There are slow news days and then there’s Easter, a day so devoid of normal human commerce that a clever marketer might just choose it as the perfect time to hold a press conference for the first and (presumably) only perfume dedicated to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Yes, an Equal Rights Amendment perfume debuting on the 35thplus-one-month anniversary its moot congressional passage. That’s what I went to check out yesterday on the 42nd floor of an intensely deserted Empire State Building. The entire New York press corps had been invited.

“We did have one camera crew,” the perfume’s publicist, nattily dressed Adam Brecht, said as I entered the ghost town that was his office.

Any others coming? ” We’ll see,” he said.

We saw: They didn’t.

Perhaps that is because the idea of a perfume lauding an amendment that failed in 1982 is not one that immediately captures the imagination. Indeed, mostlegislation — even that which is successful — does not lend itself directly to perfume inspiration. That’s why we’ve never seen “Calvin Klein’s Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, for Her,” or even “Chanel No. 5279-B.”

Still, Mr. Brecht (a former aide to Senator D’Amato and a polo player to boot) explained: Both the perfume and the purpose behind it were the brainchild of a famed

Japanese fashion designer, Hanae Mori — and she knows a thing or two about what women want. Now in her 80s and still head of the $500 million business she founded, Ms. Mori has long believed in clothes that are feminine, and opportunity that is gender-free.

“Within the context of Japan, she’s the most successful female entrepreneur in any field, period,” Mr. Brecht said. “And at the time she came to this country — she lived on the Upper East Side in the ’70s and ’80s — the Equal Rights Amendment was really at the top of the political agenda. It’s still around” — it gets reintroduced in Congress every year — “and she wanted to mark the 35th anniversary of its passage.”

This despite the fact the amendment was never ratified by the two-thirds of the states it needed to become part of the Constitution. Three states short of that goal, it died in 1982 (or even earlier, depending on some finer points of law).

It’s no fun to blaze a trail for women and then not see them joyously striding along it. (Just as it’s no fun to hold a press conference and not see flocks of joyous reporters.) And so, in addition to calling some sorely needed attention to the amendment — which still could some day pass — Ms. Mori is also dedicating 5% of the perfume’s U.S. profits to the League of Women Voters. She wants more women to pay attention to politics, and vice versa.

This does not explain, however, why she decided to call the perfume Magical Moon.

Brut, it ain’t.

In fact, the name sounds strikingly like a bath gel, and the bottle isn’t helping any. Made of clear blue glass with a stopper shaped like the globe, it doesn’t say anything about women’s rights, anywhere. (It does say “Made in France.”)

That’s because it has to do with her personal story, Mr. Brecht hastened to elucidate: “In 1955, she opens her first boutique in Tokyo — the only woman ever to have a business of any kind with her name on it. And the first person through the door is a Japanese businessman who comes in and lectures her about how she should be at home with her family! So that night, rather than being discouraged, she worked more furiously than ever by the light of the moon. And she always says that was her ‘magical moon,’ because that night set her more firmly on her course than ever.”

Too bad they couldn’t put thaton the package. Then other women, working just as firmly toward a less sexist future, would get the whole premise — women like Esther Gelbard, treasurer of the New Jerseybased E.R.A. Campaign Network.

“I don’t even wear perfume. I have an allergy to it,” the 70something activist said. “But if anything will help, I’m all for it. If I see it in the stores, I’ll even buy it, because my goal is, when I die, I want to be in the Constitution.”

Me, too. We’ve waited long enough. And if we smell nice when we get there, so much the better.

lskenazy@yahoo.com