Biography | Gloria Steinem — The Senate Caucus Room Where She Testified for the ERA

On 6 May 1970 Gloria Steinem testified for the Equal Rights Amendment before a Senate judiciary subcommittee.

The hearings ran 5-7 May in the Senate Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building.

The New York Times described women filling that room on the first day.

The room is now the Kennedy Caucus Room, Russell 325.

It still sits in the 1909 Beaux-Arts office building on Constitution Avenue Northeast, across the plaza from the Senate wing of the Capitol.

Steinem identified herself as a writer and editor and as a member of the Democratic National Committee policy council.

She said she was there in support of the amendment.

The prepared statement, printed in the hearing record, listed refusals of service, housing, and public space that she attributed solely to being a woman.

She asked the committee to treat those daily facts as political, not private.

The amendment had been introduced in some form since 1923.

Congress would send a version to the states in 1972.

Ratification then stalled three states short of the original deadline.

The Caucus Room is not a street you wander into.

It is a working Senate chamber with posted public hours for tours of the complex.

The pin is the Russell Building that holds it.

The words are in the 1970 Government Printing Office volume of the hearings.

Photo: Russell Senate Office Building, Architect of the Capitol, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Gloria Steinem, 12 January 1972, Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.