so and that report is such a big deal when it comes to the era so esther peterson the big architect at the pcsw, which is the abbreviation for the president's commission on the status of women. she is a ardent era opponent and she believed that with this commission. they could make the era unnecessary and to offer up alternative ways for improving women's status and what she called a more balanced and practical approach towards removing the arbitrary discriminations on women and keeping what she believed to be equitable distinctions in place and so in the pcsw's final report. it's so important as i describe in chapter 6 because it's like protections finally came to an answer that they were trying to develop, you know, since the 1920s basically which is this idea of how do we get the law to recognize women as full rights marine citizens without taking away the law's ability to treat women differently from men. and so what they did in the pcsw is offer up an alternative constitutional approach and to just summarize it quickly this alternative constitutional approach basically recommended

then you also have people on the protectionist side, like esther peterson, and representative emmanuel celler, who hated the e. r. a., but also wrote very strong -- we're very strong supporters of the civil rights movement. in their mind, racial discriminations were unnatural transgressions against people. but they thought that sex discrimination could be equitable. they believe that men and women were so different in their social and biological roles in society. then on the pro e. r. a. side, you head people like mary church terrell, and other individuals like emma lets, of the national women's party, seen the e. r. a. being part of when large struggle. then you also have on the pro e. r. a. side, individuals like representative howard smith who was a segregationist, a white supremacists, racist, not a good person in many ways, supporting the e. r. a. because in his mind he believed that it would ensure that black americans didn't have an advantage over white women. in his mind, the e. r. a. meant equality for white men and white women again, with so many other areas in the original c