At half-past noon, with marchers lined up on Constitution Avenue, a girl scout carrying an American flag began the day’s procession. Marching behind her, the D.C. Columbian Band rolled out a step-lively beat, and a trolley packed with elderly suffragettes shouted, “we’re here to stay, and ERA won’t go away.” Brimming with energy and euphoria, the demonstrators marched toward Capitol Hill.
With ecstatic enthusiasm, demonstrators sang and chanted all the way up Constitution Avenue. The chant most heard that day was “ERA now!” At other times they exclaimed, “One two three four, we need three more (three more states to ratify), five six seven eight, Congress must extend the date!”
Many of the marchers dressed in all white in a gesture to their suffragette foremothers, who, 65 years earlier—and staged by Alice Paul—conducted their own march down Pennsylvania Avenue. On that day in 1913, the women were forced to stop their rally due to the violence and disorder of the male opposition. In remembrance of the march, the 1978 demonstrators “struck a large bell for a note of mournful remembrance.” July 9 also marked the one-year anniversary of Paul’s passing. Many of the marchers purchased Alice Paul buttons and pinned them to their white attire. Some demonstrators also wore an ERA sash around their torsos.
The demonstrators came from all walks of life, each with their own reason for attending. “I was born a feminist,” said Marcia Karklin of Connecticut. “I came out of the womb with a clenched fist at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Providence, R.I.” 74-year-old Nan Wood, who was president of her own Chicago-based electronics firm, exclaimed from her wheelchair: “I’ve been a feminist since I was born in 1903.” One woman even named her daughter Era in honor of the ERA. And among the New Jersey delegation, a sign was spotted that read, “Jesus Was A Feminist.”
The marchers also had varying political outlooks. One activist called America’s federalist governing system “archaic,” and instead proposed “a national referendum” as an easier way to change the Constitution. A member of the Workers World Party told the Evening Star that while the group supports the ERA, “we’re trying to put it in a class perspective.” Not even the middle-class marchers “benefit under capitalism,” she said. Eileen Boris, reflecting on her participation in the march decades later, stated that while she was there to make history, she was not “a dedicated campaigner for the ERA.” She clarified that as a “socialist feminist, I understood that constitutional equality with men under capitalism would leave intact structures of class and race privilege between women.”