Famous Actress Urges US Congress to Back Equal Rights for Women

Streep dispatched a package with a book and letter to all members of Congress on Tuesday, the day after her 66th birthday.

“I am writing to ask you to stand up for equality – for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself – by actively supporting the equal rights amendment,” Streep writes.

Each packet includes a copy of Equal Means Equal, a book by Jessica Neuwirth, president of the ERA Coalition, which campaigns to update the US constitution to include the amendment prohibiting discrimination against women and girls under the law.

Streep whooped and waved her arms at the 2015 Oscars when best supporting actress winner Patricia Arquette called for equal pay and rights for women during her acceptance speech.

And in 2014 she called cartoon icon Walt Disney a “gender bigot”, the Guardian reported.

The equal rights amendment was written in 1920, shortly after women were given the vote in the US.

It was introduced unsuccessfully in every legislative year in Congress from 1923 until it was finally passed in 1972.

It was sent to each state for ratification but by 1982, despite an extension of the traditional deadline for ratification, it was three states short of the minimum of 38 needed to add it to the constitution and the issue stalled.

Hold-out states included Arizona, Nevada and Utah in the west, and a large area of the south and Deep South.

Various campaigns to revive the attempt via Congress again since 1982 have failed.

But Streep, who has been nominated for 19 Academy Awards, has now chosen to put her global fame and stature and her personal politics behind a new push.

The American Civil Liberties Union last month issued a report that said the US movie business was so sexist it should be investigated for legal civil liberties violations. It highlighted in particular the lack of female directors at Hollywood level, despite them being plentiful in college film-making programs and film festivals featuring nascent movie professionals.

Streep’s latest move in writing to Congress takes the battle for equality off the screen and beyond the film industry to the cause of women’s equality more universally.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle regularly try to restart the process of adding the ERA to the constitution, but as yet without success.

The amendment says that: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Streep’s letter says: “A whole new generation of women and girls are talking about equality – equal pay, equal protection from sexual assault, equal rights.”

California congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Democrat, added her support.

“The time is ripe to ratify the equal rights amendment. Seventy percent of people polled think that we already have an ERA in the constitution and they’re shocked to find we don’t have one,” she said.