PATRICIA SEXTON’S CLAIM in the February 1971 DISSENT article “Women Debate the Equal Rights Amendment” that “the vulnerable woman down at the bottom of the job ladder” will in the long run be pulled up by the Equal Rights Amendment is outrageously optimistic. Unfortunately, the only way to go is not up. Far more likely, a good many women would be forced off the job ladder altogether, preferring the purgatory of existence on ADC to the hell of backbreaking, home-wrecking compulsory overtime—overtime they could be required to work if state protective legislation is abolished. The pie in the sky so generously proffered by the advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment must seem like a cruel joke to women who have no hope of reaching it. Just try telling a woman obliged to work a 60- or even a 70-hour week, as well as meet her family responsibilities, that the Equal Rights Amend...