The defense spending authorization bill passed the Senate with an amendment tacked on that would extend mandatory draft registration to women—and some feminists aren’t having it. You’d think a gender-inclusive Selective Service would be a coup for feminist groups still clinging to the Equal Rights Amendment. Not so.
The fairer sex’s historical exclusion from the draft amounts to “protective status” for women, which labor unions opposed the ERA in order to preserve. But suggest the removal of women’s protective status in the unlikely event the draft’s ever reinstated?
“There are a lot of women especially involved in peace activism,” Kyle Ciani, a professor of social history and women and gender studies at Illinois State, reassured a young woman who expressed concern about the draft at a National Women’s Party event in D.C. last week. Another ERA activist added, “If more women were involved [in the military], it would help the peace movement.”
There’s hope, in other words, that women’s having to register for the Selective Service would reignite the spirit of the Sixties. Activism lost its urgency after Vietnam, after all. On the bright side, girls would get the chance to burn their draft cards. Phyllis Schlafly may have said it best, “It is amusing to watch the semantic chicanery of the advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment when confronted with this issue of the draft.” But of course, that was in 1972.
