Tag Archives: gender equality

Guest Post: Heath Hardage Lee

Recently, I read Heath Hardage Lee’s book, The League of Wives, about a group of determined women who forced the American government to bring their POW husbands home from Vietnam. I loved this book! When I saw that Heath had moderated a Title IX panel at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, I asked if she’d share her thoughts. So, here she is on the blog today, and again, I love what she has to say!*

On February 6, 1969, President Richard Nixon faced the second press conference of his new administration. He fielded questions on a wide range of topics from a room packed with reporters. However, when Washington bureau chief for the North American Newspaper Alliance Vera Glaser got her turn, she asked him a question no one had expected.

“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. 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?”

Glaser’s question became part of the push that the new administration needed to prioritize women’s rights and gender equity. In response to Glaser’s query, the President’s Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities was rapidly organized. The completed Task Force report, entitled “A Matter of Simple Justice” was sent to the President on December 12, 1969.

Righting the ratio

Among the major action items in the Task Force report was this recommendation: “The President should appoint more women to positions of top responsibility in all branches of federal government to achieve a more equitable ratio of men and women.” Barbara Hackman Franklin, one of the first female graduates of Harvard Business School and rising star in the banking world was appointed as Staff Assistant to the President in April 1971. Within this role, Franklin would lead all efforts to fulfill the Task Force recommendation. Her work would prove critical to the success of the administration’s efforts for women.

One of the many ripple effects of the Task Force recommendations and Franklin’s work was the proposal of the landmark Education Amendments, primarily authored by Rep. Patsy Mink, and strongly supported by Rep. Edith Green and Sen. Birch Bayh. These amendments include the now famous Title IX. President Nixon signed these amendments into law fifty years ago on June 23, 1972.

When the final regulations were issued in 1975, Title IX covered women and girls, students and employees, protecting them all from discrimination. This included sexual harassment, admissions policies, basically every aspect of education K-12 for institutions that receive federal funding.

Today Title IX is most often equated with women’s sports, but it was part of this broader movement towards women’s rights and gender equity across the board that began with Vera Glaser’s question, the Presidential Task Force for Women, and Barbara Hackman Franklin. This potent push meant that equity for women went from an afterthought under previous administrations to high priority under President Nixon.

Hearing from the athletes

On June 23 of this year, I helped celebrate the 50th anniversary of Title IX (renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in 2002) at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. I was honored to set the historical context for the event and interview Barbara Hackman Franklin. Our chat was followed by a panel of outstanding Olympians: three-time gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings (beach volleyball), four-time gold medalist Janet Evans (distance swimming), and two-time gold medalist Courtney Mathewson (water polo).

What these young female athletes had to say was heartening. Each of the women noted that they had never felt discriminated against in the sports world due to their gender. Not once had any of them felt the sting of sexism that some of their athlete mothers had warned them about. Thanks to Title IX, all three women had grown up feeling safe, supported and empowered in their respective arenas. These Olympians had never known a world without the benefits and protections of consequential legislation which allowed each of them to soar athletically.

Thanks to women like Vera Glaser, who asked President Nixon that first question about women’s equality, and Barbara Hackman Franklin, who implemented that first real push for women inside the U.S. government, female athletes today enjoy the same playing field as their male counterparts. They are no longer “the lost sex” in the sports arena.

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* Get to know Heath Lee at her website. https://heathleeauthor.com/

PHOTO (left to right): Kerri Walsh Jennings, Heath Lee, Barbara Hackman Franklin, Janet Evans and Courtney Mathewson.

Suzyn Waldman goes yard

I’ve been listening to Suzyn Waldman and John Sterling on WFAN radio this year while I watch Yankees games on television. (The announcers they’re trying out in the YES network booth are wretched! Give me Michael Kay, David Cone and Paul O’Neill for every game!) Why didn’t I tune in to the radio broadcasts years ago? I love the pair’s insights into the game.

This week, Suzyn Waldman was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. She has been a sports broadcaster (both television and radio) for 36 years and the Yankees color commentator for the last 18 years. In her career, she has covered both the Yankees and the New York Knicks, among other gigs.

Let’s talk about her firsts. Hers was the first voice heard on WFAN when it premiered in 1987, the first all-sports radio network. She was also the first woman to become a full-time broadcaster for a Major League Baseball team.

Suzyn is more than aware of the role she has played as a female “first.”

“When we talk about women in baseball, and beyond that, one of the most important concepts, to me, is representation. If you can see it, you can be it,” she said. “Representation makes the trailblazers, the ‘firsts,’ even more important.”*

The silent treatment

Yet a career like Suzyn’s in sports broadcasting would have been unimaginable prior to Title IX. In fact, it wasn’t until 1984 that the first female sports broadcaster was hired. That year, Lesley Visser began her sports broadcasting career as an NFL sideline reporter.

Even post-Title IX, Suzyn has had to fight for her place in broadcasting. The male-dominated sports world didn’t let her in without a struggle. She says that for her entire first season with the Yankees, no one in the press box spoke to her.

“It was strange to realize that half the world thinks you’re an idiot because you’re female,” she said. “I never realized that. I grew up, I did whatever I wanted. I didn’t know I was an idiot. It was startling to realize that people didn’t want you there because you’re a female.”**

And getting the cold shoulder wasn’t the worst she had to endure.

“I got feces and used condoms in the mail, terrible things,” she recalled. “In 1989, I had a police detail at the stadium because someone was trying to kill me. There’s lots that went on that I will never tell anyone.”***

When Suzyn reflects on the changes that have come about in the three-plus decades of her career, she says one things stands out to her as progress.

“I was alone, I was totally alone. Women like me, we had to make it work on our own,” she said. “If I didn’t handle it, then they’d say, ‘We’ll get someone who can.’ Nobody helped me. Today, younger women have help. You all have people that support you.”^†

Kudos from the industry

Her induction into the Hall of Fame was lauded by everyone in the industry.

“We applaud the well-deserved recognition, particularly for Suzyn’s trailblazing leadership that has been an example to so many fans and women working in our game,” a WFAN spokesperson said.^††

“This accomplishment is the deserved result of decades of hard work and dedication to her craft, and we would be remiss to not laud her professionalism and resolve while staring down countless obstacles as a pioneering woman in her field,” the Yankee organization said.^†††

At 75 years old, Suzyn is still going strong. I say — may she be the voice of the Yankees for many years to come. I’ll be listening!

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* Sarah Langs, “A discussion with trailblazer Suzyn Waldman,” MLB.com (March 19, 2021).

** Lauren Gardner, “Suzyn Waldman on her career,” MLB Tonight (March 30, 2021). Video interview.

*** Dylan Svoboda, “Trailblazer Waldman elected to Radio Hall of Fame,” MLB.com (July 25, 2022).

† Gardner, “Suzyn Waldman.” (The asterisks were getting out of hand.)

†† Lou DiPietro, “Yankees, MLB release statements on Suzyn Waldman’s induction into Radio Hall of Fame” WFAN Sports Radio 101.9 FM (July 25, 2022).

††† Svoboda, “Trailblazer Waldman.”

Why do we put up with it?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing stories of women whose actions expanded Title IX to include sexual harassment and violence as a violation of the law. It got me thinking…

Why don’t we recognize sexual harassment when it happens to us? Why doesn’t it make us angry? Why don’t we all speak up?

I agree with the Yale student who said that sexual harassment is something that we all just expect. Something women just have to deal with. Maybe laugh about it with your girlfriends, roll your eyes, but otherwise let it go. It’s just the way it is.

But it isn’t the way it should be.

Safe in high school…

I got to thinking about my own experiences. In 1972, the year Title IX was enacted, I was entering high school. I knew nothing of the new law. I wasn’t an athletic girl; I was a geeky girl who played the flute and got straight As.

In my school, musical kids and top students were equally split between boys and girls as far as I could see, no discrimination. If you were the best instrumentalist, you were awarded first chair. If you got the best grades, you were ranked at the top of your class.

I spent my free class periods in the quadrangle of private practice rooms in the music wing. I was perfectly safe there. I had two male band and orchestra teachers. Mr. Thrall was a fatherly gentleman whom we all loved. The other music teacher was a younger man who was also perfectly proper in his dealings with students. I rode in a car with him across New York State to the Catskills and back for all-state band, no problem.

Title IX didn’t seem to apply to me. At least for three years.

… Until…

In my senior year, I was in an accelerated English program that allowed me to choose independent study. I was assigned to a male teacher who was familiar to me from drama club. He was known — known! and we put up with it! — to be handsy and overly familiar with female students.

I don’t remember what path of study I chose, but I remember that he chose one session. He assigned me to read an e.e. cummings poem.

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.

Let me just tell you here that I was a very naive girl. I was brought up in a fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren household. It was an insular world that didn’t let in anything from the outside world, especially anything related to sex.

I think that explains my confusion when the teacher asked me what I thought about the poem. What did I think about the last lines?

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new.

I don’t remember what I said. Nothing? He went on — maybe that session, maybe another — to ask me about what I and my boyfriend of two years got up to together. Had we… you know… surely by now…

Throughout the year, he would whisper things in my ear. “I’m going to marry you some day,” he’d say. Was that grooming? At the senior prom, he asked me to dance — he, a chaperone — but after graduation, thankfully, that was the end of it. I guess he just went on to the next unsuspecting girl.*

I consider myself fortunate that nothing physical ever happened. It certainly could have. I’ve often wondered whether this teacher got through his career unscathed. Whether he ever faced any consequences for his actions. Whether any girl was brave enough to stand up to him.

Because of this experience, I understand the deep desire to let something invasive go unchallenged. I respect women who pursue recourse, no matter their feelings of humiliation and the cost to themselves of going public. They challenged what we all thought we had to endure — we all just thought it was the way things were. Yet because of the courage of women like these, it’s not the way things have to be.

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* Unfortunately, that wasn’t my last experience with harassment. There was that Thomson newspaper executive who took me to dinner “to discuss my career advancement.” It wasn’t my career he had an interest in.

PHOTO: e.e. cummings

Harassment? What harassment?

In my last post, I introduced you to Christine Franklin, whose Title IX lawsuit expanded the gender equality law to cover sexual harassment. Although hers was the first successful such lawsuit, it wasn’t the first.

Five classmates at Yale University have that honor. In 1977, Ronni Alexander, Margery Reifler, Pamela Price, Lisa Stone and Ann Olivarius sued the university claiming sexual harassment.

The women didn’t want money — their suit didn’t ask for damages. They merely wanted the university to implement an effective way of addressing sexual harassment and assault. Yale had admitted women eleven years earlier, in 1968, yet their well-being wasn’t being protected.

The women’s complaints are familiar to almost every female on the planet. Ronni and Margery said they’d been physically harassed by a music teacher and a hockey coach. Pamela said she’d been the victim of what today is called quid pro quo harassment — a political science teacher offered good grades in exchange for sex. Lisa said an English professor had propositioned her and Ann Olivarius said she’d been threatened for helping fellow students pursue complaints.

Five women, five stories

The details of the complaints were ugly. Ronni was studying music and taking private flute lessons from Keith Brion. He began locking the door of the lesson room, eventually touching and fondling her. One day, after she had bumped her head on a door frame and suffered a concussion, he offered her a ride home, but instead he took her to his apartment and raped her. He forced her into sex a second time on another day.

Ronni told no one, believing it was her fault somehow. But when she quit music in her sophomore year, she began hearing from other women who quit their music studies. “Oh, me too,” the women would say, with a knowing glance.*

Margery was manager of Yale’s hockey team. One day, Coach Richard Kentwell grabbed her and began fondling and kissing her. She fled. After this happened a few more times, she quit the team.

Pamela Price said that her international relations professor, Raymond Duvall, demanded sex in return for a good grade on a paper. “Do I really, really want the A?” she says he began. When she refused, she got a C on the paper and in the course.**

Lisa also took lessons from Brion, and she arrived one day to find him undressing in the lesson room. She also gave up the flute. Two years later, she was talking with poetry professor Michael Cooke in his office. He put a hand on her knee and suggested making love to her. She fled the room.

Ann didn’t have her own complaint, but she’d heard plenty of women’s stories. She was incensed that they had no way of seeking justice.

Their point is made

The women filed suit as Alexander v. Yale University. For daring to speak out, they faced hostility, even from women.

“There was some sense that the women in the lawsuit were whining about issues they should have expected to face,” said student Betsy Scarf. “We all faced them: before Yale, at Yale, after Yale.”***

In the end, all but Pamela’s case was thrown out. In a pre-trial hearing, magistrates said Ronni’s and Margery’s cases were moot, because they’d graduated. They said Lisa and Ann had not directly suffered harassment — there was no concept then of a hostile workplace — so they could not sue.

In Pamela’s case, the courts ruled that she had not proved the quid pro quo deal. “I knew what that was about,” she said. “As an African American woman, I could not say that this white man had done this to me and be believed.”****

The women all went on to have successful lives and careers. Despite the defeat, they’d made their point. They’d stood up to a powerful university.

“We attend college to study, not to be playthings or sex objects for male faculty members,” said Phyllis Crocker, then of the grievance committee of the Yale Undergraduate Women’s Caucus.*****

Sadly, sexual harassment and violence still occurs on college campuses, but thanks to these five women, it is now recognized — and can be addressed — as discrimination under Title IX.

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* Nicole Allen, “To Break the Silence,” senior thesis on Alexander v. Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale, 2009).

** “To Break,” p. 4.

*** “To Break,” p. 6.

**** “To Break,” p. 6.

***** Excerpts, Alexander v. Yale: Collected Documents from the Yale Undergraduate Women’s Caucus and Grievance Committee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1978), p. 19.

Photo: Ronnie Alexander, Ann Olivarius, Pamela Price

Title IX branches out

It took 20 years and the courage of one teenage girl to expand the reach of Title IX into the realm of sexual harassment.

In 1986, Christine Franklin was a freshman at North Gwinnett High School in Suwanee, Georgia. She had a boyfriend, played in the school band and eagerly accepted an offer from her economics teacher, Andrew Hill, to help him in the classroom, grading tests and running errands.

She said Hill, who was also the school’s football coach, began bringing up references to sex and questioning her about her sex life. Eventually, he — a married man — called her at home, asking her on a date. Finally, in her sophomore year, she says, he forcibly kissed her in the school parking lot and pressured her into having sex on three occasions.

Christine and her boyfriend told her band teacher about Hill’s conduct, but she says he advised her to drop the matter. She went to the school’s guidance counselor, who she says also downplayed her claim, although the school did open an investigation.

Skipping over the school

Hill resigned in 1988, citing the football team’s poor performance. But that wasn’t enough for Christine. She filed a complaint with the federal Office of Civil Rights, which oversees Title IX. OCR ordered the school to create procedures for reporting sexual harassment. Still, Christine went on, bringing a $6 million lawsuit in U.S. district court against the school district, saying it failed to protect her from Hill, in violation of Title IX.

This wasn’t the first time Title IX had been applied to sexual harassment in a lawsuit, but none so far had been successful. And it was the first time compensation was attached to a Title IX claim.

With Hill gone, and reporting procedures in place, the school thought everything was hunky dory. The court agreed, dismissing Christine’s suit in 1989, and again on appeal in 1990.

But Christine persisted, and in 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Christine was not only challenging one school district. She was standing up to President Bush, whose administration opposed expanding the reach of Title IX. The president said it would expose school districts to a massive financial burden.

Apparently, in his mind, a school’s welfare trumped a student’s welfare.

Not only that, but the case was being heard by a court that included Justice Clarence Thomas, who, during his Senate confirmation hearing, was accused of sexual harassment. He was confirmed anyway.*

A lifelong nightmare

In February 1992, the high court ruled unanimously in Christine’s favor, clearing the way for her to seek compensation.

“We intend to ask for substantial damages in the amount of $1 million or more to compensate for the trauma that she has to sustain for the rest of her natural life,” said Michael Weinstock, Christine’s attorney.**

Christine had gone on to college but dropped out after one year, saying she suffered from eating and sleep disorders. She married her high school boyfriend, Douglas Kreeft, and had a child, but struggled with crushing fears. She found it difficult to leave her home.

“To be honest, it’s been a nightmare,” she said.***

Meanwhile, Hill was supported by a large circle of former students, football parents and fellow church members. He made a living selling building supplies and steadfastly maintained his innocence, saying Christine had initiated their encounters.

For its part, the school district claimed that Christine had made up an ever-changing story and that she had a habit of befriending male teachers. The alleged sexual encounters, they say, were consensual.

A wide-ranging victory

In the end, the Gwinnett school district settled with Christine for an undisclosed amount. Her lawsuit became the starting point of a new era for Title IX.

“It’s an enormous victory for women and girls across the country because it puts teeth in the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. “It means that students who are victims of sexual harassment, who have been closed out of courses, whose athletic opportunities have been denied and who have faced discrimination in so many other ways finally have a remedy that really will make a difference.”****

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* Law professor Anita Hill testified that Thomas harassed her when she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas was confirmed by a narrow margin of 52-48.

** “Student to press $1 million sexual harassment suit,” UPI (February 28, 1992).

*** “Student,” UPI.

**** Ruth Marcus, “Harassment damages approved,” Washington Post (February 27, 1992).

Claiming her place in the canon

Title IX is usually thought of as a sports law, so we often forget that its original intent was to increase academic opportunity. In 1974, just two years after Title IX was enacted, a woman who wanted to go to medical school brought a lawsuit claiming gender bias.

Geraldine Cannon was a surgical nurse in Skokie, Ill., who had been practicing since 1955. While serving in Iceland during the Korean War, a doctor had remarked that she had extraordinary skills. She began to think about becoming a doctor.

“I love nursing and I don’t think it gets the recognition it deserves. But I can do more. I want to go further,” she said of her decision to pursue medical studies.*

But soon, Geraldine and her husband started a family. In 1974, she finally got her degree from Trinity College in Deerfield, Ill. She was 39 years old, with five children and a grandchild.

Geraldine had high grades and a good score on the medical college admissions test. She applied to seven medical schools in Illinois. They all turned her down, including the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine and the Northwestern University Medical School.

Both schools rejected Geraldine on the basis of age, not sex. The University of Chicago wouldn’t enroll students over the age of 30 who didn’t have an advanced degree. Northwestern wouldn’t enroll any applicant over the age of 35.

She decided to fight back.

Wait just a minute there

Geraldine filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, alleging that university officials had engaged in sex discrimination in violation of Title IX.

Sex discrimination? Shouldn’t her complaint be about age discrimination?

Geraldine argued that women often have to put off or interrupt their education for childbirth and to raise families. The delays and interruptions increase the likelihood of women pursuing advanced education over the age of 30.

“I think, if we really put a value on marriage, motherhood and raising a family, then women should also be allowed to choose the sequence of their life,” she said.**

Geraldine’s husband was a lawyer, and the Cannons filed suit. They lost in district court and on appeal, but took the case to the Supreme Court.

In Cannon v. the University of Chicago, the high court ruled 6-3 in her favor. But the justices said only that Geraldine had the right to sue, not that she could enroll. The court answered the question of whether an individual, as opposed to an entire class — say, all female applicants who were denied admission to those medical schools — could sue under Title IX. The court said, yes, she could.

Meanwhile, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 had prohibited age limits in programs that receive federal funds. The two universities said that Geraldine could apply again, but they would judge her qualifications against those of the 1979 class, which were more stringent. Geraldine wanted her application to be compared to the 1974 applicants. She continued her legal fight.

The fight of her life

That decision to continue fighting likely cost Geraldine her chance to become a doctor. In 1979, the year of the Supreme Court ruling, she was 44 years old. In an interview, she expressed her continuing interest and hope for the future.

“Each fall I think, ‘I’ll make it to medical school this time,’” she said. “I’m ready. I’m not rusty. I don’t think I’m too old either. Doctors stay on the scene for a long, long time.”***

But it seems unlikely that Geraldine ever got to medical school. In a court brief I saw from 1985, the year Geraldine turned 50, it was clear she was still fighting — and losing.

“Attorneys are expected, even required, to represent their clients’ interests zealously. But they are also expected to know when to give up on an obviously lost cause. It should have been apparent to Cannon’s counsel that Cannon’s cause was dead,” the court sniffed.

Despite the outcome of her fight, Geraldine has claimed a place in the canon of Title IX warriors. She had the nerve and the persistence to challenge longstanding discriminatory practices against women. In that way, she won her battle.

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* Carol Kleiman, “Too Old for Med School?” Chicago Tribune (Lifestyle Section 12, October 21, 1979), pp. 1 and 4.

** “Too Old.”

*** “Too Old.”

**** Cannon v. Loyola University of Chicago, 609 F. Supp. 1010 (1985) Feb. 26, 1985. United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. No. 84 C 8063.

Vaulting to Title IX success

Gymnastics was one sport available for women long before Title IX. But that doesn’t mean it was free from discrimination. In fact, gymnasts at Brown University brought a precedent-setting lawsuit in 1992, two decades after Title IX became law.

In 1991, Brown University cut women’s varsity gymnastics, along with three other teams. It wasn’t that the program was failing; just the year before, the team had won Brown’s first-ever Ivy League title for gymnastics.

Amy Cohen, the incoming captain of the team, was devastated.

“We begged for another solution; we suggested the athletics director ask all coaches to trim 5 percent from their budgets to spare these four teams,” she says. “He told us in no uncertain terms that he had made the decision and that his decision was final.”*

Who got rid of whom?

The possibility remained of keeping the team at a club level, and the women got to work fundraising. Over the summer, they raised enough money — from the community, not the university! — to continue. In the fall, Amy arrived on campus proud of saving the team and expecting the athletic director to congratulate the women.

Well, that didn’t happen.

“He locked us out of our locker room and informed us that we could not see the athletic trainers, use the varsity weight room or hold home meets on weekends,” she said. “At one point, he even muttered, ‘I thought I got rid of you.’”**

The university had cut the teams — men’s water polo and golf, and women’s gymnastics and volleyball — in response to a mandate to trim $1.6 million from its budget. It claimed it was acting fairly by cutting two women’s and two men’s teams.

Amy saw it differently — women were already underrepresented in sports at Brown, so the cuts disproportionately affected them. At the time, women comprised 53.8 percent of the 5,600 enrolled students, yet they represented just 38 percent of the 900 varsity athletes.

A civil rights warrior

In 1992, Amy became the lead plaintiff in a Title IX lawsuit against the university. The case wound its way through the courts, handing the women victory after victory. In 1997, they finally won in district court, but Brown didn’t give up. It appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The ruling leaves the university no choice but to set aside up to 51 percent of its varsity opportunities for qualified women because 51 percent of its students were women,” said a spokeswoman for the university. “That stark numerical quota was required without regard to the fact that women do not represent 51 percent of all interested athletes.”***

This well-worn argument is sort of a chicken-and-the-egg line of thinking. Women aren’t as interested in sports as men are, one side says. Women would be just as interested in sports if they had as much opportunity as men, the other side says.

When the women won their case in 1997, Amy was no longer a student. Then a second-grade teacher, Amy said her students likened her to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

“I think they understand Title IX better than most of the nation’s athletic directors,” she said.****

Fast forward to today

Ultimately, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the ruling stood. The university set in motion a plan to increase minimum team sizes for women’s sports, cap team sizes for men’s sports, restore the four cut teams, and add a women’s lightweight crew team.

That wasn’t the end of the story, though. In May 2020, Brown cut several women’s teams even though male athletes already had a larger share of the school’s athletic resources. The women went back to court and emerged with a settlement requiring the university to reinstate two of the teams and extend enforcement of the decree for several more years.

For Amy, this decades-long battle for equality became bigger than just one team.

“We realized that this case was about much more than just getting our gymnastics team back. We became Title IX warriors,” she said. “Over the past 50 years, progress has been made towards equality and equity in sports but, I am sad to say, we still have a long way to go. I hope that in my lifetime I will see true equity and equality.”*****

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* “Class Action Hall of Fame, Class of 2022: Title IX Champions for Equality in Women’s Sports,” Impact Fund (February 2022). Amy and her teammates were honored by this social justice organization for their activism. https://www.impactfund.org/social-justice-blog/cahof22

** “Class Action,” Impact Fund.

*** “Women gain a victory in access to athletics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (April 22, 1997), p. 5.

**** Susan Ware. Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc., 2007), p. 85.

***** “Class Action,” Impact Fund.

PHOTO: Brown University women’s 1990 gymnastics team. Amy Cohen is in front, above the “O” in the sign. Source: National Museum of American History.

Let’s hear it for “the girls”

The next Summer Olympic Games aren’t until 2024, so there’s still time for broadcasters to rethink their coverage of female athletes. Broadcasts of the Olympics reach massive audiences, giving athletes a thrilling moment on the world stage. Yet broadcasters often take the opportunity to minimize women’s achievements.

This was especially noticeable at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics — so noticeable that for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics (played in 2021 because of the pandemic), the International Olympics Committee issued “portrayal guidelines” that included such advice as to not focus on athletes’ looks, clothing or intimate body parts and to refrain from broadcasting wardrobe malfunctions.

“You will not see in our coverage some things that we have been seeing in the past, with details and close-up on parts of the body,” said Olympic Broadcasting Services chief executive Yiannis Exarchos.*

Even so, female athletes at the 2020 Olympics staged protests over the skimpy uniforms some sports’ ruling bodies require. German gymnasts wore unitards that covered them from head to toe. And, after verbal protests at the Olympics, Norwegian women refused to play in bikini bottoms at a European beach handball event, instead donning skin-tight shorts. They were fined for breaking the rules.

So, what did broadcasters say in 2016 that ticked people off?

Target: gymnasts

Because of their petite size, female gymnasts in particular were the frequent target of sexist comments. When NBC cameras panned over the world-beating Olympic gymnastics team on the sidelines, commentator Jim Watson said, “They might as well be standing around at a mall.”^**After all, he apparently wanted the audience to know, they’re just vapid teen girls.

Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in U.S. history, was also reduced to average teen girl status in 2016. In NBC’s promotional video, “Better Know an Athlete,” Simone was shown getting a manicure, and an interview with her parents was reduced to comments about her love of shopping.

Commentators also attacked gymnast Gabrielle Douglas for her hair, repeating criticism she faced at the 2012 London Olympics. Never mind that she’s a world-class athlete and the first African-American gymnast in Olympic history to be named Individual All-Around Champion.

When female athletes achieve feats of strength or speed, they are often compared to men, whose achievements clearly are thought superior. In 2016, both commentators and viewers compared Simone Biles to runner Usain Bolt and swimmer Michael Phelps, but she batted away the comparisons.

“I’m not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps,” she insisted. “I’m the first Simone Biles.”^***

Not satisfied to confine their sexism to just one sport, Fox News ran a segment on whether all female Olympians should wear makeup — inviting two men to weigh in with their opinion. They declared that the only way for women to snag sponsorships was by wearing makeup.

“Would you put money behind a gal that won the gold medal that looks like a washed out rag?” asked commentator Bo Dietl. “No. If she looked beautiful, and looked a little happy-looking, then you’d support her.”^****

So there!

The good news is that female athletes are persevering and thriving. At the 2020 Olympics, women comprised almost 54 percent of Team USA and won 58.4 percent of the medals, including 23 gold medals. NBC spent 59.1 percent of its broadcast time on women’s events.

Still, 82 percent of commentators were male, and female athletes were ten times more likely than male athletes to be visually objectified with camera angles. Female athletes were also seven times more likely than men be referred to using diminutive language such as “girl” or “lady,” according to Power Play’s #RespectHerGame Olympic report.

Let’s hope broadcasters get the message going forward, because people are watching. In 2016, one tweet on this very failing went viral.^*****

“Seriously commentators stop calling women girls. From: pretty much everyone.”

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* Graham Dunbar, “Olympic broadcasters curb sexual images of female athletes,” Associated Press (July 26, 2021).

** Carole Glines, “Tarnished Olympics? NBC Blasted for Blunders as Ratings Tumble,” Fox News, August 9, 2016

***Megan Garber, “The Olympic Quote (That Should Be) Heard ‘Round the World,” The Atlantic, August 12, 2016. In 2020, Simone withdrew from the women’s team final and the women’s all-around final, due to mental health concerns.

**** Jihan Forbes, “Male Commentators Offer Some Very Important Opinions on Female Athletes’ Wearing Makeup,” YahooSports, August 11, 2016. Dietl is a retired New York City Police Department detective and media personality who was a frequent guest on Fox News programs. He held no credentials in the sporting world.

***** Tweet by Chris Mayer (@chrismayer), Twitter, July 8, 2016.

An athlete turned author

Title IX slashed a definitive before-and-after dividing line. But recently I’ve been reminded that women did play sports long before the 1972 law. Today, let’s go back to the early 1900s.

A hundred-plus years ago, golf was one of the few sports “approved” for women. It was a genteel pursuit that didn’t involve sweat. But, of course, it was a sport only for the privileged. There were tony country club golf courses and golf pros back then as now. Only a few dozen women competed at an elite level.

But one woman not only played golf, she excelled at it and she wrote about it!

A teen sensation

In the early 1900s, Genevieve Hecker topped the charts of the women’s golf circuit. She was born in Darien, Connecticut, in 1883, and began playing at the Wee Burn Golf Club in Noroton.* Her success at the game led to her eventual election as captain of the women’s team. In 1901, the family switched its membership to Apawamis, a course in Rye, New York, named with the Native American words for “covering tree.”

Genevieve was only 16 years old when she won her first tournament, the 1900 Women’s Metropolitan championships. She won again in 1901. That year, and in 1902, she also won the Women’s National Golf Tournament sponsored by the United States Golf Association (USGA), the highest achievement a woman could attain in those times.

“It is admitted by every critic who has ever seen her play that in style and grace, she is absolutely in a class by herself,” one sportswriter declared.**

But Genevieve also was eager to test her skill against men. In 1902, she led the Apawamis Club’s women’s team against the men’s team in an intramural match. She won her match by three holes against Maturin Ballou, the USGA secretary at the time.*** (And here I thought that the Billie Jean King v. Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match was the first ever gender battle in sports!)

Sharing the good stuff

That year, Genevieve also began writing about golf. In 1902, Harper’s magazine published a series of her articles. Two years later, in 1904, she wrote the first book of golf instruction for women, Golf for Women, published by Baker & Taylor. It cost $2, was a bestseller and went into many subsequent printings. (The publisher thought it necessary to identify the author on the cover not only by her own name but in parentheses as Mrs. Charles T. Stout. It’s only proper, right?)

“No woman player, however skilful, can fail to profit by a careful study of it,” reported the New York Post in its review.****

Although Genevieve remained an enthusiastic player, she bowed to the conventions of the time and left competition while she bore and raised children. But in 1925, at the age of 41, she won a New York Women’s Metropolitan Golf event. Once a champion always a champion!

Today, around 25 million people play golf, according to the National Golf Foundation. About a quarter of the players are women. And, if you want, you can still pick up a copy of Genevieve’s book***** — it was reprinted as recently as 2017!

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* Genevieve’s father, John V. Hecker, was a flour miller in New York City, and no ordinary one at that. He was described at the time as a millionaire.

** W.E. Burlock, Jr., “Genevieve Hecker Tells Post Readers How Famous Women Golfers Are Preparing for Championship Tournament to be Played at Brookline This Week,” Boston Post (Sept. 28,1902), p. 48. However, Burlock also believed that Genevieve didn’t always play her best, “owing more, I have always thought, to indifference and carelessness than to lack of ability.”

*** But the men won the handicap competition 8-6.

**** Associated Press, “She Wrote the Book,” New York Daily News (June 19, 2022), p. 70.

***** Here’s one copy on AbeBooks. https://bit.ly/3yv4cPD

Guest post: Author Kathleen Stone

A time out for Mary Church Terrell

Recently, I invited Kathleen Stone, author of They Called Us Girls:Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men (Cynren Press, 2022), to talk about anything that was on her mind. Kathleen’s book chronicles the lives of seven unconventional women of the 1900s who broke out of society’s expected roles for women. Just the right topic for this blog!

Kathleen’s eye fell on Mary Church Terrell, a woman who I also encountered while writing my book on the woman suffrage movement, Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment. I’ll let Kathleen take it from here. Enjoy this guest post that touches on women’s rights from suffrage to civil rights, to, yes, even Title IX.

When my alma mater, Oberlin College, renamed its central library for Mary Church Terrell, I didn’t know much about her, other than that she was an alumna. Since then, I have come to understand that she was pivotal in two movements that share a complicated history — the movement for civil rights for Black Americans and the movement for women’s rights.

Mary Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, the year Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to parents who had been enslaved. Her mother owned a hair salon and her father was a successful businessman. Education was one of her family’s goals, an opportunity often denied to Black Americans, and Mary headed to Oberlin College in Ohio.

Oberlin was the first college in the country to admit both men and women as well as students of color, but its embrace of equality went only so far. To women, the college offered a two-year program, and to men a four-year program, including Latin and Greek. Mary’s friends urged her to take the two-year program — if she were too educated, they warned, she would intimidate men and never find a husband. She ignored their advice and completed the four-year course, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1884 before going on to get a master’s. She taught at Wilberforce University, the first private, historically Black college in the country, and later moved to Washington, DC where she taught in the district’s segregated system.

Despite warnings that she would scare off men, Mary did marry. Her husband, Robert H. Terrell, was her intellectual match; he was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a teacher, lawyer, justice of the peace and municipal court judge.

A dual role in activism

Mary stood at the intersection of the movements for women’s rights and civil rights for Black Americans. She was the founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a member of the Women’s Committee for Equal Justice, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Women’s Republican League of Washington, D.C. She was the first African American woman to serve on the D.C. Board of Education.*

On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated, Mary marched down Pennsylvania Avenue with thousands of women, demanding the right to vote. When Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party staged picket lines at the White House in support of suffrage, she joined in, sometimes with her teenage daughter, even though violence and arrest were real possibilities.**

A dual disadvantage

After the 19^th Amendment was ratified in 1920, it must have been galling that some of her sisters-in-suffrage refused to involve themselves in the civil rights struggle. Mary tried to awaken them to her reality:

“A white woman has only one handicap to overcome — that of sex. I have two — both sex and race. I belong to the only group in this country which has two such huge obstacles to overcome. Colored men have only one — that of race.”***

Her rhetoric was not only informative but also pragmatic. When she urged the National Woman’s Party to address the difficulties Black women experienced when trying to vote, she said:

“Colored women need the ballot to protect themselves because their men cannot protect them since the 14th and 15^th Amendments are null and void. They are lynched and are victims of the Jim Crow Car Laws, the Convict Lease System, and other evils.”****

Despite her compelling logic, the party’s white leadership failed to take up her challenge.

That did not stop Mary. She continued her advocacy into the 1950s. At age 86, she joined a protest, ordering food at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., knowing that the segregated establishment would refuse to serve her. The subsequent lawsuit got to the U.S. Supreme Court where — a year before its landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education — it held that the restaurant had violated anti-discrimination laws.

A living legacy

Mary died in 1954, ten years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of both race and sex. It would be another eight years before Congress passed legislation, including Title IX, that outlawed discrimination in education. That, too, would have spoken to her passion.

Not many of us will have as far reaching an impact as Mary Church Terrell did. That’s certainly true for me, but she nonetheless inspires me. She reinforces my belief that education is crucial, opening opportunities for work and ways to contribute.

Mary also demonstrates the importance of speaking up for others. When she advocated for Black women in the South who were unable to vote and whose husbands were in prison, she was not speaking for herself, the wife of a judge appointed by the president. She was reaching beyond herself to speak for those without access to the venues where she found herself.

From Mary, I take inspiration that I can do something similar in my life, even if my actions are smaller and my words less consequential than hers. She would agree, I believe, that we all can work to make life better for others.

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* Biographical information drawn from articles by Mary Church Terrell’s biographer, Alison M. Parker, and from Lisa Gulasy, “Learning from Activist Mary Church Terrell,” Oberlin College & Conservatory (February 13, 2016). For a deeper dive, see Alison Parker’s biography, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell, the Forgotten ‘Face of African American Women’s Suffrage Activism,’” Ms. (February 13, 2021).

*** Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), p. 29.

**** Alison M. Parker, “Mary Church Terrell: Black Suffragist and Civil Rights Activist,” National Park Service.

Nancy B. Kennedy

Author of Women Win the Vote!