Update: President Joe Biden said Friday that he believes the Equal Rights Amendment has met the requirements needed for ratification but he did not order the archivist to publish it. The move was seen as largely symbolic as he prepares to leave office.

Every day for the final week-and-a-half of Joe Biden’s presidency, Rosie Couture and other members of the Young Feminist Party she co-founded in high school have been picketing in sub-freezing temperatures outside the White House, urging the outgoing president to make sure the U.S. Constitution protects their rights before he leaves office.

Couture is in college now, as are most of the members of the core group that have shown up each day, even after a snowstorm. Every morning, they have bundled up and walked from the AirBnb they’re sharing to the coffee shop near the White House that they use as staging area and respite from the cold. For eight hours, they rotate in and out of their huddle at the South Gate, where they hand tourists flyers summarizing what they want Biden to do: Publish the Equal Rights Amendment. 

One of their largest signs — “PUT WOMEN AND LGBTQ+ PEOPLE IN THE CONSTITUTION” in purple block letters on white fabric — evokes those carried by early women’s suffragists when they paraded in front of the White House in 1913 ahead of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.

The suffragists returned four years later for a six-days-a-week, months-long picket, the first in the country’s history. They were taunted. Their signs were damaged. Some were arrested. Still, they carried on. A banner carried by members of the National Woman’s Party asked, “MR. PRESIDENT HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?”

Wilson, initially reluctant, came around to the suffragists’ cause. In a 1918 speech to Congress, he backed the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. It became law in August 1920, establishing women’s right to vote, though access to the ballot box remained uneven for women of color until the Civil Rights Movement.

Once the 19th Amendment was enacted, the National Woman’s Party started agitating for the suffragists’ next goal: an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution that would explicitly protect people from discrimination on the basis of their sex. 

The ERA — which, if adopted, would be the Constitution’s 28th Amendment — is what brought Couture and other members of the Young Feminist Party to the White House. Heirs to a more than 100-years-long crusade, they are spending the tail ends of their college breaks on a last-ditch fight for change.

Couture was in her first year of high school in Virginia when she learned about now-state Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy’s resolution to ratify the ERA. “At the time I had no idea what it was about, but I opened the bill and realized what the Equal Rights Amendment was and was very surprised … I had thought sex equality was already in the Constitution. I thought: This must be a mistake,” Couture told The 19th from her frigid post between the White House and the Washington Monument.

“So I kept on doing research, and I reached out to Jennifer herself, and she connected me to incredible organizers who were working on the Equal Rights Amendment and it turns out that a lot of people are organizing around it … this is a century-long struggle … and we’ve had this big generational gap with Gen Z and millennials in particular missing from the fight.”

Couture and high school friend Belan Yeshigeta founded what was then known as Generation Ratify. In 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, hitting the critical three-fourths of state legislatures needed to amend the Constitution. With ratification complete, the group, now with 14,000 members, voted last year to change its name to the Young Feminist Party.

The Young Feminist Party, along with fellow picket organizer the Feminist Front, are members of the ERA Coalition, which is made up of dozens of organizations, large and small, established and grassroots, including the National Organization for Women, the National Association of Women Lawyers, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the League of Women Voters. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and former Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, all Democrats, have ginned up support from hundreds of their colleagues in the House and Senate and acted as key liaisons between the coalition and the Biden White House.

The ERA, though ratified by the requisite number of states, has languished as its advocates and detractors tussle over whether it missed its chance. Congress approved the ERA in 1972, when it had broad bipartisan support, and set a seven-year deadline for state ratification that was later extended to 1982. Twenty-two states ratified the ERA that first year, but eventually progress stalled. Ahead of Virginia’s ratification, the Office of Legal Counsel under the first Trump administration issued an opinion stating that the national archivist could not publish the amendment because of the deadline. 

In 2021, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted to remove the deadline altogether, but the bill could not overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. With that, the ERA, like so many efforts that once enjoyed bipartisan support, fell victim to Washington gridlock and partisan wrangling. 

The members of the ERA Coalition believe the national archivist, a political appointee with no fixed term, has the authority to publish the ERA because there is no ratification deadline in the Constitution — an interpretation also supported by the 400,000-member American Bar Association. But Dr. Colleen Shogan, appointed by Biden to the archivist’s role in 2023, disagrees. “In 2020 and again in 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable,” she wrote in a December media alert.

In the buildup to the 2024 elections, the ERA Coalition was hopeful their movement would see results if Vice President Kamala Harris became the first woman president. Harris’ subsequent loss to Donald Trump added a now-or-never — or at least now-or-not for another four years — fervor to their effort. A “Biden Publish the ERA Alliance” developed to lobby him to direct Shogan to publish the ERA in his final days as president. 

There were reasons to be hopeful. Biden supported the ERA as a senator from Delaware. There have been stakeholder meetings about it throughout his presidency, with Gillibrand in particular acting as the movement’s emissary with top White House staff. Biden’s proclamation for Women’s History Month in 2022 stated it was “long past time that the principle of women’s equality should be enshrined in our Constitution.” When Kate Kelly, who oversees a women’s initiative at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, wore her green ERA button to the White House Christmas party last month, Biden pointed to it and said, “The ERA, we need to get that done.” She said she was assured by White House staff that ERA publication was still a “live issue” as recently as this month.

Kelly, who previously worked as Bush’s legislative director, knows they’ve come close before. When she was counsel to the House Oversight Committee under Democratic former Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, she got a call from National Archives’ congressional liaison John Hamilton.

“He said, ‘You will be getting the best news of your life on Monday, you’re going to be so excited, it’s going to be amazing, I’ll talk to you on Monday,’” Kelly recalled at a Tuesday news conference held by the alliance. 

“On Monday, I got a call from him again and he said, ‘It’s not going to happen,’” she continued, her voice trailing off as it filled with emotion. “Sorry, that was a very difficult thing.”

The alliance members pointed to two individuals close to Biden they believe to be standing in their way by advising the president against publication: White House Counsel Ed Siskel and U.S. Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Christopher Fonzone. Both are in roles that shape the administration’s legal strategy. The White House did not respond to The 19th’s requests to talk about Siskel and Fonzone specifically or the ERA’s publication generally.

ERA backers know they are now down to hours and not days, and it isn’t looking promising. 

The White House stopped responding to Gillibrand’s requests for meetings, an aide confirmed. At a Tuesday night all-ages concert, a singer from the queer-fronted group Boy Meets Pearl amended instructions for activists on the fly: “Text — the White House is no longer taking phone calls.” Before the musical performances began, ERA Coalition President and CEO Zakiya Thomas offered a reminder: “We need to have fun — the next four years will be dismal for many of us but we can’t stop.”

Couture realizes their window is closing. As she stood outside the White House, a federal court struck down Biden administration efforts to protect transgender students and bolster rules related to sex discrimination in schools. She knows that even if Biden does direct his archivist to publish the ERA, it too will face legal challenges. She is clear-eyed about the potential obstacles. “But honestly? It’s just too important not to try,” she said. 

“If Biden wants to have any semblance of a legacy that is one of fighting for women and queer people,” Couture continued, “he has to act, he has to put us in the Constitution.”

She noted that Biden and Harris positioned themselves as champions of reproductive freedoms during their respective campaigns. “They’ve campaigned on challenging sex discrimination, on protecting survivors, but when it comes to really using their full power to protect us, there’s little action,” she said. “Executive Orders and statements and proclamations are nice, but when push comes to shove, they’re not going to protect us under a Trump administration.”