Tag Archives: #TitleIX50

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.

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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.

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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)

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.”

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* 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

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).

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).

Gold medal lessons

Today, we’re talking track and field. And you can’t talk about that sport without talking about Willye White.

White was born in 1939 and raised by her grandparents in Money, Mississippi. The town of Money became infamous 16 years later as the place where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was brutally tortured and murdered. So you can imagine the environment in which White grew up.

To add to her family’s income, White picked cotton, but she made time for sports.

“I started chopping cotton when I was 10,” she said. “I got paid $2.50 a day for 12 hours. The only way I could get any recognition was through sports. Sports gave me an escape. It kept me off the street.”*

At the same age, White began training in her segregated schools as a sprinter and in the long jump. In 1956, as a high school sophomore, she qualified for the Olympics, where she took home silver in the long jump at the Melbourne Games. She also participated in the 1960 Rome Olympics, although she didn’t medal.

But in White’s world, medals aren’t what the Olympics are about.

“The Olympic movement taught me not to judge a person by the color of their skin but by the contents of their hearts,” White said.**

Olympic-sized racism

In contrast to White’s worldview, Olympic officials of the time held an odious view of Black female athletes. In the 1940s, Olympic official Norman Cox suggested they should compete separately.

“The International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them,” he proposed. “The unfairly advantaged hermaphrodites, those less-skilled, child-bearing types with largish breasts, wide hips and knocked knees who regularly defeated normal [meaning white] women.”***

Norman Cox could have learned a few things from Willye White.

When it came time for college, White started at Tennessee State University, where future Olympian Wilma Rudolph was a teammate. But White chaffed under the controlling thumb of her coach, Ed Temple, and she left after six months. In 1960, she moved to Chicago, where she became a nurse.

Racing toward freedom

Two years later, in 1962, the iconic Penn Relays opened competition to women. The renowned track-and-field event began in 1895 and is hosted annually by the University of Pennsylvania at Franklin Field in Philadelphia. It’s the oldest and largest track and field competition in North America. Upwards of 15,000 high school athletes compete before crowds topping 100,000 spectators. For 67 years, it was a male-only affair.

In its inaugural year, the only women’s event was an invitational 100-yard dash. Willye White was invited to compete.

Nine women raced, and White won with a time of 10.9 seconds. Along with the other eight women, White broke open the Relays. The next year, an Olympic development relay was added and in 1964, the 440-yard relay. By 1976, the Relays had expanded women’s competition to include a full schedule of events.

White went on to become the first five-time Olympian in the history of American track and field. After her Olympic days were over, she concentrated on her education, earning a bachelor’s degree in public health administration at Chicago State in 1976.

She won 13 national indoor and outdoor titles and set seven U.S. records in the long jump. She was a member of more than 30 international track and field teams and won a dozen Amateur Athletic Union long jump titles, and was elected to 11 halls of fame. She coached Team USA to the 1981 World Cup and the 1994 U.S. Olympic Festival. She founded a business as a fitness and sports consultant and started a foundation that provided after-school programs, health care and summer camps for children.

But, despite all the acclaim, White considered her greatest accomplishment was simply to find her place in life. A place where her color and her background didn’t constrain her.

“Athletics was my flight to freedom: freedom from prejudice, freedom from illiteracy, freedom from bias,” she said. “It was my acceptance in the world.”****