Research Paper on:
Rights for Women in America

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
not apply to women. When Nicole Brown Simpson was savagely murdered on June 12, 1994, and details of her marital history of domestic violence were featured in her murder  trial, the issue of womens rights and lack thereof splashed across the front pages of America. Domestic violence against women has long been a "dirty little secret" that has  been around since the earliest days of colonial society, but was seldom addressed by government legislation and often treated by law enforcement officials as personal disputes not requiring outside intervention.  In addition to violence and sexual harassment, womens rights issues also include gender discrimination, economics, education, employment, health and lesbian rights, and for the most part, affect not only  women, but also the many minority groups that are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America. Throughout history, women have long been discriminated against in all aspects of American society.  However, this practice was no longer legally sanctioned after the landmark case of Reed v. Reed, in which the Supreme Court ruled, for the first time, "that classification based  on sex was unconstitutional" (The History of the ACLU Womens Rights Project, 2002). There were two other important court cases addressing this issue, such as Craig v. Boren, in  which the Supreme Court decided to look more closely at any type of classification based upon gender, and Califano v. Goldfarb, which declared Social Security regulations which discriminated on the  basis of sex to be unconstitutional, describing such practices as an "accidental by-product of a traditional way of thinking about females" (The History of the ACLU Womens Rights Project, 2002).  Although there was a proposed Equal Rights Amendment that would have ensured the constitutional rights of women and minorities, but fell short of the support necessary for ratification. Only