Tag Archives: gender equality

He said what?!?

“Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls, the women of tomorrow.”

            Whoa! A judge deciding a pre-Title IX case actually said that. We’ll get to him in a little bit.

            In August 1970, Susan Hollander, a sophomore at Hamden High School in Connecticut, started running a mile a day, in preparation for trying out for her school’s track team. The problem? There was no girls track team at her school, so she planned to try out for the boys team.

            When school started, she began training with the boys team. The cross country coach was willing to let her compete, and the boys didn’t seem to mind. But the football coach saw her running with the boys and reported her to the athletic director.

            “The rules are against that. You have to tell her she can’t work out with you,” the athletic director told her coach, Carl Westberg.*

Going the distance

            The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) got involved and ruled that Susan couldn’t run with the boys. The CIAC had banned co-ed teams, so if a girl wanted to participate in a particular sport and her school didn’t have a girls team, she couldn’t play.

            Fortunately, Susan’s father was a lawyer, and a runner himself. They brought a lawsuit against the Hamden school board. They were joined in the lawsuit by a swimmer at another Connecticut school, Jane Frederickson of Willimantic High School. Their suit was on behalf of all female athletes in the state of Connecticut who wanted to participate in non-contact sports on boys teams.

            The next year, in the spring of 1971, a judge dismissed the suit.

            “The challenge to win and the glory of achievement, at least for many boys, would lose incentive and become nullified,” wrote Judge John Clark Fitzgerald of allowing girls’ participation.**

            Not satisfied with that pronouncement, Judge Fitzgerald continued with the statement that I started my post with, one that has become infamous post-Title IX. 

            “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls, the women of tomorrow.***

            Eye roll!

No support here

            The lawsuit went on to U.S. District Court in New Haven, this time backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. There, in January 1973, the young athletes won the right to compete.

            Judge Jan O. Newman limited the victory, however. The girls could compete on a boys team only if there wasn’t a comparable team for girls at the school. The ruling was also considered an experiment that was to last just one year. And — get this! — compliance was up to the administration at each school.

            Reaction to the ruling was as breathtakingly tone-deaf as Judge Fitzgerald’s comments.

            “If they want to play on my team, they can shower with my team,” huffed one Connecticut basketball coach.****

            And, instead of supporting the girls, the head of the CIAC’s Girls Athletic Committee trashed them.

            “It’s doubtful that either could be competitive on the same level with the boys,” Arden Curtis sniffed.

            Susan Hollander never benefited from the lawsuit she brought. At the time of the court victory, she was a senior, and her school had added a girls spring track team, which she joined. Even before the victory, she was willing to let the hubbub die down.

            “I don’t particularly enjoy all the attention,” she told the media.† “I just want to be on a team.” 

                                                ___________________________

* Lori Riley, “Changing A Mind-Set That Kept Girls Out Of Track, Cross Country,” The Hartford Courant (June 26, 2012).

** Judge’s Ruling Keeps Girl Off Cross Country Team” The Hartford Courant (April 1, 1971), p. 27.

*** Shelley Smith. “Not Quite the Game Intended,” Nike is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports. Ed. Lissa Smith (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1998), p. 300.

**** Bob Baird, “CIAC Girls’ Activities Head Opposes Coed Competition,” The Bridgeport Post (January 26, 1973), p. 32. Arden Curtis’s quote comes from this article as well.

† Hartford Courant, p. 27.

Schlafly v. Title IX

When you hear the name Phyllis Schlafly, what comes to mind? Her battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, of course. But when her name came up in my last blog post, I got to wondering whether she’d also campaigned against Title IX.

            First, the facts of her life. I had no idea she was a lawyer. Phyllis Stewart Schlafly earned her BA and JD at Washington University and a masters at Radcliffe. She was a Republican activist who founded the Eagle Forum, a conservative political interest group that she helmed until her death in 2016 at the age of 92. She was the author and co-author of many books, including an anti-feminist book titled,  “The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can’t Say.”

            Schlafly worked tirelessly to defeat the ERA, arguing that it would erase traditional gender roles and force women out of the home. She — a working woman. How ironic! She stoked fears that single-gender bathrooms would disappear (well, she saw the future), force courts to approve same-sex marriage (again, ahead of the curve), that women would be forced to serve in military combat roles and that older women would lose their Social Security benefits.

            Her campaigns were made for TV. She dropped off homemade pies to legislators with the slogan, “I am for mom and apple pie.” Ironically, Schlafly and her sister had been raised by a working mother. Odile Stewart was a librarian and teacher. She supported the family through long stretches of her husband’s unemployment during the Great Depression.

Fly, Eagle, fly

            Schlafly used the Eagle Forum as a platform for her views on Title IX. In 2003, she ridiculed Bernice Sandler, the “Godmother of Title IX,” for believing that women should have — or that they even want — equal opportunity to participate in sports.*

            “But now enter from stage left a feminist named Bernice Sandler,” she wrote, “who took over the Office of Civil Rights in Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education.

            “She picked the innocuous word ‘proportionality’ out of the dictionary (not out of the law), and turned it into a feminist code word for one of three tests by which college athletic departments would be judged as to their compliance with Title IX. She created a new definition for this word: if 56 percent of a student body is female, then 56 percent of the students playing on athletic teams must be female.”

            It’s this “proportionality” test that Schlafly objected to. This test examines whether the number of male and female students enrolled in the school’s athletics programs matches the male/female student body ratio.

            “This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to play sports far more than women do,” she said. “It’s a fact of human nature that female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in anywhere near the percentage that male students do.”**

            Overall, Schlafly believed that enforcing Title IX is detrimental to men.

            “The evidence is overwhelming that Title IX has been turned into a tool to punish men,” she said. “The feminists’ intention is to eliminate everything that is masculine or macho, and to pretend that women are equal to men in physical prowess and desire.”

Back to the future

             It’s ironic then that the Eagle Forum has pivoted to the issue of the biological differences between women and men. This year, it introduced “The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” which it says aims to protect the original intent of Title IX — to provide equitable athletic opportunity for males and females.

            The act opposes President Biden’s recent attempts to allow gender identity, and not biological sex, to define who is a woman and who can compete on women’s sports teams. Allowing trans men to compete on women’s athletic teams, the Forum says, strips athletic opportunities from women and violates their privacy.

            The Eagle Forum is in good company on this issue. A wide array of feminist activists oppose allowing gender identity to drive the Title IX bus. Phyllis Schlafly a feminist? Maybe!

                                                _____________________________

* Phyllis Schlafly, “Wrestling with Title IX,” The Eagle Forum (February 12, 2003). Schlafly hoped the newly formed Commission on Opportunity in Athletics would eliminate the proportionality test. In its report, the commission made 23 recommendations. The final recommendation was what Schlafly wanted: identifying more ways to comply with Title IX. Didn’t happen.

** She was ignoring the fact that the proportionality test is only one of three ways a college can comply with Title IX. The third test says that colleges can be in compliance if they can show that female students are not interested in participating in an expanded athletic program.

Time for time travel

It’s surprising how little attention Title IX got when it was signed into law in 1972. But a lot was happening that year — both good and bad — so the headlines were claimed by events that buried a seemingly insignificant piece of legislation whose impact wouldn’t be realized for years.

            So, c’mon, hop in the way back machine with me and take a look at what was happening fifty years ago.  

                                                            ******** 

January 5. NASA initiates the space shuttle program. We’re conquering space!

January 25.  Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman, announces her candidacy for president. Her goal was a “union of the disenfranchised.” 

February 21. President Nixon begins an eight-day trip to China to meet with Mao Zedong. He’s the first president to make an official visit to the Communist country.

March 22. Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. Activist Phyllis Schlafly wages war with her “STOP ERA” campaign.

March 24. “The Godfather” is released in theaters around the country. It’s a hit, to say the least!

April 16. The United States resumes its bombing campaign, targeting the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Vietnam War rages on.

April 17. Women run officially in the Boston Marathon for the first time. Nina Kuscsik of Huntington, New York, wins with a time of 3 hours, 10 minutes and 26 seconds.

May 15. Alabama Gov. George Wallace is shot and paralyzed at a rally in Maryland. An ardent racist, he had ordered police to shutter the state’s public schools rather than integrate them. On his orders, civil rights activists were attacked by state troopers.

May 26. Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT I treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, both of which limit weapons systems. We’re trying to get along!

June 14–23. Hurricane Agnes kills 128 people along the East Coast.

June 23. President Nixon signs Title IX, part of the Education Amendments of 1972, into law. This should be big news!

June 23. But also on this day, five men hired by White House officials are arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. A scandal is brewing!

July 8. Actress and activist Jane Fonda begins a two-week tour of North Vietnam to protest the war. In an epic optics fail, she sits astride a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun for photographers. She gains the nickname “Hanoi Jane.”

July 21. On “Bloody Friday,” nineteen Irish Republican Army bombs explode across Belfast, killing nine and seriously wounding 130 other people. “The Troubles” continue.

July 25. The U.S. admits that Black men were used as guinea pigs in the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” beginning in 1932. Consent was never sought and treatment was withheld.   

August 1. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, the Democratic nominee for vice president, withdraws after his treatment and hospitalization for depression becomes known.

August 21. Nixon is nominated at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach for a second term, along with his running mate Spiro Agnew.

September 1. American chess player Bobby Fischer defeats Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky at a match held in Reykjavik, Iceland. He’s the first American chess champion.

September 5. Eleven athletes from the Israeli Olympic team are murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September during the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. Incredibly, Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage says the Games must go on.

October 16. Country singer Loretta Lynn becomes the first female to win the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award. Chalk it up to “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

November 7. Nixon defeats McGovern in a landslide election. But Watergate looms as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pound away at their typewriters.

November 14. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes at 1,003.16, the first time the stock index had topped 1,000. We’re in the money!

December 14. Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt become the last astronauts to walk on the moon.

December 25. Following the breakdown of peace talks, Nixon begins another bombing campaign against North Vietnam. “The Christmas Bombing” is widely criticized. The war drags on.

  ********

            Those of us who were following the news in the 1970s no doubt remember all of these events. We all wish we could go back in time and erase so much of what happened that year. But Title IX is one highlight of that eventful year that we would never wish to change!

PHOTO: Shirley Chisholm announcing her candidacy for president (Associated Press)

It’s Women’s Equality Day!

Time out! Today we celebrate Women’s Equality Day. On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was signed into law.

            If you think Title IX has been a battle, you need to read up on the suffrage fight!* Women fought for 72 years just to have the word “men” deleted from the Constitution’s wording on voting rights. It took more work — and more years — to ensure all women could vote regardless of color or heritage, but we were on our way. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally outlawed discrimination of any kind at the polls.

            Today I want to introduce you to just one of the millions of suffragists who devoted their lives to the suffrage cause.

Mother doesn’t vote

            Carrie Chapman Catt had a political awakening when she was just 11 years old. In 1872, as her father and brothers hitched up the family wagon to go into their Iowa town to vote in the presidential election (Greeley vs. Grant), she saw that her mother wasn’t getting ready to go.

             “Why, Mother, aren’t you going to vote for Greeley?” she asked. She was interested in national affairs, and had accompanied her father to political rallies, but she didn’t realize until that day that women couldn’t vote.**

            Carrie took the office of president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and again in 1915. While a few states granted women the vote during her tenure — most notably New York State — she realized that a federal amendment was the real way ahead. In 1916, at an emergency meeting of NAWSA, she urged women to press on.

            “Nothing less than this nation-wide, vigilant, unceasing campaigning will win the ratification,” she told them. “The Woman’s Hour has struck! Women arise: Demand the vote!”***

Victory ahead

            The suffragists’ unceasing campaign finally paid off. The amendment passed Congress in June 1919 and went out to the states for ratification. One by one, states voted to ratify, until Carrie saw victory ahead.

            At a suffrage convention held on February 13, 1920, Carrie addressed the crowd of thousands of women. Although victory was still six months away, she was convinced the battle was won.

            Here, I’ve reprinted excerpts from her victory speech that day. It was a rousing message that drew thunderous applause. And it speaks to us today, as women continue to fight in many realms for true equality.  

Be Joyful Today

            There is no earthly power that can do more than delay by a trifle the final enfranchisement of women.

            The enemies of progress and liberty never surrender and never die. Ever since the days of cave men, they have stood ready with their sledge hammers to strike any liberal idea on the head whenever it appeared.

            Suffragists were never dismayed when they were a tiny group and all the world against them. What care they now when all the world is with them? March on, suffragists—the victory is yours!

            The trail has been long and winding; the struggle has been tedious and wearying. You made sacrifices and received many hard knocks. Be joyful today! Our final victory is due, is inevitable, is almost here.

            Some day the history of these past few months will be written and, if the writer catches the real spirit of it all, it will be a thrilling story. Ours has been a movement with a soul, a dauntless, unconquerable soul ever leading on.

            Women be glad today! Let your voices ring out the gladness in your hearts. There will never come another day like this. Let the joy be unconfined and let it speak so clearly that its echo will be heard around the world and find its way into the soul of every woman of any and every race and nationality who is yearning for opportunity and liberty still denied her sex.

                                                            ___________________

* You can start with my book! Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment (Norton Young Readers, 2020). I profile nineteen women whose work led to victory in the suffrage fight.

** Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1944), p. 28.

* Carrie Chapman Catt, “The Crisis,” Atlantic City, NJ (September 7, 1916). My excerpts come from the version printed in the Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News (September 16, 1916), p.1.

PHOTO: That’s Carrie holding the massive victory bouquet. When victory finally came, she was honored with a ticker tape parade and a banquet in New York City.

Let’s hear it for the dads

In June this year, the New York Times ran a piece on “Title IX parents”— parents who through the years have filed lawsuits on behalf of their daughters in order to enforce gender parity. The article focused on several mothers who sought redress through the courts.*

            But it’s not always mothers who are their daughters’ advocates. There are Title IX dads, too.

            In 1996, Ron Randolph took an early Title IX stand. Ron lived in Owasso, Oklahoma, and was a firefighter in nearby Tulsa. He was a single dad, with a son and a daughter. Fifteen-year-old Mimi played softball for Owasso High School.

            Mimi’s team played on an old dirt field a few miles from the school, while the boys’ baseball team had a state-of-the-art stadium complete with viewing stands and an electronic scoreboard.

            “Our guys’ team has three sets of uniforms, while all of our uniforms — total — are less than they have in one set,” Mimi told a reporter at the time.** The uniforms for her team didn’t even match.

            Her dad chimed in: “They played night games on a softball field where 23 of the 37 light bulbs were burned out.”***

            When the team went to the state championships for the first time in the school’s history, the school wouldn’t pay for motel stays. The girls had to drive back and forth every day.

A father’s awakening

            Ron heard about Title IX at a community seminar offered by Ray Yasser, a law professor at the University of Tulsa and an expert in sports law. That was the light-bulb moment for this dad.

            “I’m not a libber by any means,’’ he said. “But if it’s right, it’s right, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”****

            Not only was Ron the parent of an athlete, he was taxpayer as well.

            “I’ve got a boy and a girl. And if I pay $100 every year to this school in taxes, and $10 of it goes to athletics, I think $5 ought to go to my boy, and $5 ought to go to my girl,” he said. “To me, it’s simple math.”†

            At the time, schools in Oklahoma as a whole had about equal numbers of enrolled boys and girls. Yet boys were offered 67 percent of the athletic opportunities, while girls had only 33 percent. And you’re talking about Title IX having been in place for 24 years! 

            Ron and the other parents asked the Owasso Independent School District to remodel the girls’ softball field. The district declined.

            Boy, was that ever a costly decision!

Oops!

            The parent group filed their lawsuit, and in May 1997, the district settled. They agreed to be in full compliance with Title IX by 1999. And, as part of the settlement, they had to construct a $275,000 softball facility. Ron laughed at that figure — if they had just remodeled the original field, he believed they could have spent about $35,000.

            “Anybody who gets sued now is an idiot,” he said. “Title IX is a fact of life. Parents will work with schools if the schools will work.”††

            If only Ron had been right! Here we are 50 years out from the passage of Title IX, and we’re still inching forward one lawsuit at a time. But things might move faster from now on, simply because of the generation of girls who are now grown up.

             “We’re now at the point where women who were high school athletes are raising families, and they definitely know their daughters are supposed to have what the men have had all along,” said Sam Schiller (a lawyer in Tennessee who has filed Title IX lawsuits in 30 states and has never lost).†††

            “It’s Title IX 2.0.”

                                                _________________________

* Bill Pennington, “The Real Enforcers of Gender Equity in Sports: Angry Parents” (June 22, 2022).

** Meg Sommerfield, “Title IX has become a more prominent tool for expanding athletic opportunities for girls,” American Association of School Administrators (undated).

*** Randy Ellis, “Struggles put girls on serve,” The Daily Oklahoman (October 3, 1999), p. 538.

**** David Hill, “A Pitch for Equality,” Education Week (August 1, 1996), p. 8.

† “A Pitch for Equality,” p. 8. (The asterisks were getting out of hand!)

††“Struggles,” p. 546.

†††“The Real Enforcers.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Hellstern, The Daily Oklahoman

Serving up a lawsuit

When you look into the history of Title IX, you go down a lot of rabbit holes! My last post, about a lawsuit filed by the San Diego State University women’s rowing team led me to a 42-year-old lawsuit that broke new ground for Title IX.

            In the fall of 1977, Long Island teenager Rollin Haffer arrived on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia, the first in her family to go to college. She was a badminton player who had gotten a tuition scholarship to play for Temple.

            “I thought I had been handed the world,” Rollin said. “Then when I arrived at Temple, I heard what the guys were getting.”*

            In the 1977-78 academic year, 42 percent of Temple’s athletes were women, but they received just 13 percent of the athletic budget. Even excluding the money spent on the football program, the men’s budget trumped the women’s by a ratio of 3.6 to 1.

Steak and hotel rooms

            For Rollin’s team, there was often no place to practice and the nets and shuttlecocks were worn out. The team had to share its uniforms with the women’s tennis team.

            The women were more than aware of the disparity. It came up at every opportunity.

            “It seemed that no matter what the topic of the meeting was, it always ended up talking about why we’re only getting $6 for three meals when we go out, and the footballers get a steak dinner and a hotel stay overnight before home games,” Rollin said.**

            Checking in with other female athletes, Rollin found the same disparities. The swimmers didn’t have enough sweatsuits to go around. The bowlers had to buy their own uniforms. Two years went by and in Rollin’s junior year (1979-80), the athletic budget gave $700,000 to the men and $188,000 to the women — $1 per female athlete for every $3.80 per male athlete.

The jig is up

            By 1980, Rollin had had enough. She rallied the troops and filed a class action lawsuit. By doing so, she became the first college athlete to take her school to task for violating Title IX. She hadn’t gone off to college thinking she’d sue her school, but in the end, she felt she had no choice.

            “To make a difference, you have to make a lot of noise,” Haffer said. “It’s in my genes. Once you see a mistake and want to correct it, go to all lengths. It’s part of my genetic makeup.”

            The lawsuit asked for $1.8 million in restitution for lost scholarships, and the allocation of half the school’s athletic resources and opportunities to the women’s program.

            The battle dragged on for eight years. Rollin graduated and became a physical education teacher, but still she persisted. Finally, in 1988, after three weeks in court, and before a judge could rule, Temple agreed to settle.

A landmark settlement

            No damages were awarded in the settlement, but the college was required to beef up its women’s athletic program and expenditures. It agreed to add women’s teams, grant proportional scholarships, improve equipment, provide trainers and training facilities for women and equalize travel and meal expenses.

            Not only that, but more importantly, the ruling held that Title IX applied to intercollegiate athletics programs regardless of whether they received direct financial aid. If the college itself received federal funds, it had to comply with Title IX. Temple stood to lose $19 million in federal funds if it didn’t meet Title IX standards.

            Rollin saw the victory as more than about money and resources. It was more than about Temple. It was about providing equal opportunity for women across the board.

            “The lawsuit really helped define Title IX,” Rollin said. “It wasn’t just scholarships. It wasn’t just uniforms.”

                                                ______________________

* Marcia Chambers, “For Women, 25 Years of Title IX Has Not Leveled the Playing Field,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (June 16, 1997).

** “How a Title IX lawsuit against Temple changed the game,” The Square Food (June 18, 2022). This quote and the following two quotes come from this article.

Follow the money

A Title IX battle is brewing at San Diego State University. But the university and the students don’t agree on what the issue is.

            Last year, the university cut the women’s rowing team. It’s rationale? The university has more female athletes than male athletes, so it can’t stay in compliance with Title IX without evening the score.  

            But seventeen female athletes sued the university, saying the issue isn’t about the number of female athletes. It’s about scholarship numbers. They countered that the university isn’t providing an equitable amount of scholarships for women.

            The women’s suit claims that for more than a decade, SDSU has awarded scholarships unequally. Over the past two years, it says, the shortfall has totaled $1.2 million.

            “It is a sad day for the entire SDSU community that we have to sue the university to make it comply with Title IX and provide athletic financial aid equally to women and men,” said Madison Fisk, a former rower.*

What are the rules here?

            The university disagrees that scholarships are the issue.

            “The truth is that SDSU awards approximately 95 percent of all possible scholarships permitted under NCAA rules for both its men’s and women’s teams, with the remaining fraction explained by legitimate reasons within SDSU coaches’ discretion,” the athletic director said.**

            A university can comply with Title IX by providing “substantially proportionate” athletic opportunities that match the gender enrollment. For example, if 50 percent of the student body is female, then roughly 50 percent of athletes should be women.

            But what happens when the numbers don’t match when it comes to men? At SDSU, male enrollment increased from 41.3 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2022. Yet in 2019-20, only 37 percent of SDSU’s athletes were men.

            SDSU’s solution was to cut a women’s sport. The rowing team had about 65 participants and offered up to 20 scholarships.

Warning: more numbers ahead

            The women who filed suit include eleven former rowing members and six women from the track and field team who joined the suit in solidarity. Fourteen of the women currently are students, while three have graduated.

            The women aren’t contesting the team’s elimination, only the scholarship awards. From  2010-20, female athletes at SDSU were granted about $2 million more in athletic scholarships than men. But, overall, scholarships have been less per female athlete because of the higher number of female athletes.

            In school year 2019-20, for example, 58.1 percent of athletes (315 women) received just 50.6 percent of the $9.2 million scholarship pool, a deficit of almost $700,000, the lawsuit states.

Is this a first?

            When the women filed suit in February, they claimed that their action represents the first time a woman’s sports team has sought monetary damages from a school for violating Title IX.

            That could be true, but I’m looking into it. The more I learn about Title IX, the more gems I discover from the past. I know, for example, that the first lawsuit seeking compensation in a case of sexual harassment was in 1986. Christine Franklin sought $6 million in damages from the North Gwinnett High School in Suwanee, Georgia, after suffering a teacher’s sexual harassment. The case was settled out of court.

            Whether the San Diego women’s lawsuit is the first, it probably won’t be the last. According to data published by the Department of Education, 31.4 percent of NCAA Division I  athletic departments (109 of 348 schools) failed to meet the “substantially proportionate” standard in 2021.

            Even so, it’s the rare — and courageous — woman who dares to bring a lawsuit against her school.

            “No one goes to college planning to sue their school,” said Arthur Bryant, the women’s attorney. “The lesson of Title IX’s enforcement in 50 years, sadly, is if women want equality, they have to sue. No one else is going to do it.”***

                                                __________________________

* Daniel Libit, “Female rowers sue San Diego State in First Title IX damages claim,” Sportico (February 7, 2022).

** Mark Zeigler, “Female athletes sue San Diego State for alleged Title IX violation,” San Diego Union Tribune (February 7, 2022). The NCAA caps the number of total scholarships a school can award per sport.

*** Dan Murphy, “San Diego State athletes band together in Title IX fight: ‘If women want equality, they have to sue’,” ESPN (June 14, 2022).

PHOTO: 2018 San Diego State University women’s rowing team

Food fight!

Sometimes, I play this game where I think of two words I believe I’ll never see in the same sentence. (I know… it gets slow in my head sometimes.) Well, this week, my mind game has come to life. I never thought I’d see “Title IX” and “free lunch” mentioned in the same sentence.

This is how it happened.

In January last year, the Biden administration issued an executive order intended to strengthen protections for LGBTQ students. It called for an overhaul of all government agencies’ anti-discrimination policies to make sure they encompass not only sexual orientation, but gender identity as well.

“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” the order began.*

School sports and transgender athletes. We know how heated that topic has become.

Up next… the Education Department

Then in June of this year, the Education Department announced proposed changes to Title IX that would include protections for LGBTQ students in cases of both sexual orientation and gender identity.

“[The changes] would make clear that preventing someone from participating in school programs and activities consistent with their gender identity would cause harm in violation of Title IX, except in some limited areas set out in the statute or regulations,” the department said.**

Again, my mind immediately went to athletics. What does that term “school programs” mean? Does that include sports teams? 

No,  the department says. In the same press release, it said it will issue a separate notice of proposed changes to Title IX to address whether and how students might participate on male or female athletics teams.

That hasn’t happened yet.

And now the USDA

Meanwhile, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) didn’t wait for the Education Department’s move. In May, the USDA announced that any entity that receives funding from its Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) — the agency that administers the free school lunch program — must interpret Title IX as the Biden administration does.

The announcement updated the definition of sex to include gender and gender identity and expanded the definition of sex-based harassment to include any action that prevents a student from participating in an education program or activity “consistent with their gender identity.”

“USDA is committed to administering all its programs with equity and fairness, and serving those in need with the highest dignity. A key step in advancing these principles is rooting out discrimination in any form — including discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said.***

The implication is that schools that don’t amend their anti-discrimination policies to align with the Biden administration’s definition of who is being discriminated against, and how they’re being discriminated against, won’t get federal funds for their free lunch programs.

In theory, that means that any school that doesn’t permit a biological male who identifies as a female to use the women’s bathroom or locker room or compete in school sports based on their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth, could face a civil rights investigation and be barred from receiving school lunch funding.

Food fight!

The projectiles fly

By the end of July, 22 states announced they were suing the USDA for threatening to withhold funds for the FNS’s National School Lunch Program from schools that do not accept the Biden administration’s LGBTQ terminology and ideology.

At the same time, Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa, Florida, threw its first handful. It sued the government to retain its free lunch program, which serves 56 low-income minority students. The lawsuit argued that the policy would force Grant Park to abandon its gender-specific student dress code, allow biological males into girls’ restrooms and force teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns, all of which goes against the tenets of their faith.

“The Biden administration is threatening to take away lunch money from low-income children simply because they attend Christian schools,” the academy’s legal counsel charged.****

 On Monday, the Biden administration retreated, assuring Grant Park that it will retain access to the free lunch program.

So, that’s one lawsuit down. But how will this play out across the states and in the thousands upon thousands of schools across the country? The issue of whether gender identity can be applied to sports programs hasn’t been settled yet, so I don’t see how the USDA can make this ruling stick.

You can be sure I’ll be watching in the months ahead. The whole cafeteria could be trashed in this epic food fight!

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* Presidential Actions: “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” (January 20, 2021).

** Dustin Jones, “Biden’s Title IX reforms would roll back Trump-era rules, expand victim protections,” NPR (June 23, 2022).

*** Press Release. “USDA Promotes Program Access, Combats Discrimination Against LGBTQI+ Community,” USDA (May 5, 2022). The directive also cover the agency’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program.

**** Sam Sachs, “Tampa religious academy sues Biden, Nikki Fried over school lunch program,”  WFLA (July 28, 2022). The academy’s counsel is Erica Steinmiller-Perdomo of the  Alliance Defending Freedom.

But Susan started it

In my last post, I mentioned that groundbreaking woman’s advocate Barbara Hackman Franklin and I share an alma mater — Penn State.

            That’s not all we share! We also both have a connection with the woman suffrage movement. Before I began writing about Title IX, I wrote about the women who powered the 19th Amendment to victory in 1920.*

            We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let me introduce Barbara.

Many firsts, many slights

            In the 1960s, Barbara broke gender barriers in corporate and government spheres. She was one of the first female graduates of the Harvard Business School and the first female with an MBA hired by the Singer Company. From there, she went to Citibank, and then on to the Nixon White House, where she created a path for women to be hired for leadership roles. After that, President H.W. Bush named her U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

            While Barbara was forging ahead, she ran into some of the attitudes that women have perpetually faced in a world run by men.

At Singer: “I know that the salaries being offered to us women in the [Harvard Business School] class of ‘64 were less by a rather hefty amount than those being offered to the men,” she said in an interview for Penn State’s “A Few Good Women” oral history project.**

At Citibank: “I remember being chastised mightily for wearing a red dress. I’ve always liked red but was told not to wear bright colors. There was one other time when I knew I didn’t get as much of a salary increase as the guy who worked beside me. I raised that issue and was told, ‘You don’t need that salary increase. You’re doing fine, for a girl, and, besides, you have a husband who works.’”

At the White House:  “In some of my speeches I commented about the way I was described as ‘tiny, diminutive and Dresden-doll-like.’ Would we ever talk about the ‘diminutive, Dresden-doll-like’ Henry Kissinger?”

At the Commerce Department: “Somewhere there arose the impression that I was appointed to be a ‘cheerleader,’ and not to run that department. The quiet implication was, ‘My goodness. Can a woman really run that big conglomerate of a department?’”

Teaming up with Susan B.

            And here’s where the connection with the suffrage fight comes in.

            Eventually, Barbara and a few of her co-workers dreamed up a way to call out men who held these kinds of attitudes.

            In her own words, here’s how they did it:

            “One of the things that we dreamed up in 1972 that we thought would underscore this push toward equality was a bust of Susan B. Anthony to be placed in the White House. We had to get someone to create the bust, and several women’s groups agreed to pick up the tab.

            They decided to copy the bust of Susan B. Anthony that is in the Capitol. It was done in bronze somewhere in upper New York State.

            The bust was shipped to the White House and taken to my office. Then we had to wait for some months before there was an opportunity to present her. Mrs. Nixon did the honors.

            Between the time that Susan B. was delivered and her presentation to Mrs. Nixon, she resided in a closet in my White House office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building.

            When someone said something that was derogatory about women, Susan B. would steal out of my closet in the dead of night and appear the next morning in the office of the guilty party to underscore her point.

            Then, of course, I had to come and rescue her and bring her back to the closet.

            It was known that the bust and the spirit of Susan B. Anthony roamed the White House on occasion at night. She just knew exactly where to go, and [White House Press Secretary] Ron Ziegler was always on the top of the list.”

            Perfect! I think that we all should have a bust of Susan B. roaming at night calling out these outdated stereotypes and attitudes, don’t you?

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* Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment (Norton Young Readers, 2020).

** Barbara’s quotes come from “A Few Good Women,” which is part of the Penn State collection, “Advancing the Cause of Women in Government, 1969-74.” It accompanies a book by Lee Stout titled A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and A Few Good Women (State College, PA: Penn State University Libraries, 2015).

A Few Good Women

In Heath Lee’s guest post this week, she recalls a moment in 1969 when Washington journalist Vera Glaser confronted President Nixon at the second press conference of his administration. 

            “Mr. President, in staffing your administration, you have so far made about 200 high-level Cabinet and other policy position appointments, and only three have gone to women,” she said. “Can you tell us, sir, whether we can we expect more equitable recognition of women’s abilities, or are we going to remain a lost sex?”*

            Normally, in this setting at the time, journalists lobbed softball questions at a president. This question was a bomb! Yet, Nixon accepted the challenge, creating The President’s Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities, whose job was to ensure that women had opportunities to take leadership roles in government.

            In 1971, Nixon appointed Barbara Hackman Franklin, one of the first female graduates of Harvard Business School, as a staff assistant. She coordinated efforts to fulfill the task force’s recommendations, which were published as “A Matter of Simple Justice” in 1970.

Penn State, of course

            When I researched Barbara, I was thrilled to find that we share an alma mater — Penn State. We ARE!

            Penn State went on to fund an oral history project titled “A Few Good Women.”** One of the women interviewed was the journalist who started it all, Vera Glaser.

            Today, I want to excerpt one small part of the interview conducted by Jean Rainey, the project’s administrator. It’s a story of a light-bulb moment when someone realizes that something isn’t fair in the world. So, here is Vera to tell the tale. 

Are you telling me…

            “I wanted to report to you something that reflects on the situation early on when the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced. I was covering the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the ERA.

            One member was Judge Marlow Cooke of Kentucky. One of the first witnesses was a very attractive young woman who had a law degree from Harvard and had graduated very, very high in her class.

            She testified that her male colleagues got choice job offers after graduating from Harvard, and here she was — having  ranked second or third in her class — with no offers of a job as a lawyer.

            So Judge Marlow Cooke said, ‘Are you telling me that my four daughters, that the money, the thousands that I’m putting out on their education, isn’t going to buy them the same break in the job market as it buys for a man?’

            She said, ‘Yes, I’m telling you that.’

            Well, that caused a hullabaloo. But his question was marvelous because it drew some chuckles, and at the same time was very, very pointed and valid.”

Use your imagination

            “I think it takes a little bit, or in the beginning, certainly it took a little bit of imagination and open mindedness on the part of men to accept what was beginning to happen 25 or 30 years ago. It isn’t that these men were prejudiced. It’s just that it had always been that way.

            Women were accustomed to this kind of division in the power structure. But women increasingly pushed for a role in the nation’s leadership.

            I have felt that my participation in the women’s movement was a very pivotal point in my life. I am so happy that I did it. I had qualms in the beginning. I had qualms as a journalist about asking the president the kind of question that I did. And yet in simple justice, you had to ask it. If I hadn’t, I am sure eventually someone else would have. So, I’m happy that I was able to do what I did, and I wish that I had been able to do a great deal more.”

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* At the time, Vera Glaser was the Washington bureau chief for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a syndicate serving about ninety newspapers. She went on to work for Knight Ridder and the Washingtonian, among other press outlets. She died in 2009.

** “A Few Good Women” is part of the Penn State collection, “Advancing the Cause of Women in Government, 1969-74.” It accompanied a book by Lee Stout titled A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and A Few Good Women (State College, PA: Penn State University Libraries, 2015).