Lisa Ann Walter: My Lifelong Fight to Pass the Equal Rights Act

Lisa Ann Walter is beloved by millions for her roles on The Parent Trap and Abbott Elementary, but she has always been a passionate advocate for women’s rights. Here she opens up about her years of activism, and why she’ll never stop fighting to pass the equal rights act.

At my age, I’m in a pretty unique position in that I have young people actually wanting to talk to me.

Not my four children, of course—they only seem to talk to me at midnight when I’m already in bed—but complete strangers talk to me all the time. Because I played a beloved character in Disney’s The Parent Trap and now appear in another beloved television show, the youngs write to me quite a bit. They come to my comedy shows. I talk to them and write them back. I give advice on where to start the journey of a performer, or what’s the best eye cream or how to come out to their grandma. Important stuff.

You know what’s weird? They often don’t know the Equal Rights Act never passed. Some don’t know what it is, other than “that thing I saw on posters in old footage of marches back when I got into feminism courtesy of post-Trump trauma”. Some just assume that women enjoy the guarantee of equal rights under our constitution. They are uniformly outraged to learn that this isn’t true—that although the required 38 states ratified the amendment to guarantee that women are equal citizens with equal rights in America, they did so after a timeline imposed by Congress to achieve it expired. So it never passed. It’s a big problem, the Not Being Equal Citizens. But also the incredible fact that these educated, engaged, involved young people don’t know. Let me stress this: They DO NOT KNOW WOMEN DO NOT CURRENTLY HAVE EQUAL CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.

I know, of course, because I was there for the fight. When I was 8, I attended my first Women’s Equality march. I grew up in a suburb of D.C. where marches for equality, civil rights, anti-war and more were what we did on the weekends like some families did little league.

We had a fantastic, hippie music teacher in kindergarten who taught us the chants and songs. “All we are saying is Give Peace a Chance”, “We’re Here, We’re Queer – get used to it”! “What do we want? ERA! When do we want it? NOW”! ERA Now! buttons adorned my jean jacket next to the flower power patches. I sat beneath my ‘Shirley Chisholm for President’ poster in my bedroom and co-wrote letters to my hometown paper, The Washington Post, along with my sister, Laura, and our next door bffs, Elinor & Deedee. At the time we were all aged between 10 and 11, and we were an undeniable force.