Zoe Maskmaker

Just 40 days after the ERA vote, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, announced that they tested positive for COVID-19.  Within hours, the NBA cancelled its entire season. In the next two days, emails arrived and all performances of Tea with Alice & Me, were cancelled.  By the end of March, the country adopted wearing masks.

I searched youtube for how to sew a standard single fold mask, ordered 1,000 yards of elastic and within a week, I was posting pictures.  I created a website and began selling masks.  Very Quickly I was sewing 12 hours a day, sewing, selling, packaging, mailing 35 every day.  My friend told me I needed to slow it down.  I committed to 25.  The last few hours were searching the internet for fabric.  When it arrived, I ironed and cut it all.

The Graphic Designer, Phillip Tommey created a very special fabric, with the iconic ERA logo.

In addition to ERA Advocates across the country buying them, Jeri Burton and I sent them for free to every woman in Congress.  In fact we spent the next 5 years working in a dozen campaigns to get the ratified Twenty-Eighth Amendment officially published.

Over the next 14 months I sewed over 3,000 masks, 1,000 of them, ERA.  Though the performances had been canceled, the masks were paying the bills. Covid 19 was still in full roar. There was no sense of mask requirements ending or people stop wearing them voluntarily.
It was very surprising that on May 13, 2021 the new administration and head of the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear masks or physically distance in most indoor settings. Sales of home sewn masks came to a hard halt.  Most who wanted to wear masks, upgraded to N95 and surgical masks.

The pressure to publish the ERA never let up.  From the day Virginia fulfilled the constitutional requirement of 38 states to this very day. Pressure rose up to press the new (very short termed) Archivist to simply publish it. A movement collected to declare the 1982 deadline unconstitutional.  January 17, 2025, the very last possible day before the inauguration of Donald Trump, Kirsten Gillibrand stood with President Joe Biden to declare the ERA, Law of the Land.