A 1916 Saxon roadster painted suffrage yellow rolled up to the Saturday Afternoon Club in Santa Rosa on Thursday afternoon, carrying two of the best-known names in the modern women’s history movement and an argument about an amendment a century in the making.
The car is the centerpiece of Driving the Vote for Equality, a national tour pressing the case that the Equal Rights Amendment — ratified by 38 states and stuck for years on a procedural question about a deadline — has only one path left: back through Congress.
That path narrowed two weeks ago. On April 21, a federal judge in Boston dismissed the last open lawsuit asking the courts to recognize the ERA as ratified. Virginia, Nevada and Illinois — the three states that ratified after 2017 — had each gone to court asking federal judges to order the Archivist of the United States to certify and publish the amendment as the 28th Amendment. The Boston ruling ended the last of those suits.
The way back to Congress means either a new resolution dropping the original 1972 deadline, or a full restart — two-thirds of both chambers and 38 states ratifying all over again.
The amendment itself is 24 words, written in 1923 and approved by two-thirds of Congress in 1972: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
In practice, it would bar federal and state governments from treating people differently under the law because of their gender. It would be the first time the Constitution explicitly guaranteed equal rights based on sex. Whether it counts as the 28th Amendment turns on a deadline written into the introductory language of the 1972 resolution, not the amendment itself.
On board the Saxon were Molly Murphy MacGregor and Kathy Bonk.
Murphy MacGregor, working out of Sonoma State University and the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women in 1977, started the local effort that became National Women’s History Month. President Jimmy Carter signed the first presidential proclamation in 1980, and Congress codified it in March 1987.
Bonk, the Washington, D.C.-based organizer who put the tour together, has spent four decades as a strategist for women’s rights causes in the nation’s capital.
“We’ve only been at this for 46 years,” MacGregor told the room in Santa Rosa. She is 74. Her daughter is 44. Her granddaughter is 14. “I’m always telling them: you need to understand what you have now that is at risk if we don’t get the Equal Rights Amendment passed.”
Bonk took the floor next and opened by telling the audience she had rewritten her speech. The tour launched March 1 — the first day of Women’s History Month — from the New York Historical Society. “However,” she said, “this is my new speech. I am very worried.”
“We went from the iconic museum and started traveling around the United States, and not only are our rights at risk but our history is at risk,” Bonk said.
Women’s history centers around the country, she said, were being absorbed into larger institutions and quietly disappearing — “being put back in the closet, in a way.”
She said she had asked the libraries of the five U.S. presidents who supported the Equal Rights Amendment — including Richard Nixon’s, in California — to host tour events. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library declined.
“We called the Carter Library and we were told, ‘Oh no, no, no, you don’t understand,'” Bonk said. “‘We just got a memo that no one is allowed to attend, celebrate or co-host a Women’s History Month event.'”
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, which is administered by the National Archives, did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. The National Archives office of communications also did not respond. The Carter Center, the Carter family’s nonprofit on the same Atlanta campus as the library, did not respond.
President Joe Biden said in his last days in office that the ERA was “the law of the land.” The archivist refused to publish it. President Donald Trump’s administration fired the archivist within weeks. On April 21, the Boston judge dismissed the last open suit.
The car carrying the argument is the Golden Flyer II — the sister car to the Saxon that Alice Snitjer Burke and Nell Richardson drove out of Columbus Circle in New York in the spring of 1916 on a 10,700-mile, 26-week, 29-state suffrage tour.
Burke, 39, was a Californian by birth — from San Jose — working for suffrage in New York. Richardson was 25, from Virginia. The country had no national highway system; most roads were unpaved, unmarked and built for horse-drawn buggies, and the Saxon rode too low for them.
“They’d be teeter-tottering on top of a high center, sort of stuck, and they’re not sure exactly where the road is,” said Jeryl Schriever, the Maine historian who wrote a book about the 1916 trip and who, with her husband, restored and now drives the Golden Flyer II. “No GPS, terrible maps.”
They got lost in the Arizona desert with a pint of water left in the car. In Alabama, someone gave them a black kitten in lieu of a coin; they named it Saxon and kept it. In Washington state, they mounted a set of elk horns on the radiator and kept those too.
California had granted women the franchise in 1911, nine years before the 19th Amendment gave women the vote nationwide. Burke and Richardson were heading west to ask, in Burke’s words, that California women help “the women back east who need a boost.” San Jose gave Burke, the hometown girl, the keys to the city.
Inside the clubhouse on Thursday, Saturday Afternoon Club president Ellen Bowen welcomed the room. The club, founded in 1894, is one of the oldest continuously operating women’s clubs in the United States.
“The club is older than our Saxon roadster,” Bowen said.
Schriever, speaking from notes, placed the 1916 tour in the mainstream wing of the suffrage movement — not the militant one led by Alice Paul.
“This was not the organization of Alice Paul, who was chaining herself to Wilson’s gates or going on a hunger strike,” Schriever said, referring to President Woodrow Wilson. “We’re going to get dressed up, we’re going to be polite, we’re going to talk men into giving us the right to vote. We were not throwing rocks through windows.”
The Saxon Motor Car Company, she said, gave Burke and Richardson the car on the condition that they write a letter to the editor in every town that had a Saxon dealer, praising the local mechanic. After the trip ended, Saxon began advertising the car as easy enough for a woman to drive.
Burke used to say that once women got the vote, she would start working on better roads. She got the vote. The roads are paved now. The amendment written in 1923 has been approved by 38 states and cleared two-thirds of Congress. It is stuck on a deadline written into the fine print of the 1972 resolution that sent it to the states — not into the amendment itself.
With civil rights protections eroding in 2026, including the recent U.S. Supreme Court gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 103-year-old Equal Rights Amendment is still moving — and the people driving it say they’re not stopping.