<P> At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, the Democrats made the divisive step of including the ERA in their platform, but the Democratic Party did not become united in favor of the amendment until congressional passage in 1972 . The main support base for the ERA until the late 1960s was among middle class Republican women . The League of Women Voters, formerly the National American Woman Suffrage Association, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment until 1972, fearing the loss of protective labor legislation . </P> <P> At the Democratic National Convention in 1960, a proposal to endorse the ERA was rejected after it met explicit opposition from liberal groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the AFL--CIO, labor unions such as the American Federation of Teachers, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the American Nurses Association, the Women's Division of the Methodist Church, and the National Councils of Jewish, Catholic, and Negro Women . The losing side then demanded that presidential candidate John F. Kennedy announce his support of the ERA; he did so in an October 21, 1960, letter to the chairman of the National Woman's Party . When Kennedy was elected, he made Esther Peterson the highest - ranking woman in his administration as an Assistant Secretary of Labor . Peterson publicly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment based on her belief that it would weaken protective labor legislation . Peterson referred to the National Woman's Party members, most of them veteran suffragists and preferred the "specific bills for specific ills" approach to equal rights . Ultimately, Kennedy's ties to labor unions meant that he and his administration did not support the ERA . </P> <P> As a concession to feminists, Kennedy appointed a blue - ribbon commission on women, the President's Commission on the Status of Women, to investigate the problem of sex discrimination in the United States . The commission was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt who opposed the ERA but no longer spoke against it publicly . In the early 1960s, Mrs. Roosevelt announced that, due to unionization, she believed the ERA was no longer a threat to women as it once may have been and told supporters that, as far as she was concerned, they could have the amendment if they wanted it . However, she never went so far as to endorse the ERA . The commission that she chaired reported (after her death) that no ERA was needed . The commission did, though, help win passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 which banned sex discrimination in wages in a number of professions (it would later be amended in the early 1970s to include the professions that it initially excluded) and secured an executive order from Kennedy eliminating sex discrimination in the civil service . The commission, composed largely of anti-ERA feminists with ties to labor, proposed remedies to the widespread sex discrimination it unearthed and in its 1963 final report held that on the issue of equality "a constitutional amendment need not now be sought". </P> <P> The national commission spurred the establishment of state and local commissions on the status of women and arranged for follow - up conferences in the years to come . The following year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned workplace discrimination not only on the basis of race, religion, and national origin, but also on the basis of sex, thanks to the lobbying of Alice Paul and Coretta Scott King and the skillful politicking of Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan . </P>

Who wrote the era passed in march 1972