Review: The Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment by Leeanne Gelletly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Winner! First person on goodreads to read this book. Is there some irony in the fact that I'm not a woman, and that I'm from Utah where they voted against ERA? (We were fed such propaganda: like that ERA would force everyone's mothers into the draft and send them to Vietnam. On page 43 the ratification map shows my area of the West in the same colors as the Deep South. Good company for civil rights.)

This book is piled deep with information, and Gelletly is family with one of the movement's founders which is a great recommendation for her personal investment in the test. This thick text does not shy away from lengthy descriptions of legislative process and piles of dates and names--yay! But it is one-stop shopping for someone doing research on the topic and needing basic answers. The book focused exclusively on the movement, and not on the cultural rhetoric that worked actively to justify the inequalities. That was a choice of focus, but also a shortcoming in terms of depth.

Copious source notes make it easy to trace quotations back to original sources. It would be nice if this extended beyond just the quoted material. Timeline, books for further study, and a handful of Internet resources round things out. Just by the good source notes alone, this book does what most info books should do in helping people go to the originals.

Does this book duplicate what anyone could find on the net? The wikipedia article is serious competition. This book wins by bulking up with relevant photos and cultural artifacts, but you could get to these quickly with google images or by following links within the wikipedia article, so maybe a draw?



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