It's been said (and sometimes attributed to Mark Twain) that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
I've been hearing a lot of rhyming about the Equal Rights Amendment lately — so much so that I'd invite Lin-Manuel Miranda to choose the long quest for a U.S. constitutional guarantee of gender equality under the law as the topic for his next musical.
The Minnesota number in the show could feature Myrtle Cain and Joan Growe. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
While playing Minnesota historian recently, I looked at the 1973 legislative session. It was the year in which DFLers took control of the House, Senate and governor's office for the first time. Now that they were finally in "the room where it happens," those DFLers knew that "history had its eyes on them" and chose their first moves with great care. (OK, I'll lay off the "Hamilton" references — other than to report that the show's soundtrack makes a nice accompaniment to dives into the Legislative Reference Library's archives.)
The newly in-charge DFLers quickly took up ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. It had been sent by Congress to the states in 1972, a year in which the Minnesota Legislature did not meet. On Feb. 8, 1973, I learned, Minnesota became the 26th state on the ratification list, with 12 states to go before reaching the requisite 38 (three-quarters of the states) for the amendment's adoption.
Hence, I thought I'd fallen into a time warp when this headline appeared in this newspaper nine days ago: "After nearly a century, the Equal Rights Amendment might finally pass." The story reported that Virginia has just given Democrats control of state government for the first time in the modern era. What are that state's new legislature's leaders vowing to take up "immediately" in January? The good ol' ERA.
Do you detect an every-half-century-or-so pattern here?
They were already detecting one in 1973. Sitting in the state Senate gallery in February 1973 was former state Rep. Myrtle Cain of Minneapolis. Cain was one of four women elected to the Legislature in the first election in which women were eligible to run, 1922. The next year, she introduced an Equal Rights Amendment bill in the state House. The ERA was being introduced in Congress and elsewhere that year in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the meeting at Seneca Falls, N.Y., that launched the 72-year crusade to give American women the right to vote.