ASHEVILLE – Roberta Madden wants to live to see the day the Equal Rights Amendment is added to the U.S. Constitution.
At 78, the Black Mountain resident fears she is running out of time.
“It’s amazing to think how long I have been working on this — since 1972,” said Madden, who retired as director of racial and social justice at the YWCA in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, seven years ago.
“The problem is no one knows what the ERA is, or they think it has already passed,” she said.
Ninety-two years after the landmark legislation was first introduced in Congress, some Western North Carolina women say it’s time to again try to win state support to ratify the ERA, an effort planned for this General Assembly session.
“We have a legacy of discrimination,” said Madden, who is the co-director of Ratify ERA-NC. [cont. reading]
