Too Little, Too Late: Changes in the Legal Status of U.S. Women

Women have yet to achieve full citizenship in the United States and most other Western democracies, and the equal rights approach is doomed to fall in achieving its stated goal of making women full citizens of the United States, Joan Hoff argues in her new book Too Little, Too Changes in the Legal Status of U.S. Women. Women remain second-class citizens because advances in their legal status have almost always come years after reformers first started agitating for such rights. Female suffrage took 72 years, from the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The first equal pay bill for women was introduced 93 years before the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. And the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in 1923, only to fail to be ratified 49 years later. By the time such rights were - or in the case of the ERA were not - accorded women, they were obsolete. Equal rights feminism does not fully consider the institutionalized inequality women continue to experience in marriage and the workforce, Hoff asserts. And until recently, it ignored the debilitating social conditioning of men and women in American society which accounts fo