“Equality of rights under the law shall not he denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” So reads the text of the much heralded Equal Rights Amendment recently passed by Congress after a half century of struggle by several women’s organizations. This year, at last, there were very few problems with the amendment’s passage through Congress, and its ratification by individual states is already well under way.

It is difficult to predict the effect of the amendment on American women. Our legal system reeks with sex-specific legislation denying women certain jobs, giving their husbands legal ascendancy in their marital relations, preventing married women from establishing their own homes, using their own names and so forth. (See Leo Kanowitz WOMEN & THE LAW). The amendment performs an important function by removing sex as a bar to achievement and initiative.

Traditionally, classifications based on sex have been upheld under the Constitution. The phrase “no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws” has only very recently been interpreted to strike down laws denying women various rights, privileges and duties. Without the new amendment, women would have to continue the slow and costly course of bringing case after case to challenge dis- criminatory laws in state after state. The burden will now shift to the states if they wish to hang onto any sex-based laws.

Many people are afraid that the amendment harms women by invalidating “protective” labor legislation. These laws, which regulate the hours women may work, the weights they may lift, and in 26 states the occupations they may enter, ostensibly were passed to protect women, “the weaker sex,” from the hardships of the working world. But in fact these laws often served only to protect the exclusive rights of men to many occupations. As the president of the International Cigarmakers Union flatly stated in 1879, “We can’t drive the females from the trade, but we can restrict their daily quota of labor through factory laws.”

Minimum wage laws for women often excluded them entirely from some areas of employment since factory owners could not hire women at wages lower than men’s, they refused to hire women at all. Maximum hours and no overtime or night work rules have had the same effect, and have been used to prevent the advancement of women who were hired.

Most ludicrous of all of course are the weight restrictions which exclude women from jobs where they must lift loads exceeding 15-35 pounds.

Special protections for women are increasingly suspect, especially given the extremely limited job opportunities available for women, and their low economic status generally. It is therefore quite unlikely that the equal rights amendment does women any harm by depriving them of the “benefits” of “protective” labor legislation.

The question remains of whether the amendment will have a positive effect on the status of American women. The amendment is likely to improve the conditions of most women as effectively as the 14th amendment improved the conditions of most black citizens–that is, not at all. The women who will benefit most are those most able to adopt the male occupations and responsibilities which have now been opened up to them. The Amendment carries with it no affirmative programs to guarantee that women become truly equal with men. Formal emancipation is granted without the means for its realization. In this way passage of the amendment may actually hurt the women’s movement.

Like our other great victory, the right to vote, the main effect of the ERA may be to deflate the women’s, rights movement for a while. When the conditions of women’s oppression and exploitation persist, they are even more likely than before to be seen as personal problems, not stemming from the nature of our social, economic and political institutions. The movement must be wary of this result; we must keep pushing for real opportunities to improve the status of all women. Now that we have been granted legal equality, we must work even harder to make the promise a reality.