What I Get Done for Women Would be IMPOSSIBLE Without the WWWeb !

My name is Sandy Oestreich, St. Petersburg Florida, USA. I have spearheaded the Florida legislature's vote to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), sort of a For-Free lobbying, for the past 14 consecutive years. THIS YEAR--2014--looks like it might be the year that will pass in about 2 months!

ERA, as I have written here previously is a piece of legislation to enable its passage into our US Constitution--A VERY BIG JOB! It would make sex discrimination, both genders, a violation of that Constitution in many cases! Can you IMAGINE what a challenge that was and IS?! It is needed because NOTHING else prevents that effectively in USA now.

ERA states: \"Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.\" (more modernly termed \"gender\" now). So, it benefits American males as well as females. But, just as elsewhere, women and girls take the brunt of sex abuse/sex discrimination in the form of workplace underpayment; stalking, grabbing, rape and murder in the street, the home, college campuses and the military. Our young women live now in a Rape Culture. Passing ERA would fix that. Often people believe that America is a great, \"exceptional\" nation.

The World Wide Web has been an amazing tool for communicating locally, nationally and internationally such that I now have more than 300 000 members in my non-profit National Equal Rights Amendment Alliance! Our Board Chair is the renowned feminist Patricia Schroeder, a 24-year veteran of our US Congress. On the Web, we write and send our ERA speeches to our very Active activists who present them in each of Florida's 67 counties. Long ago we created our big web site, www.2PassERA.org, and I spend many hours updating that, our 326 major organization-members, and our 3802 activists on what to do next to further passage of the ERA. I give home garden sales to raise money for travel, expenses to get to Florida state's capitol where we try to influence legislators to give us ERA protection via their votes.

The Web has served us marvelously. I now can send 24 batches of 200 email messages via our SandyO@PassERA.org address in 20 minutes, zip zip zip, and can connect with all our organizations without needing to meet somewhere to exchange information or \"wait for the next Board meeting in a month or so\"!

It's not without its challenges and aggravation, though. As we all know, when the WWW is busy, waiting to get an urgent email out is maddening. And correcting gmail account email addresses of our people is tricky. My wish is that soon, providers will recognize that changing their format every few months is much less necessary to the user than just cleaning up what they currently provide.

Is anyone with me on that?