In my last post, I continued the story of Margie Wright, a girl who had been kicked off a Little League team because of her gender. But her father stepped in and started a softball team, so the girls of Warrensburg, Illinois, had a chance to compete at a sport.
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In my last blog post, we met 10-year-old Margie Wright, a girl who was excited about playing in her first Little League game. She’d made the team, the only girl to make the cut.
But as the game got underway, a group of angry women bullied the coach into dropping her from the team, because she was a girl. The year was 1962 — ten years pre-Title IX.
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Let’s take a timeout from the Title IX timeline and tell a story of a woman whose involvement in sport spanned pre- and post Title IX years. It’s a baseball story, and I love baseball. I’ve spent almost 20 years attending my son’s ball games, so I understand the deep desire children can have to play the game.*
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In my last post, we followed Title IX through Congress, until the final bill landed on President Richard Nixon’s desk. He signed the Education Amendments of 1972 into law on June 23, 1972.
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Title IX actually has another name these days. In 2002, the law was renamed The Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act. And in 2014, forty-two years after Title IX was signed into law, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rep. Mink the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her contributions to gender equality.
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Let’s talk about gyms, locker rooms and bathrooms, shall we? Discrimination follows women into the most intimate spaces of public life. Women like Reps. Patsy Mink and Edith Green, who were forging paths in government and drafting legislation to equalize gender equality, found blockades even here.
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When we last left Rep. Patsy Mink (D-HI) and Rep. Edith Green (D-OR), they were confabbing with education consultant Bunny Sadler. Now the Title IX bill needed a champion in the Senate. Birch Bayh (D-IN) raised his hand.
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In my last post, I introduced Olympic track and field star Wilma Rudolph. In 1960, when she was reaching the peak of her athletic career, a political star was making her way to Washington, DC, where she would make history with the Title IX legislation.
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