Author: Renée K. Gadoua

In August 1980, longtime Syracusan Betty Bone Schiess joined 11 women who chained themselves to a railing outside the Washington, D.C., offices of the Republican National Committee. The women wore white and purple — colors associated with women’s suffrage — and burned a copy of the party platform, which the previous month reversed its 40-year tradition of supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. “The fact that the Republicans withdrew support of the ERA from their platform is a scandal,” Schiess told The Washington Post at the time. (Although Congress approved the ERA in 1972, the amendment failed to get approval from…

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