Your post is informative & appreciated. Learned a lot.
I remember in 1978 how the E.R.A. had sailed through 35 state legislatures starting in 1972 when it suddenly ground to a halt & the clock ran out a year later. Liberals blamed Phyllis Schlafly, Total Woman, and a growing majority of American women who decided that a feminism movement dominated by ranting lesbian radicals was simply not for them.
As for bootleggers & state legislatures, Prohibition in some states made for very strange bedfellows indeed. Dry counties in Tennessee & Alabama to this day. Some have distilleries in them.
What Congress should have done was re-pass and re-submit the amendment to the states with another seven year clock. But support had dwindled enough that congressional nose counting showed that there was no longer a chance for the necessary two-thirds margin in either House for passage. So they settled for a standard act of Congress and hoped that would work.
There was another fly in the ointment. A number of states had rescinded their ratifications, an act known as rescission. It had always been assumed that rescission by a state legislature was legal until the three-fourths threshold was reached for ratification. This was a legal bone of contention.
A federal court in Idaho ruled that Congress had erred in extending the window to ten years by using a majority vote. The legal "form" was incorrect. But the court also ruled that rescission was unconstitutional, which came as a surprise. I should note that the ABA Document to which I linked brought this gray area up back in 1973.
The case finally made its way to the Supreme Court after the ten year window had expired, so the Court refused to grant cert because the case was now moot. The 9th Circuit decision still stands: (1) The ERA is dead, and (2) Rescission is unconstitutional. As the ABA Document points out, Congress could make rescission legal again if it chose.
This is why I got annoyed at a FReeper who posted a thread raising hell because the Illinois Legislature was about to ratify the ERA. Who cares? If the legislature ratifies, a Memorandum of Ratification will be sent to the Archivist of the United States, who will send it back to Illinois with a letter stating that the legislature was 35 years too late.