Why ‘Because of Sex’ Should Protect Gay People

Forty years ago, I rented a rural Virginia cottage from a local grande dame imposingly named Butler Brayne Thornton Robinson Franklin but known to all as “Muzz.” Muzz died in 2003 at the age of 104, having lived an extraordinary life, with stints in revolutionary Spain and wartime China, followed by decades of stateside activism as a comrade of the feminist leader Alice Paul, founder of the National Woman’s Party and author of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Muzz told me she personally had helped change history by asking Representative Howard, a Democrat from Virginia and the powerful chair of the House Rules Committee, to include “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the section that prohibits employment discrimination. She . Civil-rights advocates had purposely left “sex” out of the bill, believing its addition would galvanize opposition. Suspecting that the bill was going to pass, Paul had asked Muzz and another Virginia feminist, Nina Avery, to write to Smith, an ardent segregationist. Muzz and Avery that forbidding job discrimination by race without doing so by sex would further disadvantage women—and especially women. Smith complied with their request, offering the amendment as if it were a joke. But it was adopted, and the bill passed.