When we last left Rep. Patsy Mink (D-HI) and Rep. Edith Green (D-OR), they were confabbing with education consultant Bunny Sadler. Now the Title IX bill needed a champion in the Senate. Birch Bayh (D-IN) raised his hand.

            Senator Bayh was the perfect champion for Title IX. His mother had been a teacher and his father, a coach and intercollegiate athletic director. Bayh learned his first lesson about gender equality early.

            In 1940, as a 12-year-old, he remembers his father being called in as the superintendent of physical education for the D.C. public school system to testify before Congress on the importance of funding physical education for girls. He asked his father what he planned to say.  

             “I’m going to tell them that little girls need strong bodies to carry their minds around just like little boys,” his father said.^*

            In high school, Bayh played basketball and baseball, and in college he boxed. He graduated in 1951 from the Purdue University School of Agriculture and received his law degree from Indiana University’s School of Law in 1960. He was admitted to the Indiana bar in 1961.  Neat and tidy.

            However, the woman who became Bayh’s wife, Marvella Hern, had a less rosy time in the educational system.

Perfectly legal barriers

            Marvella was the first girl elected president of her high school student body. She was elected governor of the Oklahoma Girls State and president of the Girls Nation in Washington. And yet, despite her many accomplishments, her ambitions were thwarted because of her gender.

            “She was a straight A student, president of the student body, her dream was to go the University of Virginia,” Bayh said. “Her application [in 1952] came back – women need not apply.” ^**

            In fact, state law prohibited women from attending UVA until 1970. Marvella eventually graduated from Indiana State University with a bachelor’s in education, the same day Bayh graduated from law school.

            Bayh said it was in part Marvella’s experience that propelled him to champion gender equality.

            “That was the first taste of discrimination she had ever experienced. It had a profound impact on her,” he said. “We both determined we were going to get involved with the political process.”***

Not doing this

            The Bayhs got another lesson in gender discrimination when their son, Evan, entered kindergarten. During a conversation with his mother, Evan said offhandedly, “There are just some things that women can’t do.” When asked where he’d heard that, he said a teacher at his school had said that – the teacher he had that year and was going to have again the next year in first grade.

            “That was one of the reasons we pulled our youngster out of the public school system and started looking elsewhere,” Bayh said.****

            Taking on the mantle of women’s rights champion during his three terms in the Senate, Bayh not only worked with Green and Mink on Title IX, but he also shepherded the Equal Rights Amendment through Congress, sending it to the states for ratification in March 1972.

            Title IX went to the president’s desk a few months later. Where it landed with a thud… and then… crickets.

                                                _________________________

* Indianapolis Star, March 14, 2019. Accessed online January 20, 2021.

** Interview with Julia Lamber in the Senator’s office in Washington, DC. (February 19-20, 2004 and February 18, 2005), p. 9

*** Lamber interview, p. 39

**** Evan went on to graduate in 1981 from the University of Virginia law school. Oh, the irony!