbying of [[Alice Paul]] and [[Coretta Scott King]] and the political influence of Representative [[Martha Griffiths]] of [[Michigan]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Haug |first=Kate |date=2016 |title=News Today: A History of the Poor People's Campaign in Real Time |url=http://www.resurrectioncity.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/News_Today.pdf |journal=Irving Street Projects |pages=1–84}}</ref>