Updated at 7:59 p.m. ET
Andrea Miller first heard about the Equal Rights Amendment from her mother.
"It basically went, 'I'm very interested in the Equal Rights Amendment; I disagree with it a little 鈥� I think women are superior to men 鈥� but we'll settle for being equal,' " Miller said with a laugh. "That was basically what my mother told me."
Miller is now 66 and living in Virginia, 鈥� the total needed 鈥� to ratify the ERA. It follows a decades-long fight over the proposed constitutional amendment banning sex discrimination.
As an eighth-grader in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1960s, Miller recalls helping her mother with a family business delivering mail door to door 鈥� they used it to drum up support for the ERA.
"We took our little ERA flyers and stuck them in the bag of junk mail," Miller said.
A few years later, Anne Schlafly Cori also was learning about the issue from her mom 鈥� , the ERA's most prominent opponent.
"The telephone rang, day and evening, with calls and questions from supporters, and from reporters, on ERA. It was a constant in my childhood," she recalled.
Now 55 and living in St. Louis, Schlafly Cori has continued her mother's work promoting conservative causes. She fears the ERA would make it harder to restrict abortion 鈥� even if the Supreme Court the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
"I think that a lot of concerns about ERA have not changed from the 1970s to today, because the end result of ERA is to make men and women interchangeable in every situation," Schlafly Cori said.
Schlafly Cori said she believes there are biological differences between men and women that sometimes require differences in the law.
Elise Bouc of Stop ERA Illinois warns of an end to separate prison facilities for female inmates or that women could be forced into a military draft.
