What’s left undone 45 years after the National Women’s Conference

I spent much of this week watching Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing, which will likely result in her becoming the first Black woman and the sixth woman overall to join the Supreme Court in the institution's 232-year existence.

But I also started the week thinking about a time before any woman had served on the high court — 1977, specifically, when Congress funded the first and ultimately only National Women's Conference, designed to address that and other glaring omissions from American democracy.

The gathering brought together luminaries including Gloria Steinem (who turns 88 today), Coretta Scott King, Maya Angelou, first ladies Rosalynn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson, and trailblazing lawmakers including Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, alongside 2,000 women delegates from states and territories across the country. For four days, they discussed and debated issues of gender inequality, in areas such as media, health care, incarceration, poverty, arts and humanities, and elected office. They issued a report, titled "The Spirit of Houston," submitted to the White House, which outlined their policies and priorities.

Sylvia Garcia was a 20-year-old law student when she attended the conference as a delegate from Texas. She was among many women who were hoping the gathering would help build support for the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923 by suffragist Alice Paul at the first Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls.

Now one of the state's first Latina congresswomen after being elected in 2018, Garcia is still fighting for passage of the ERA— her role a sign of both the progress and the work left undone in the generations since the Houston gathering.

"The ERA was so important then, and it brought so many women across this nation as we organized," Garcia told the audience at this week's panel. "Regretfully, we still haven't gotten it done. It's amazing to me that I was fighting that fight back in '77 and here I am, as a member of Congress sitting on the Judiciary Committee and we had a hearing on the same thing again."