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Meryl Streep celebrated her 66th birthday earlier this week. To celebrate, she decided to send letters to every member of Congress asking them to revive the Equal Rights Amendment. You can read the Wiki for the ERA here – it’s a fascinating history and it’s amazing to think about how close women came to across-the-board constitutionally guaranteed equality. It’s also pretty amazing to reflect back on how the ERA pitted various feminist movements against each other. Well, we might get a repeat of that.

Meryl Streep has signed a letter being sent to every single member of Congress, urging them to revive a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women.

“I am writing to ask you to stand up for equality – for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself – by actively supporting the Equal Rights Amendment,” Streep wrote in the message.

Each of her letters were sent to Capitol Hill along with a copy of the book Equal Means Equal: Why the Time for the ERA is Now by Jessica Neuwirth, president of the ERA Coalition, which was founded last year to rally a broader base of public support for the amendment.

The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972, stating, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of by any state on account of sex.” But only 35 states ratified it over the next 10 years, three short of the 38-state minimum needed to add it to the Constitution, and the issue stalled. Since then, the Associated Press notes, lawmakers from both political parties have regularly tried to restart the process.

[From EW]

While I would like to see the ERA debate revived, I honestly don’t have much hope that it will ever pass. Still, it would force so many discussions and it would ensure that many elected representatives would have to go on the record about why they believed why women should be paid less, or why women should have less reproductive freedom than men and on and on.

Meryl is very politically active across the board, but one of my favorite pieces of Meryl’s activism is her work to create the Women’s History Museum in Washington, DC. Go here to read more about that.

Photos courtesy of WENN.
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