Sometimes, to get attention, protest has to take a dramatic form. The form of a woman, to be exact.

            Four years after the passage of Title IX, members of the women’s crew team at Yale University were fed up. They had no facilities at the Robert Cooke Boathouse. They had a tiny toilet at the back of the boat repair bay. While the men’s facilities took up the entire second floor, they had no locker room or showers. The women sat in their wet clothes on the bus waiting for the men to finish before they could shower and change, sometimes up to two hours. They shivered in the cold, as river water and rain froze on their skin, their clothes and hair. The team continually fought illness.

            To make matters worse, in 1974, the university had actually acquired a portable trailer with bathroom and shower facilities, but had never got it operational. There it sat in plain view of the shivering, coughing women.

            One day, the women decided they’d had enough.

            On March 3, 1976, 19 team members led by captain Christine Ernst filed into the office of Joni Barnett, the director of women’s athletics. Gathering in front of her, the women stripped off their practice uniforms and stood naked in defiant, silent protest. On their backs and chests, the women had written “Title IX” in blue marker.

            “These are bodies Yale is exploiting. We are not just statistics on your win column. We are desperate,” Ernst read from a statement. “We can’t accept any excuses, nor can we trust  normal channels of complaint. We’re human and being treated as less than such.”^*

                At the time of the protest, Ernst said that half the team was sick. And she had bigger things to focus on. She had been on the silver-medal eight from the 1975 World Championships. (And later, half of the lightweight double that won the world championship in 1986.)**

                ^“We had plenty of time on that bus to stew and plot,” said Ernst later. “She [Barrett] never went to bat for us. She would say, ‘We don’t have any money.’”***           

            Two Yale Daily News staff members were invited to witness the protest — photographer Nina Haight and Daniel Zweig, executive editor of the paper and a New York Times stringer (who sat with his back to the nude women). Within twenty minutes of the protest, the Times contacted the university for comment.

            Many years later, Anne Taubes Warner said that at the time, she was not a political person. She was busy training for the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1976, where she would be part of the eight boat’s bronze medal finish. But she had suffered pneumonia twice, once landing in the hospital.

            “It really was a last resort,” she said. “But I still believe in what we did. It was an outrageous situation.”****

            Ginny Gilder, a freshman that year, remains proud of the team’s action. “I felt the magnificence of the moment,” she said later. “Standing up for myself, for all of us, surrounded by my compatriots.”*****

            All along, Barnett had said the women were expecting too much too soon. Nevertheless, after the protest, she sent a memo up the chain urging immediate action on the trailer. After the New York Times article ran, Yale and its alumni answered the call with funding. In spring 1977, with an infusion of $250,000, the women got their showers. Not only that, Yale named a faculty member to oversee Title IX compliance.

            Not a bad result for shivering in a cold athletics director’s office for a few minutes.

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* Susan Ware. Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc., 2007),  pp. 70-71.

** Isn’t it beautiful that today, Chris Ernst is the owner of Pipelines, a successful plumbing company in Roslindale, Mass.?!?

*** Lori Riley, Hartford Courant (May 24, 1992), p. A9.

**** Hartford Courant (May 24, 1992). Taubes Warner is a lawyer practicing in Boston today.

***** Ginny Guilder. Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), p. 54. Yale’s current facility for its crew program, Gilder Boathouse, is named for her. It’s a 22,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility. Gilder is co-owner of the Seattle Storm, the WNBA basketball team.

Photo credit: Nina Haight, Yale Daily News (March 3, 1976)