Women's History Month

Floor Speech

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Ms. GRAHAM. Mr. Speaker, first I want to thank Congresswoman Watson Coleman for holding this special session and bringing attention to the Equal Rights Amendment.

When I was born in 1963, we lived in a different world. It was legal to openly discriminate against hiring women; it was legal to discriminate against women in lending and credit; it was legal to pay women substantially less than men; and it was legal to fire a woman just for becoming pregnant.

Fortunately, when I was born, things were beginning to change. Women were fighting for and gaining greater equality.

Today, women are better protected from those forms of discrimination. We have made great strides, but we haven't yet been able to recognize our equality in the Constitution. There is nothing more sacred, nothing more important to America than our Constitution.

I support the Equal Rights Amendment because I grew up in a changing world, but I want my daughter and the next generation to grow up in a changed world. I want my daughter to live in a country where her and every woman's equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

To illustrate why I believe we should and still can ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, I want to specifically speak about the history of the ERA in my home State of Florida.

Our House of Representatives voted for ratification of the ERA three separate times--in 1972, 1975, and 1979--but our Senate remained more divided on the issue.

Bill Cotterell, a columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat, recently opined:

It was still a very different world, where a Member of the legislature walked around with a toy pig under his arm, proudly proclaiming himself a male chauvinist.

It was a different world, one still changing, but I am proud to say there were men who stood up for the women of our State in the State senate. One of them was my father, Bob Graham, who bucked his own Democratic Party leadership to support the ERA, a move that helped earn him the title of a doghouse Democrat.

After repeated failures in the Senate, some thought the ERA was dead, but it resurfaced in Florida in 1982. That summer, just a few weeks remaining before the ratification deadline, more than 10,000 men and women marched on our State capitol in support of the amendment.

Hearing their call and supporting their cause, my father, who had moved out of the doghouse into the Governor's mansion, called our legislature into special session. For the fourth time, the House voted in favor of the amendment, but unfortunately the senate blocked ratification. That was 34 years ago.

And today I believe our State is better than that. I believe, given another chance to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Democrats and Republicans in Florida could be united to support equality for women.

I am proud to have grown up in a changing world, but it is time for our daughters and the next generation of women to grow up in a changed world. It is time to recognize their equality in our Constitution.

I thank the Congresswoman for bringing attention to this issue and for all that you do on behalf of women.

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