Speak your mind on DeVos and Title IX

We’re at a pivotal moment in Title IX history. Not since 1975 has the Department of Education changed the regulations governing Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The Trump Administration now is going all-out to see that its definition of sex discrimination becomes the law of the land and to limit how schools are allowed to respond to it. Women’s advocates are fighting back, but Education Secretary Betsy DeVos gave the public only until Jan. 29, 2019 to submit comments for or against her new Title IX rules. Groups like Know Your IX, End Rape on […]

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Weaponizing Title IX serves politics

What happens on campus with Title IX spills over into broader society and vice versa. It’s always been thus in a general way but lately we’ve seen different groups weaponizing Title IX to fight off-campus battles. Social change movements always have influenced Title IX’s use on campus. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT rights movement, and the movement against sexual violence contributed to Title IX’s creation and helped give women and men the self-agency to use Title IX as a tool for progress. Title IX’s application then changed not only campus life but society outside of academia. […]

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Fresno’s robust Title IX history documented

I want to understand Title IX‘s history not only at elite East Coast universities and in the Washington, D.C. halls of power (where much of its story gets told) but in other settings too. When you think of Title IX’s 46-year-history, Fresno, Calif. may not be the first place to come to mind, yet its extensive and robust Title IX history illustrates the evolution of the law’s application and feminism in the U.S. heartland. Feminism shapes Title IX (and vice versa) in all corners of the United States, in all income brackets, and in diverse populations. I could have picked […]

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Nameless sisterhood surrounds Title IX

If you’ve ever felt that you’re part of a nameless sisterhood, take a moment to appreciate Arvonne Fraser. As smart as they come, energetic, socially astute and politically savvy, Fraser was a doer and an organizer. She got things done. But she came out of a much more sexist era than today. Fraser blossomed in the feminist resurgence of the 1970s to become a strong organizer for women’s causes, including Title IX. Had she been born closer to today, Fraser likely would have been a Congresswoman or governor instead of the de facto campaign manager for her politician husband. Arvonne Fraser […]

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A closer look at Title IX in Fresno

I’m jazzed to announce that I’ll be speaking about Title IX history particularly in the context of Fresno, Calif. at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association on Saturday, August 4, at Santa Clara (Calif.) University. I’ll be part of a session entitled “Memories of Political and Cultural Protest” with two other speakers who will focus on campus protests in Paris in 1968 and campus anti-war activism in California’s Silicon Valley from 1965 to 1980. My talk ties the past to the present with the title, “Uppity Women, Nasty Women: From Title IX to […]

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Survivors face backlash

Advocating political and cultural change engenders backlash. Student survivors of sexual assault successfully pushed many educational institutions to do their Title IX duties in the last decade despite ongoing, painful pushback. They worry for the student survivors of gun violence who now command the media spotlight but face attacks from opponents of gun control. “Young people are really, really powerful and really savvy,” says Sage Carson, manager of the non-profit organization Know Your IX. “These amazingly powerful organizations such as End Rape on Campus and Know Your IX were started by young people because they know how to work with […]

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On Title IX’s bench: the ACLU

Imagine you’re a 15-year-old girl and something’s happening at school that you think is unfair to girls or LGBTQ students. School administrators and even school district officials ignore your complaints or tell you to go away. Who you gonna call? If you’ve never heard of the various legal groups that specialize in helping women or LGBTQ people, you’ve probably heard of the ACLU — the American Civil Liberties Union. Maybe the boys got a new baseball field while girls’ softball is stuck on a rutted, run-down community diamond. Or a teacher keeps touching students in creepy ways. Or boys get […]

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So long, Shakespeare; adios, Aziz Ansari

One of the byproducts of immersing myself into researching Title IX is an altered personal tolerance for sex discrimination. More and more, I don’t. Tolerate it, that is. And that means letting go of some formerly cherished cultural reference points and practices. In this time of upheaval between the sexes, a lot of people may be experiencing something similar. This isn’t a new phenomenon. People — and our society — change as we not only get our eyes opened to injustices but begin to empathize with those who suffer under them. The latter is more “woke” than the former. This […]

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Get ready for more Title IX fireworks

Happy 2018! In the new year, the backlash against Title IX will make more headlines as the Trump Administration continues to change regulations dealing with sex discrimination in education. Advocates for girls and women will push back and eventually move society two steps forward for every step back. We’ve seen this before, many times. Let’s take a look at the challenges that Title IX faced and overcame at this point in previous decades. It’s been a wild ride toward equity in education. The fun isn’t done. This timeline leaves out a lot, yet you can see patterns and progress: 1968 […]

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Men complain things to me

Writer Rebecca Solnit brilliantly described the commonplace phenomenon of mansplaining in her book Men Explain Things To Me. There’s a similar phenomenon — menplaining? dudespouting? — in which men co-opt women’s grievances to complain that they’re the victims of sexism when some advance in women’s rights constrains male advantages. Title IX‘s current battles and its history are full of menplaining in the courts. Male student athletes sued in the 1990s and 2000s. They complained of sex bias in the Title IX regulations  because they forced — forced! mind you — athletic directors to cut some men’s teams when budgets got tight. […]

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Systemic sexism cracking under #MeToo

We’re in a #metoo cultural moment that’s removing blinders about systemic sexism. Let’s look at how we got here and explore what comes next. If we do that honestly, feelings come up — anger, embarrassment, shame, regret. There’s probably not one of us who doesn’t wish we had understood things better earlier, hadn’t gone along with some of the sexist confines of our culture, had behaved differently in particular situations, or had been heard by others sooner. This goes for both men and women. It’s important to recognize these feelings, and equally important to channel them into positive action. Anyone […]

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Hugh Hefner, pornography, and Title IX converge

One need look no farther than the obituaries for Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to see sexism still so firmly entrenched in our society. These came as I’ve been reading the latest book by Catharine MacKinnon. She’s a lawyer whose work was key to getting sexual harassment in education recognized as illegal under Title IX. Stay with me here — the two converge. The print version of the Associated Press obituary for Hefner published in the San Francisco Chronicle today uncritically gushed about Hefner and his life. It parroted his self-assessed contributions to society and detailed his financial success and cultural influences. […]

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Most Basic Title IX Step Skipped

Schools, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions or programs have had 42 years to designate a Title IX coordinator at each of their institutions, as required by law. How can it be that some still don’t take this most basic step to comply with Title IX — even in the home district of Title IX’s author, the late Rep. Edith Green of Portland, Ore.? It’s been nearly a year since the board of Portland Public Schools ordered employees to figure out why the district allegedly let a male employee get away with years of sexual misconduct and assault, and fix […]

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New Knot in Civil Rights Tug-of-War

The U.S. Department of Education recently inverted a strategy it tried in 1975 to cut back on its work enforcing civil rights laws, including Title IX. Public outcry from  organizations for minorities, women, and the disabled — plus a supportive court ruling — forced federal officials to back off in 1975. Will it today? Historically, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has used two approaches to enforce civil rights — investigating individual complaints of discrimination, and broader “compliance reviews” of an educational institution as a whole. Compliance reviews may be scheduled any time, or can arise from complaints. In […]

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Happy birthday, Title IX! (from some of us)

Title IX is 45 years old this month! Imagine having your logic, your morality, and even your right to exist constantly being questioned for 45 years — essentially, what most women encounter in overt or subtle ways in our sexist society. You’d be tired of this nonsense by now, right? That’s what Title IX has faced since Congress passed it and President Nixon signed it on June 23, 1972. Fortunately, enough people understand the need to prohibit sex discrimination in education and have benefited from Title IX, giving this law the strength to persist. Compare the muscles and skills of today’s female […]

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When schools ignore Title IX, children suffer

Title IX issues that start in colleges and universities inevitably make their way to K-12 schools, opening society’s eyes to the pervasiveness of the problem at all ages. A year-long investigation by Associated Press reporters provides the latest example — a “hidden horror” of 17,000 sexual assaults by students against other students in grades K-12 over a four-year period. Too often in these cases, students and their parents must rely on Title IX to amplify their cries for help. Student sexual assaults have been the top headline-grabbing Title IX complaint in higher education over the past 6 years or so. The […]

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Pawing through the papers of Title IX history

Here’s the thing about Title IX: Everybody I interview has a Title IX story. Some of the stories contradict each other. There are those that present clear pictures of the past, and others are a little blurry around the edges. Title IX is, after all, 45 years old — still young, but old enough for people to question their memories about it, or to question the memories of others. And old enough that some of the people involved in the beginning are, unfortunately, no longer with us. Part of my job as a journalist and historian is to question the […]

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Facades change, but Title IX foundation remains

An aging federal building in Portland, Ore. that was rehabilitated to model modern environmental ethics honors a woman, coincidentally named Edith Green, who is best known for rehabbing federal laws to treat women ethically. Rep. Edith Louise Starrett Green (D-OR), a former teacher, birthed Title IX in 1971-1972 as chair of the Subcommittee on Education of the House Education and Labor Committee, giving girls and women equal opportunities in education. During her 10 terms from 1955 to 1974, Congress also felt her influence in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a 1971 bill that outlawed sex discrimination in training doctors, nurses, […]

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Generations inherit Title IX unfinished business

Feminism is a journey, not a destination. We travel some of the same roads as our foremothers. Our descendants retrace a few of our footsteps, rediscover some things we’ve experienced, and continue hacking through the sexist thickets that still block the way. If we’re lucky, they blaze trails that take us to beautiful new vistas. Title IX remains the most important law for U.S. women other than the 13th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution (which abolished slavery and granted women the right to vote) because feminism’s work is unfinished and Title IX is the strongest tool we have to clear the path ahead. Some of […]

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Framing Title IX controversies: New or old?

The media and anti-Title IX pundits are fond of framing controversies around campus sexual assaults as a relatively “new” phenomenon that started in 2011. Too often that leaves out the 45-year history of schools and colleges unfairly ignoring, obstinately defying, and only reluctantly complying with Title IX’s mandate to fight sex discrimination in education. A case in point: The Chronicle of Higher Education, which probably has the best and most extensive Title IX coverage of any media outlet over the years, published a lengthy and very interesting article (available to subscribers), “One Letter Changed Colleges’ Response to Rape Cases.” The article described events since the Office for Civil […]

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Title IX case bridged Black, women’s movements

Pamela Price entered Yale University in 1974 as a Black nationalist with an Angela Davis-style afro. She’d never heard of Title IX and wasn’t attracted to any of the women’s organizations on campus. She put her heart and energies into the Black community and working for civil rights. By the time she graduated in 1978, though, Price was one of a handful of women at the heart of a pivotal legal case that established for the first time that Title IX covers sexual harassment — Alexander v. Yale. Her involvement bridged the Black rights and women’s rights movements on campus. Thus began a chain […]

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Athlete activism all about men, apparently

A new Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change at San Jose State University launched yesterday, but media coverage of the kick-off event gives the impression that only men are athletes and activists. A featured panel of “leaders and legends” in sports was all men, a slap that stings extra in 2017, the 45th anniversary of Title IX. The half-day program focused on activism against racism, which was wonderful (though a bit confusing at first, since nothing in the Institute’s name or description suggested limiting the topic of Social Change to race issues). The program did include an earlier panel that […]

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Senators should ask DeVos about Title IX

The U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has at least another week to consider what it will ask Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos since it delayed her nomination hearing from Jan. 11th to next Wednesday, Jan. 18. My suggestion: Ask her about Title IX. Does she understand that it’s a civil law operating under civil procedures, not criminal ones? Does she agree that Title IX is important for elementary and secondary schools as well as higher educational institutions? Is she aware that it’s about so much more than the hot-button issues of sports or sexual assault or transgender bathrooms? For the […]

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Fake news generates fake history

Pop quiz: Who said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Go ahead, google it. You’ll find lots of sources all over the Web and social media agreeing that the quote came from poet and writer Maya Angelou. But they’re all wrong. The modern crisis of fake news has a corollary in fake history, which is why I find myself returning to original (“primary”) sources as I research the history of Title IX. It’s difficult to discern the fakeness of the quote above by online searching because it’s been repeated so often that it dominates search results. Eventually, another source […]

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Journalists ignore women’s sports

I saw ghosts in October. I could sense that female athletes were out there being sportsy and all, but in my local newspaper mostly they were invisible. I decided, on an irritated whim, to monitor the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of women’s sports for one month and write a Letter to the Editor each day, a horrifying exercise that left me cursing the Chronicle. Jump to the Oct. 31 letter below for a recap and the curse. Or follow along in these excerpts: Oct. 1: 10 pages, 22 stories, 13 photos. Women = 2 sentences. Nothing on the two exciting WNBA […]

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Ten reasons to vote, for Title IX

Title IX itself isn’t on the ballot Nov. 8, but it might as well be. The gains made for sexual and gender fairness through Title IX were created by politicians, courts, and activists, and can be undone by them, too. Now that we’ve had several generations of women grow up and grow stronger under Title IX, I tend to think that we’ll never  go back to the days when “normal” meant only men got to make the decisions and to define what’s fair. We’ve still got a long way to go to reach equity in so many parts of our […]

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Media amplify Title IX controversies

Journalists’s coverage of Title IX disputes put the heat on government and educational institutions to deal with sex discrimination, from Cheryl Fields at The Chronicle of Higher Education in the 1970s to Tyler Kingkade at the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed today. Their stories about feminism and the backlashes against it are time capsules of two different eras with some persistent problems. (See the video interview with Fields, above.) Fields’s beat (the federal government as it relates to education)  justified covering Title IX issues and reached a dedicated audience of academic readers of the print weekly newspaper. Kingkade carved an online niche that reaches […]

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Running for president, long before Hillary

History turns a page this week when Hillary Clinton becomes the first female candidate for U.S. President to be nominated by a major political party. In the spirit of this blog’s weaving of historical and contemporary threads, you might enjoy The Guardian’s article on Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President, or The Smithsonian’s article on the same topic. Many of the foremothers of Title IX who have been profiled on this blog are contemporaries of Sen. Clinton and entered government service in some fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. See this earlier post for a fun photo […]

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Equality game in overtime for coaches

I loved being the quarterback. I had a strong passing arm, a good eye for quickly reading the players on the field, and fast legs to sprint when I had to. My college football team didn’t play on the stadium field, since girls weren’t allowed to play intercollegiate football, but the intramural teams got us in the game. On Christmas break, back home my father seemed to listen with enthusiasm as I described the best plays from our games. He introduced me to football, after all, through weekend TV, teaching me to recognize a screen play or a defensive blitz. […]

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PEER took Title IX to the kids

“It’s just ordinary us.” That’s how Holly Knox describes people who change the world. You don’t need to be special, she said. Most world-changers aren’t. She’s one of the “ordinary” people who followed an opportunity to make a difference, and it improved the lives of girls across the country. (See the video interview.) At age 27, Knox left a government job to found an advocacy organization that became a powerhouse in bringing Title IX into elementary and secondary schools to fight sex discrimination — the Project on Equal Education Rights (PEER). She had been working as a legislative staff person in […]

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Sports took center court under Title IX

(Video: Margot Polivy describes the struggles around women’s athletics under Title IX in the 1970s.) The people who created Title IX really weren’t thinking about athletics. No one saw the uproar coming. For the most part, Title IX’s creators focused on collegiate admissions, equity in faculty hiring, fair pay, getting rid of sex-role stereotypes in school materials, and the like. But once the law passed in 1972 and the federal government set about formulating regulations to implement it, controversy over athletics quickly became the public face of Title IX. In many crucial settings over the next decade, Margot Polivy spoke for women’s athletics as […]

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Writing the Title IX playbook on sports

A non-athlete played a profound role in opening up sports to millions of U.S. girls and women. In this video, she talks about what it took to begin writing the playbook for equality in athletics under Title IX. Margaret Dunkle was in her mid-20s when she joined Bernice Sandler to work on the Project on the Status and Education of Women at the Association of American Colleges just a few weeks after Title IX became law in 1972.  The creators and foremothers of Title IX weren’t thinking of sports  in the beginning; the law originally was intended to fix discrimination […]

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Fomenting a feminist utopia can be fun

It’s one thing to change the course of history. It’s even rarer to know that’s what you’re doing, and perhaps rarer still to have fun doing it. While researching the people behind Title IX from its inception to today, I’ve vicariously enjoyed the camaraderie and sisterhood expressed along the way, from the “foremothers” of Title IX in the 1970s to the editors and contributors involved in the new book The Feminist Utopia Project (The Feminist Press 2015). Feminists involved in the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s worked on many projects and goals, some of which succeeded and some of which […]

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My Title IX reading list (or what I did this summer)

Current news articles and analyses provide helpful nuggets of background related to Title IX, such as a New York Times Magazine article on The Return of the Sex Wars. But to sample the bigger buffet of Title IX history from the past 50 years, I’ve been devouring books and films, digging into research libraries, and savoring original documents generously sent me by the people I’ve been interviewing. Bernice Sandler told me that she once set a goal of owning every book about equality for women, which might have been possible decades ago, but she soon found that the second wave of […]

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Students as sexual predators: the norm?

What do Title IX, the comedian Betsy Salkind, and the new film The Hunting Ground have in common? A historical thread that’s about to change one sorry aspect of U.S. society. Finally. I hope. The Hunting Ground opens in cities across the United States this week and offers the possibility of a fundamental cultural shift toward accepting that non-consensual sex is an assault even if it’s done by a peer, like a student with a student, and that schools must not hide, tolerate, or condone it. At least, I think that’s what the film may point toward. I plan to see […]

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Women get smaller share of coaching since Title IX

Often when we think of Title IX we think of how this law opened up opportunities for millions of girls to play sports and be athletes. The numbers tell a different story for women who want to be coaches. The percentage of college women’s teams that are coached by women dropped by more than half (from 90% to 40%) while the proportion of women coaching men’s teams did not rise, according to the fine folks at the Title IX Blog who do such a good job of keeping us up to date on current events related to Title IX. Don’t blame […]

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Uppity women star in new film

“She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” opens today in a San Francisco movie theater, and I can’t wait to see it. The headline on San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle’s review calls it “How women got started getting uppity,” which of course reminds me of the uppity women I’ve been interviewing for my book on the people behind Title IX. Some of the Title IX foremothers never would have joined the street protests or other public demonstrations depicted in the film. They weren’t those kind of women. Much too radical for them. Yet, uppity they were, too. And all the […]

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