Yup, Jane Mansbridge, http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/lost_era.html
>...Why We Lost the ERA
Jane J. Mansbridge
University of Chicago Press 1986
"Because the ERA applied only to the government and not to private businesses and corporations, it would have had no noticeable effect, at least in the short run, on the gap between men's and women's wages." page 2
"For its advocates, the ERA was a device for allowing the Supreme Court to impose the principle of equality between the sexes on recalcitrant state legislators. For legislators, that was precisely the problem. They did not want their actions reviewed, much less reversed, by federal judges whom they did not even appoint." pages 4-5
"The major women's organizations were able to persuade two-thirds of the states to approve women's suffrage in 1920. In the same year these organizations began to discuss an Equal Rights Amendment. Alice Paul and her militant National Women's Party had gained national notoriety by picketing the White House and staging hunger strikes for women's suffrage. Now the same group proposed a constitutional amendment, introduced in Congress in 1923, that read: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." " page 8
"Why did the states stop ratifying in 1973? Why did public support in the unratified states begin to decline? The campaign against the ERA succeeded because it shifted debate away from equal rights and focused it on the possibility that the ERA might bring substantive changes in women's roles and behavior. In this era, the American public, though changing its outlook, still objected to any major changes in traditional roles of men and women. To the degree that the opposition could convince people that the ERA would bring about such changed, it eroded support for the ERA.
Much of the apparent support for the Equal Rights Amendment in surveys came from a sympathetic response to the concept of "rights," not from a commitment to actual changes in women's roles." page 20
"Yet, the explanation for these figures is quite simple: Americans can favor abstract rights even when they oppose substantive change." page 22
"Few people derive their preferences deductively from general principles. Rather, they infer their principles from their particular preferences." page 26 <SNIP> http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/lost_era.html