The defeat of the national Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in June 1982 ended a period of organized advocacy about women's formal political status. Policy analysts and researchers subsequently identified numerous reasons for the national failure: few state organizations developed for the ratification campaign, lack of preparation for anti-ERA challenges in traditionally-oriented states, fears that the ERA would change women's roles in the home, the unexpected legal benefits the Supreme Court gave women during the 1970s without the ERA, and opponents' effective linkage, however false, of the ERA to legal abortion (Berry, 1988; Boles, 1979,1982,1985,1989; Marilley, 1989).