Lisa Ann Walter: My Lifelong Fight to Pass the Equal Rights Act

Lisa Ann Walter is beloved by millions for her roles on The Parent Trap and Abbott Elementary, but she has always been a passionate advocate for women’s rights. Here she opens up about her years of activism, and why she’ll never stop fighting to pass the Equal Rights Act.

At my age, I’m in a pretty unique position in that I have young people actually wanting to talk to me.

Not my four children, of course—they only seem to talk to me at midnight when I’m already in bed—but complete strangers talk to me all the time. Because I played a beloved character in Disney’s The Parent Trap and now appear in another beloved television show, the youngs write to me quite a bit. They come to my comedy shows. I talk to them and write them back. I give advice on where to start the journey of a performer, or what’s the best eye cream, or how to come out to their grandma. Important stuff.

Lisa Ann Walter speaks on stage during Era Coalition Forward Women’s Equality Trailblazer Awards, May 2024, Los Angeles, California.Amy Sussman/Getty Images

You know what’s weird? They often don’t know the Equal Rights Amendment never passed. Some don’t know what it is, other than “that thing I saw on posters in old footage of marches back when I got into feminism courtesy of post-Trump trauma.” Some just assume that women enjoy the guarantee of equal rights under our constitution. They are uniformly outraged to learn that this isn’t true—that although the required 38 states ratified the amendment to guarantee that women are equal citizens with equal rights in America, they did so after a timeline that imposed by Congress to achieve it had expired. So it never passed. It’s a big problem, the Not Being Equal Citizens. But also the incredible fact that these educated, engaged, involved young people don’t know. Let me stress this: THEY DO NOT KNOW WOMEN DO NOT CURRENTLY HAVE EQUAL CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.

I know, of course, because I was there for the fight. When I was eight years old, I attended my first Women’s Equality march. I grew up in a suburb of Washington, DC, where marches for equality, civil rights, anti-war, and more were what we did on the weekends the way some families did Little League.

We had a fantastic, hippie music teacher in kindergarten who taught us the chants and songs. “All we are saying is give peace a chance”, “We’re here, we’re queer—get used to it”! “What do we want? ERA! When do we want it? Now!” ERA Now! buttons adorned my jean jacket next to the flower-power patches. I sat beneath my “Shirley Chisholm for President” poster in my bedroom and cowrote letters to my hometown paper, The Washington Post, along with my sister, Laura, and our next door bffs, Elinor and Deedee. At the time we were all aged between 10 and 11, and we were an undeniable force.

The ERA felt like something that would be a done deal in pretty short order. As little girls in the 1970s, the concept of equality felt natural to us. We built treehouses and three-room forts in the backyard. We threw fundraising carnivals for the March of Dimes. We biked flyers all over the neighborhood, canvassed at the polls—I sat with the giant electoral rolls book and cold-called for candidates like Senator Barbara Mikulski. We became baby activists. We were deeply and emotionally involved in the fight to pass the ERA. As a girl, it made no sense to me that women didn’t have equal rights. We were as capable and smart as any boys we knew. We survived divorced parents and sexual assault. We were brave, funny, and had a fierce determination that life should be fair.

Within a year I had saved enough allowance money to buy my first subscription. It wasn’t MAD Magazine—although I bought every issue of that on the newsstand. It was Ms. Magazine—the feminist publication launched by Gloria Steinem in December 1971. The girl gang read every page of the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Our Selves, owned by the neighbor’s teenage sister.

I was a self-proclaimed feminist, which was not a popular sentiment in middle school in the mid-1970s. “Why do you hate boys?” “Lisa wants us girls to use the boy’s bathroom.” It was a lonely, uphill battle explaining why equality wasn’t such a crazy idea to a room full of 12-year-olds. I was still a girl, yet I learned how to defend against arguments from the likes of prominent antifeminist and fundamentalist tool Phyllis Schlafly.

Our girl gang assumed that after such vigorous continued campaigning, the bill would be ratified. I mean, it just made sense. But every year we were increasingly discouraged with our fellow Americans, as state after state voted against ratification. Every year of the 1970s, another state would disappoint us as the arbitrary timeline placed by Congress inched closer.

I believe that it was these years that began a gnawing and disturbing reality in my young girl mind: I don’t think people in other parts of the country think we should all be equal. Huh. That’s so weird. Why?

Then 1979 came and went. The deadline wherein 38 states needed to ratify the bill for it to become a constitutional amendment had passed by. By that time my girl gang was already thoroughly disenchanted. We turned to other battles and tried to get enough money for college in the years after President Ronald Reagan gutted funding.

Lisa Ann Walter speaks at Glamour and Paid Leave for All’s Pass Paid Leave Event, July 2024, Washington DC.

Alexandra Folino

It is often now argued that “women don’t need the ERA…other bills guarantee your rights.” And there have been gains: In 1963, the Equal Pay Act guaranteeing equitable wages for the same work, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex was passed. 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting employment discrimination. In 1972, Title IX preventing sex discrimination in federally funded schools. In 1973, Roe v. Wade, which I heard preached about every Sunday at my parish, after I’d marched for reproductive rights on Saturdays. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act providing civil rights remedies for sexual-assault and domestic-violence victims. All of this seemed to move us in the right direction.

However, recently there have been disturbing losses: In 2000, the US Supreme Court invalidated portions of the Violence Against Women Act (some of which have since been restored). Dozens of antichoice (“heartbeat”) laws have been enacted across the country since 2016, became “trigger laws” heralding the frightening prospect that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. Then, of course, in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court case, that moment came, along with the repeal of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, determining that the US Constitution does not confer any right to abortion, returning those regulations to the states.

And we see how that’s going. In 2023, Groff v. DeJoy allowed the denial of our civil rights based on exemptions for religious beliefs.

Why is all this even more important now? When folks wonder, “Well, don’t you have equal rights, basically?” keep in mind that if the ERA had been published in 2022 as the 28th amendment, the Dobbs decision could’ve been different.

This is how personal these policies get: Years ago, I was on location for a project, and I was unaware that I was several months pregnant. I hadn’t missed a period, no morning sickness. In this project, I was doing some light stunts—including falls and so on. Late one night I started bleeding. A lot. I stood up and a river of blood fell out of me. I was alone. I was terrified. When the bleeding didn’t stop, I went to the hospital. After the shock of learning I was pregnant…and miscarrying…followed by an entire night of painful contractions, I was told that although my body had spontaneously ended the pregnancy, there was still tissue in my uterus. Left there, it could become life-threatening and so, I was told, they had to do a D&C.

For those of you unfamiliar with medical jargon, a dilation and curettage is the same procedure that is used in abortion. In this case, it would be used to prevent me from hemorrhaging to death, the way women used to do quite often due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth.

Several things are important here. First, I already had a living child, and so miscarrying was traumatic for several reasons, not the least of which was knowing I was losing a baby. Second, had this happened today, on location in a state with these draconian antichoice laws, not only could I have been made to wait until I was closer to death—alone and terrified—but the state might have had the option to charge me with second-degree manslaughter for being complicit in the incident since I was unknowingly engaging in activities that could endanger pregnancy.

I think often of women who are now in the position I was in. It’s why I introduced resolutions at Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) conventions to protect my union sisters and why I became the chair of the National Women’s Committee in order to cement those protections. Because I experienced this traumatic event in a state where, if it happened today, I could have died.

During these dangerous times, it’s more important than ever to ensure that women are viewed as entire, whole, and equal citizens under our Constitution. It’s been decades since my girl gang terrorized Langley Park on our banana-seat Schwinns, but we regularly exchange texts—almost always humorous, sometimes panicked, about the tenuous state of women’s rights.

We’ve gone on to become a doctor, a lawyer, a police captain, and a creator of entertainment. My comedy has always been the reflection of the female experience. I created and starred in two sitcoms centered around a working mom with a career she loved, created several successful unscripted series, and wrote a bestselling book regarding women and self-esteem.

They’re all funny. They have to be. First because network notes used to always be some version of, “We have to make sure that you stay likeable,” but personally I prefer funny because we need to laugh. It can be a powerful messaging tool. And as my Sicilian Nana used to say “What’re ya gonna do? Cry.”

The ERA was first drafted in 1923. That very same year, the American public was introduced to Mickey Mouse, frozen food, and the cheeseburger—which all continue to be raging success stories. And in the last 100 years, we have passed some pretty important laws:

In Washington State it’s illegal to kill Bigfoot. The law was later amended designating Bigfoot as an endangered species.In Arkansas it’s illegal to mispronounce Arkansas.In Arizona it’s illegal for donkeys to sleep in bathtubs.In Georgia it’s illegal to keep an ice-cream cone in your back pocket. On Sundays.But what we haven’t done? Demanded that we overturn the arbitrary timeline in order to pass the ERA. Maybe if we just had put Equal Rights for Women on a cheeseburger, we’d have them by now.