The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), originally written by Alice Paul in 1921 and first proposed to Congress in 1923, was intended to guarantee full rights for women under the law. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to women, in August 1920, some believed that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to guarantee full rights for women in all aspects of life, from employment to education to divorce to property ownership. In fact, not all feminists agreed that such a constitutional amendment was necessary. Nevertheless, Alice Paul and other members of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) discussed language for the proposed ERA. In the ensuing years the fight over the amendment waxed and waned, with the proposed legislation being introduced to every session of Congress from 1923 onward but remaining bottled up in committees. Paul rewrote the ERA into the current language in 1943, aiming to echo the language of the Fifteenth Amendment (which bars governments from preventing a person from voting on the basis of race or previous slave status) and the Nineteenth Amendment. With the revitalization of the women’s movement in the 1960s, the demand for the passage of the ERA gained new life. Feminists, male and female, recognized that inequities still existed under American law, despite the passage of such landmark legislation as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (protecting people against discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race or national origin or gender). The revised version of the ERA was finally pushed through Congress and presented to the states for ratification on March 22, 1972. The amendment’s proponents saw it as the culmination of the long struggle for women’s rights that began with the American Revolution and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.