Tag Archives: #TitleIXat50

A coach steps up

Michigan State is the poster child for universities that violated Title IX in the way they treated (or, rather, didn’t treat) instances of sexual abuse. In 2019, it was found guilty of failing to stop Larry Nassar from criminally assaulting hundreds of female athletes in his role as team doctor (not to mention his criminal actions as a trainer for USA Gymnastics). But it’s not the only such sordid Title IX story.

In 2009, the head swimming and diving coach for San Jose State University, Sage Hopkins, began hearing stories about the athletic department’s trainer, Scott Shaw. Female athletes were coming to him with complaints about his behavior.

The swimmers said that Shaw often worked alone with them in the training room. He didn’t explain his treatments before beginning and he didn’t seek their consent. They said Shaw would touch their pelvic area and massage their breasts, and in some cases touch their nipples beneath their clothing. All the while, he was purportedly working on unrelated areas of the body, such as the shoulder, knee or back.

Seventeen swimmers ultimately complained about Shaw to Hopkins. The coach compiled their accounts into a nearly 300-page file. He notified the athletic department, the university administration and the campus police. In late 2009, the university opened an investigation based on the complaints.

Nope, not guilty

In 2010, however, the university ruled that Shaw was not guilty of misconduct. They said his methods of “pressure point” therapy were an acceptable treatment for muscle injuries. Shaw suffered no consequences and continued as director of sports medicine.

“I’m upset that this person abused his power, but I’m even more upset that this larger power allowed him to do that and then still keep his job there,” said former San Jose swimmer Caitlin Macky. “We weren’t taken seriously, and we weren’t protected at the time.”*

Meanwhile, Hopkins continued to confront the administration. In 2018, he re-reported the allegations. In addition, he documented instances of what he believed to be retaliation against him and his staff for speaking out against Shaw.

Along comes Title IX

So, here’s where Title IX comes in. Hopkins included the university’s Title IX office when he updated the athletes’ complaints. In June 2020, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office initiated a Title IX compliance review of the university.

During the review, the university reopened its investigation into the 2009 complaints. In addition, two current swimmers came forward with new complaints against Shaw. In this review, it came to light that in the original investigation, the university interviewed just one swimmer about Shaw’s behavior, ignoring all the other women.

The DOJ concluded that San Jose had violated Title IX. Shaw’s physical therapy “lacked medical basis, ignored proper protocols and violated the system’s sexual harassment policies.” It required the university to pay $1.6 million to athletes from six teams and mandated an overhaul of the university’s sexual harassment and abuse reporting system.

In 2021, the university review found that Shaw was responsible for at least five instances of sexual abuse. By then, however, Shaw had retired.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. In April 2021, Hopkins filed a lawsuit against San Jose State claiming retaliation for pursuing the athletes’ complaints. In the lawsuit, Steve O’Brien, former deputy athletics director, says he was fired after refusing an order from the university to discipline Hopkins and a staff member. O’Brien believes the order, and his firing, was in response to Hopkins re-reporting the Title IX violations.

In January 2022, the university settled with Hopkins for $250,000. In addition, the university also agreed to another two settlements totaling $4.9 million to the abuse victims. Hopkins remains the university’s swim coach.

He had their back

All too often, when it comes to Title IX violations, female athletes are on their own, filing their own lawsuits against their universities, with no one to back them up. In fact, most often they face censure and backlash. San Jose’s women were grateful that their coach had their back.

“I’m so thankful for Sage Hopkins and the perseverance he showed in advocating for all student-athletes, not just his own,” Caitlin Macky said.**

And so Title IX inches forward, one step — and most often, one lawsuit — at a time.

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** Emma Edmund, “San Jose settles retaliation lawsuit, apologizes to Sage Hopkins,” swimswam.com (January 13, 2022).

* Kenny Jacoby and Rachel Axon, “San Jose State reinvestigates claims athletic trainer inappropriately touched swimmers,” USA Today (April 17, 2020).

PHOTO: Sage Hopkins speaking during a ceremony commending him for his advocacy

Thanks but no thanks

Susan Kaplowitz chose an interesting topic for her doctoral thesis: “Guidelines for Establishing Equitable Interscholastic Athletic Programs for Boys and Girls in Public High Schools.” That’s not surprising. Susan was well aware that women were discriminated against as athletes.

We met Susan in my last blog post. The Bronx native was athletic from an early age, but girls had no organized sports in the 1950s and ‘60s. She couldn’t play for a school until she went to Hunter College, where she majored in physical education. She went on get a masters at Kean University and a doctorate at New York University. Her doctoral studies in physical education coincided with the passage of Title IX.

After writing her dissertation, Susan had a great idea. Why not show it to area athletic directors, so they can assess whether their sports programs were fair to girls? She shared her findings with thirteen public high schools, hoping they would use them to see if their programs complied with Title IX guidelines, and to move them toward compliance if they weren’t.

And then crickets.

Eventually, one of the thirteen athletic directors said he would use her guidelines to audit his sports program. “The other twelve said that their programs were fine as they were,” she said.*

Strikeout after strikeout

Susan went on to marry and have children and continued with her love of sports as a player, coach and referee. She played on adult softball and volleyball teams. She refereed softball and basketball. She even coached college basketball for Stern College, the women’s college of Yeshiva University.

In 1979, Rutgers University was looking for an assistant basketball coach, and she applied.

“Despite my qualifications and my experience, I didn’t get the job, and I always wondered why,” she said.** She suspected her gender factored into the decision.

The years went by, but even post-Title IX, society’s view of women didn’t change overnight. In 1984, when Susan’s son was six, she wanted to coach his t-ball team. She walked into the coaches’ meeting, and a man approached her.

“’Miss, this meeting is for coaches,’” he said, stopping her.

“I responded, ‘I am a coach and wish to coach a team,’” she said. “After all these years, I still remember his look. When I asked for an assistant coach, not one man volunteered to help me. So, I coached the team myself.”

In 1988, she applied for a position as the sports and recreation director at a local Y. Again, her gender was a barrier.

“One of the interviewers said, ‘This job involves coaching and night and weekend games. You have two children. How would you be able to do this?’” she recalls. Three men and Susan were up for the job, and she didn’t get it. She suspects the men weren’t asked about their childcare arrangements.

A flourishing career

But Susan wasn’t deterred by any of this. She went on to teach at Rutgers University as a professor of exercise science until her retirement last year. At Rutgers, she started the Center for Exercise and Aging and taught students to be physical education teachers, physical therapists and recreation specialists, among many other careers. She’s worked with children of all ages, she’s a personal trainer and has been a consultant for gyms and Ys. She’s even coached her grandson’s teams with no opposition from anyone!

In an interesting twist, Susan’s son Andrew married Lisa Stern Kaplowitz, a student athlete at Brown University in the 1990s. Lisa was on the women’s gymnastics team that brought a Title IX lawsuit against the university in 1991 for cutting the team. I’ll be talking to Lisa soon!

Pride as a pioneer

Susan’s lived during a time of tremendous upheaval in society’s view of women and gender equality. Sometimes, she says she regrets being born too soon to benefit from Title IX. But she also understands the unique privilege she’s had of being part of the generation that changed everything.

“I am filled with pride and happiness to see the progress that girls and women in sports have made,” she said. “I know there are miles to go, and examples of inequality still exist, but mothers and fathers are teaching and playing sports with their daughters as well as their sons, just as my dad did with me. Through their parents’ strong influence, children will learn how beneficial athletic participation can be — for boys and girls.”

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* From my interview with Susan on November 21, 2022.

** Susan Kaplowitz, “My Title IX Story: The Personal Perspective of a Female Athlete and Coach,” Shape America (May 24, 2022). All remaining quotes are from this article.

Ohio hears a “who”

Title IX is getting another spin through the washer on transgender rights. In November, a group of inter-faith parents sued an Ohio school district for allowing transgender students to use gendered bathrooms.

The parents are suing the Bethel Local School District of Dayton, Ohio, for using students’ stated gender identity rather than their biological sex to determine which bathroom they can use. In the lawsuit, filed on their behalf by America First Legal, the parents accuse the district of violating Title IX and state gender protections. They claim the district is forcing families to conform to its policy favoring transgender students, which infringes on their parental rights.

“Boys are boys, girls are girls, and every student has the right to privacy in intimate spaces that has been enjoyed by every single generation of students before them,” said lead counsel Gene Hamilton. “We are proud to fight for our clients in this important area.”*

Silent switcheroo

Specifically, the parents claim damage because the policy is causing health problems — rather than use bathrooms that allow access to students of the opposite biological sex, students have tried to avoid using bathrooms during school hours, holding their urine for uncomfortable and unhealthy amounts of time. If they do use the restroom, the lawsuit says, it causes anxiety and emotional distress. Girls go to the restroom in pairs or groups in order to make sure they are safe and their modesty protected.

The parents are equally upset that the school district actually has gender-neutral bathrooms for transgender students to use. In one case, a group of Muslim families donated money to have a gender-neutral bathroom built. But after the new policy went into effect in January 2022, the district stopped requiring transgender students to use the gender-neutral bathrooms. Even worse, the parents say, is that the district didn’t even inform them of the policy change.

Before filing the lawsuit, the parents aired their concerns to school officials. His clients, Hamilton said, “tried to find solutions that would value and respect all members of the community,” but they were ignored.

Anybody home?

Not only does the lawsuit claim Title IX infringement, it also targets the state of Ohio, whose officials have been equally as obtuse, the parents say. The state says it can’t help.

“Over the past several years, we have received many questions from local school districts on the topic of accommodating transgender students and whether specific accommodations are required, given the guidance in place at the time,” said Sara Clark, chief legal counsel for the Ohio School Boards Association.“We encourage districts to work with students requesting accommodations on a case-by-case basis.”**

Guidance at the federal level is also MIA. In June 2021, the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission applied the 1964 Civil Rights Act to gay, lesbian and transgender people in schools and workplaces. The guidance would apply to schools that accept federal financial aid, extending transgender protections to include use of restrooms and locker rooms.

But twenty states, including Ohio, sued the federal government in 2020 over transgender rights policies. A federal judge blocked the administration’s new rules until these lawsuits are resolved. This ruling brings the whole issue of transgender rights to a standstill. Lacking federal legal protection makes it unlikely that individual states can set and enforce their laws.

Title IX tug-of-war

So, Ohio has kicked the can back to the schools while the issue of transgender rights chugs its way through the agonizingly slow legal process. In the absence of guidance, individual school districts are being forced to form their own policies — and, not surprisingly, are running into legal backlashes like this one.

And the group of parents whose children are in the Bethel school district are happy to push back. “The parental right to direct the education, safety, and upbringing of their children is the oldest fundamental right recognized by the Supreme Court,” they say.

For its part, the Bethel School Board is using Title IX to support its claim that it had no choice but to open the restrooms to transgender students. The move was made to comply with Title IX, it says, because “the federal government was threatening school funding, and potential litigation was imminent.”

I guess we’ll just have to hold our… breaths… waiting for the final outcome.

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* Jeremiah Poff, “Ohio school district sued for transgender bathroom policy that caused students to ‘hold their urine,” Washington Examiner (November 22, 2022). This quote and the next come from this article.

** Jim Gaines, “Transgender rights in Ohio: Protections at stake with challenges underway,” Springfield News-Sun (July 4, 2022).

Stemming the bias

Title IX’s most visible impact has been in athletics, but the law dramatically changed the academic universe for women, too. Evelynn Hammonds was in the first wave of women to break through the barriers women interested in science had faced.

Born in 1953 in Atlanta, Evelynn was intrigued with science and the physical world from the very beginning.

“As a young child, I was always very interested in science,” she said. “I had all these different kinds of science kits — I had a chemistry set, I had a microscope, I had all kinds of building kits, and it just spurred in me an interest in wanting to understand how the world worked.”*

In high school, Evelynn’s interest in physics emerged. A National Merit Scholar, Hammonds attended Spelman College, where she entered a joint engineering program with Georgia Institute of Technology. She also took physics courses at Morehouse College. She graduated in 1976 with degrees in physics and electrical engineering.

Evelynn got her first chance to work in a physics lab in Bell Labs’ Summer Research Program for Women and Minorities. After graduation, she began a PhD program at MIT, but instead of finishing, went to work as a software engineer for five years. She completed her PhD at Harvard in the history of science.

Making inroads

Today, she is Professor of the History of Science and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. She was a dean at Harvard for five years, but returned to teaching in 2021.

Women like Evelynn are paving the way for women in the sciences. Many of the degrees women seek today are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. In 1970, two years before Title IX was passed, women comprised just 8 percent of STEM workers. Today, that number is 27 percent.

But men still dominate: men make up half of all U.S. workers, but 73 percent of the STEM workforce. Engineering and computer science — two of the most lucrative STEM fields — remain heavily male. Only 21 percent of college engineering majors and 19 percent of computer science majors are women.

It’s the culture, stupid

Part of the problem is a culture that is unwelcoming, and even hostile, to women. Evelynn found that to be true as early as her college years.

“You’re in a culture where, on any given day, somebody might think you were a secretary, or a janitor, or anything but a graduate student in physics,” she said. “It was made very clear to us by some people that we didn’t fit, that we didn’t belong, that we were only there because of affirmative action, that we could never be successful. We were constantly finding those attitudes.”**

Because of that, Evelynn authored her first published paper as E.M. Hammond, so people couldn’t tell she was a woman or African American. She was following in a long line of female scientists who have had to fight for recognition. Women in earlier generations had always been victims of the culture.

“I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin,” said Nancy Grace Roman, the first female executive at NASA. “She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’”***

What’s to be done

Evelynn and others are working to erase the hurdles that still exist for women in STEM fields. Some possible fixes: universities should diversify their faculty and courses should teach social issues, journals should reject research that doesn’t consider gender and sex, and Title IX should be used as a lever to force institutions to comply.

“We’ve fought our fight as my generation, but we’re going to have to keep fighting for a while,” she said.† “We have a lot of work to do. The attitudes and the culture haven’t changed as much as they absolutely have to.”

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* Jennifer Berglund, “Challenges and Change for Women of Color in Science – A Conversation with Evelyn Hammonds, Chair and Professor of the History of Science,” Harvard Museum of Sciences and Culture (August 20, 2020).

** Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, “Women in STEM need more than a law,” Harvard Gazette (June 20, 2022).

*** Report: “The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics,” American Association of University Women. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018) is known as the “Mother of the Hubble Telescope” for her role in planning the telescope.

† “Challenges and Change” and “Women in STEM.”

Watching and waiting

“To my best basketball player in the ninth grade, boy or girl.”

That’s what a gym teacher and the basketball coach wrote in Tara VanDerveer’s ninth-grade yearbook. But the words didn’t made Tara proud — they were painful, because Tara hadn’t played on her school’s basketball team. Girls weren’t allowed.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, girls sports were practically nonexistent. The girls at Tara’s school only had gym class and play dates, which were after-school meets with girls from area high schools. The girls were mixed up on temporary teams, so that competition was muted and results weren’t recorded.

But everyone knew Tara loved to play. “I was always in the gym. If I couldn’t play, I was always watching,” she said.*

In fact, two years earlier, when she was in seventh-grade, a star basketball player — a boy, of course — wrote, “You will go to the Olympics in basketball some day.”

There was no Olympic basketball for women in those days! What did this boy know that Tara didn’t know?

Playing the system

Tara was born in 1953 in Melrose, Massachusetts, but grew up outside of Albany, New York. She was the oldest of five girls. They would go to the Y on the weekends to swim, and play racquetball and other sports. But as she got older, the opportunities became fewer, and girls went looking elsewhere for how to spend their time.

But Tara still wanted to play, especially basketball.

“When I was a little kid, I’d be by myself, dribbling and shooting, and pretending I was playing in front of a big arena. It was like I could imagine it,” she recalled. “But I don’t even know why I could imagine it. There was nothing like that for women.”

She tried to play with the boys, but they wouldn’t let her play — until she figured out how to make herself welcome.

“I had the best basketball and if they wanted to use my ball, then I’d play,” she said.

Mentored by the best

In her sophomore year, the family moved to Niagara Falls, and she played for a high school there. She wanted to play in college, but she couldn’t afford schools with the top basketball teams. She started at the University of Albany, but transferred in her sophomore year to Indiana University, where she finished her three years as a stand-out player.

At Indiana, Tara soaked it all in. Bobby Knight was the men’s basketball coach at the time. Tara watched his practices in the stands every day and she took a coaching class that he offered.

In her sophomore year, the women’s coach, Bea Gorton, took the team to the Final Four of the AIAW (the precursor to the NCAA) championship, losing only in the semi-finals. (Earlier this year, I wrote about another player on this team, Debbie Millbern Powers.)

Even at that level, the women athletes were pretty much on their own.

“My sophomore year, we didn’t have a uniform,” she said. “You bought your own shoes, paid for your own meals, [slept] four to a room.”

Today, if people know the name of Tara VanDerveer, it’s because she’s earned the title of winningest coach in women’s college basketball. She has been head coach of women’s basketball at Stanford University since 1985, and in December 2021, she passed the University of Tennessee’s legendary Pat Summit for most wins.

And, that seventh-grade basketball player was right — she went to the Olympics. In 1996, she coached Team USA at the Atlanta Games, winning all eight games and beating Brazil for gold. (If you don’t remember this, it might be because of the bombing at the Atlanta Games that grabbed all the headlines.)

Tara and Title IX

Tara regrets that she never had the chance to play professional basketball. But she’s passionate about coaching. In fact, she believes coaching will take Title IX to the next level.

“Since Title IX passed, it’s gone from over 90 percent of women’s teams coached by women, to less than 50 percent. We’ve got to fix that pipeline,” she said.** She’s doing her part, only hiring female coaches.

Tara credits Title IX with everything about her life.

“I would say honestly that my whole life, everything about my life, is because of Title IX,” she said.*** “Before that there really weren’t coaching jobs, so there was no such thing as a profession for women coaches. Having that job has allowed me to work at a great university, buy a house, travel, you know, do everything ― my life is totally determined by it.”

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* Dave Kiefer, “Q&A with Tara VanDerveer,” The Mercury (CA) News (February 20, 2008). This quote and the next three are from this article.

** Lindsay Schnell, “Meet California Woman of the Year Honoree Tara VanDerveer,” The (Palm Springs, CA) Desert Sun (March 13, 2022), p. A7.

*** Charlotte Carroll and Rhiannon Walker, “How has Title IX changed your life? Women in sports answer,” The Athletic (June 24, 2022).

Inaugural Ballers pub day!

It’s pub day for Andrew Maraniss! His book, Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First U.S. Women’s Olympic Basketball Team released today. Congrats to Andrew!

The team played in the 1976 Olympics, only four years after the passage of Title IX. That surprised me, because for most women’s sports, it took years, and even decades, for teams to really get going. Women needed programs at all levels, college scholarships and high-level coaching, all of which didn’t exist at the time. In most cases, achievement did take a lot of time. This team was clearly an outlier.

Sports and social justice

My first question for Andrew was: How is it that a guy gets to write about a women’s team? Isn’t that a job for a female author? He didn’t back away from the question.

“Sports give me a way to write about social justice,” he says. “I write stories that expose racism, sexism and hypocrisy of all kinds. And, even today, it’s not true to say that sports have achieved a level playing field.”*

Andrew’s earlier books established his credentials in social justice issues. His first book, Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016) told the story of the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). He broke the color barrier when he began playing for the Vanderbilt Commodores in 1966.

“My book stemmed from a paper I did in college about Perry,” he said. “His story had such an impact on me that it’s one of the few things I remember doing in college!”

Perry Wallace’s story of persevering in the segregated South never left Andrew’s mind, and he decided to expand it into a book. A biographer doesn’t need the approval of his subject, but he contacted Perry anyway. His response? “Go for it!”

Andrew spent the next eight years working on the book. His respect for Wallace only grew. “It was an incredible education for me,” he says. In 2017, a new version of the book released for young readers.

Andrew’s next book, Games of Deception: The True Story of the First Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany (Viking Books for Young Readers, 2021) addresses the big question of that Olympics: Should the U.S. have boycotted those Games given the dictator’s growing racial discrimination against Jewish people?

His third book concerned bias of another kind. Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke (Viking Books for Young Readers, 2021) tells the story of the first openly gay player in Major League Baseball.

So there’s a theme here, right? Andrew Maraniss tells True Stories!

Inquiring minds want to know

While Andrew was giving talks about the 1936 Olympic men’s basketball team, he faced some tough student audiences.

“I went to schools in North Carolina and Kansas, and the students there asked me the same question: ‘What’s the story of the first women’s Olympic basketball team?’” Andrew says.

Well — that set the wheels turning. Andrew saw the 50th anniversary of Title IX coming up and thought, What better time?

There are some lofty names on that Olympic team, many of whom he interviewed: Nancy Dunkle, Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers, Lusia Harris, coach Billie Moore and coach Pat Head (Summitt), who went on to become the winningest coach in women’s college basketball (only recently surpassed by Tara VanDerveer). Last week, he met another player from the team — Juliene Simpson — and she draped her silver medal around his neck!

Yes, that underfunded, unappreciated upstart team that no one thought had a chance of succeeding went on to take a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics. The U.S. boycotted the Olympics in 1980 but the team won gold in 1984 and again in 1988. At the 1992 Games, the U.S. took home a bronze, but since that year has won gold at every Olympics, not even dropping a single game — a gold-medal winning streak of seven straight Olympics.

Andrew hopes that by sharing the story of these pioneering women, he’ll not only inspire new generations, but also focus attention on the work yet to be done.

“Title IX needs to be protected and expanded,” he says. “It’s important for both men and women to take an interest in women’s sports. We need to offer equal scholarships and pay equal attention. We’re not done, but this generation of women paved the way.”

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* All of Andrew Maraniss’s quotes come from our interview on September 6, 2022. One last bit of information: Andrew was a baseball player in high school and was offered a scholarship to play at a D3 school (Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.). But he was also offered a sports writing scholarship at Vanderbilt, which he accepted. He continues to work for his alma mater as special projects director for the athletic department. Visit Andrew’s website at http://andrewmaraniss.com/

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!

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* 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.

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.”

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* 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.

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).