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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Title IX advocates say Black Lives Matter

A professional association of Title IX administrators recently proclaimed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit in Minnesota claims that protecting transgender students’ rights amounts to discrimination against girls under Title IX. The intersections between discrimination based on sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, disability, etc. — and how these intersections are used to try to achieve political goals — have always been part of Title IX history. Perhaps never more so than today. The statement released by the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA) generated a standing ovation when first read at its […]

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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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Women got Ford to fund Title IX

A good idea doesn’t go very far, very fast without financing. In the early years of Title IX, key funds came through a new cohort of women hired or promoted by the Ford Foundation. Uppity women on the Foundation’s staff pressured senior management in the early 1970s to diversify its white-male bastion of decision-makers and to direct more of its funding to issues pertinent to women and people of color. The same process was happening in all parts of society thanks to civil rights movements and the second-wave women’s movement. Ford’s response included giving Terry Saario and  Mariam Chamberlain the power in 1972 to […]

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Office for Civil Rights helped, hindered Title IX

Republican and Democratic Administrations have different track records for Office of Civil Rights enforcement of Title IX. (The OCR is part of the Executive Branch.) Three videos in this blog — with former OCR officials Martin Gerry, Cindy Brown, and Deborah Ashford — give a taste of that divide from the 1970s under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations. After Title IX became law in 1972, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) had to write regulations to implement the law. That’s standard procedure, usually accomplished in a matter of months for many laws, but the Nixon and Ford […]

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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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Lobbyists, Congressional staff influenced Title IX

[Videos feature Judy Norrell, former lobbyist for the League of Women Voters, and Barbara Dixon, former staff person for Sen. Birch Bayh.] Title IX wasn’t just an act of Congress, nor did it come simply from the demands of women’s activist organizations. There’s plenty of overlap between insiders and outsiders in Washington, D.C. and varying degrees of insider- or outsider-ness depending on the person and the situation. Women were small in number compared with men working in the nation’s capitol in the 1970s, which made it easier, in some ways, to find each other and collaborate as both insiders and outsiders. Female […]

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhpqXfl6340&feature=youtu.be

National Lawyers Guild honors Title IX shero

Like many of today’s undergraduates who have spoken up about sexual assaults and harassment on college campuses, a sense of outrage drove Pamela Price  to complain to Yale University officials after a male faculty member offered her an A grade in exchange for sex. Implying, of course, that he’d lower her grade if she didn’t submit. Her final grade: C. But that was in 1976, and the grade wasn’t the end of the story. Price and her allies filed the first legal complaint against sexual harassment under Title IX. Their years-long legal battle — known initially as Alexander v. Yale before the court reduced it to […]

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Women’s rights, minority rights inseparable

VIDEO: Francelia Gleaves (now McKindra) not only was one of the first people to work at length on Title IX issues in the 1970s, she was one of the few African Americans doing this work. To her, minority rights and women’s rights were inseparable, though not everyone felt that way, she says in this 2015 interview. A lot was happening on both fronts at that time. White America still was slow to adjust to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, by the way, failed to prohibit discrimination based on sex in some of its provisions, hence the need for Title […]

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Hunting Ground documentary in crosshairs of history

The San Francisco Chronicle published my op-ed article about women finding their voices to speak out against sexual assault and harassment on campuses. It’s online now; look for it in print on Thursday, Nov. 19. This Sunday, Nov. 22, CNN will televise the documentary The Hunting Ground about the handling of sexual assaults at colleges and universities. You can watch or record it at 5 p.m. Pacific time (8 p.m. Eastern), followed by a discussion panel featuring the filmmakers and others. Director Kirby Dick and Producer Amy Ziering (creators of the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War) took some heat […]

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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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Lack of Title IX in K-12 schools add to college rape crisis?

A third of 96 school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area that responded to requests for public information did not identify a Title IX coordinator in their district — something they are required to have by law. That law — Title IX — has been on the books for more than 43 years and is in headlines today because of mounting complaints about sexual assaults and harassment on college campuses. “What the heck is happening at K through 12,” and how is that contributing to this epidemic of sexual assaults in colleges, Noreen Farrell of Equal Rights Advocates wondered at a focus […]

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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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Legal muscle behind Title IX still flexing

The Chicago Public School District just got its sports programs schooled by a Hall of Famer. Not a sports star, mind you, but Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. (Video: Greenberger describes her reasons for pursuing legal justice for women.) Chicago has agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights resulting from a complaint filed by the Center in 2010 claiming that the city denies girls the sports opportunities it gives to boys. As a result, the District will have to create roughly 6,000 more opportunities for girls to engage in sports, affecting most of […]

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Men fought (and fight) for Title IX too

From 93-year-old Vincent Macaluso to young men on college campuses today, a long line of male allies to women helped bring us Title IX and are fighting to uphold its principles of fairness. (Video: The Godfather of Title IX) While we wouldn’t have this essential law without all the uppity women who pushed for it, let’s take a moment on this 43rd anniversary of President Nixon signing Title IX (June 23, 1972) to recognize its forefathers, in a week when the nation also celebrates Father’s Day. Much of the momentum leading up to Title IX came from a slew of […]

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Spotting truthiness in Title IX debates

So much of what passes for informed discussion about Title IX is tantamount to truthiness, the wonderful word coined by comedian Stephen Colbert. Some people prefer what they wish to be true instead of the historical reality of Title IX. Whether in debates about the handling of sexual assault and harassment complaints on campuses, or in the never-ending whining by men’s sports fans that Title IX is killing their sports, some inaccuracies certainly are due to an unfortunate lack of knowledge about Title IX despite it being one of the most important laws for U.S. women since the right to […]

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Uppity women changing UC Santa Barbara

A nearly 13-hour sit-in by female students and their supporters at the University of California, Santa Barbara produced promises of change from the administration, providing an example of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go under Title IX. The sit-in happened just as I was watching the 1999 documentary A Hero for Daisy about a dramatic 1976 protest by female students at Yale University who stripped off their clothes in an administrator’s office to reveal “Title IX” or “IX” written in bold letters on their chests and backs. Their leader, Chris Ernst, then read a statement of grievances […]

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Too [fill in the blank] for a woman

Whatever you think of the outcome of the lawsuit by Ellen Pao claiming sex discrimination at the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, a tactic used by the company’s defense team could make one cringe — character assassination. (Video: Bernice Sandler, who was “too strong for a woman.”) Telling a woman that she is too exacting, too condescending, too abrasive, too strong, too weak,  too whatever to be hired, promoted, etc. is an age-old excuse used countless times to deny women opportunities that might be offered to a man who has the same qualities. (Speaking generally now, not specifically about […]

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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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Taking the mystery out of obtaining consent

I’m wondering how the new “affirmative consent” standard adopted by California in 2015 and by an increasing number of colleges around the country is working out so far. It basically says that a college student must obtain consent from an awake, sober person before having sex, or risk having that sex be considered an assault. It doesn’t sound too complicated to me, but some people seem to think so. Here’s an excellent explanation from blogger Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess, who brilliantly says, “If you’re still struggling, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.” The rest is […]

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Video history from women behind Title IX

Eleven of the women most closely involved in the struggle to implement Title IX gathered on January 26, 2015 to give a living history of this most important legislation for U.S. women since the right to vote. Focusing mainly on the early years after its passage in 1972, they also shared their fears that Title IX’s hard-won gains could be lost if people don’t remain vigilant in supporting it. I’m thankful to Margaret Dunkle for organizing the luncheon at the Woman’s National Democratic Club and for including me as I research my book on the people behind Title IX.

Fresno tied to Title IX over decades

Video: Bernice Sandler coaches Women’s Studies students and faculty who are trying to improve policies at the California State University, Fresno, in November 2014. People all over the United States have links to Title IX. I’m enjoying seeing the fingers of this important law poke up in some unexpected places as I research its history and today’s in-the-news developments. Among them: Fresno, California, which appears often enough that it serves as an example of nearly every phase of Title IX. For example, Frederick W. Ness was president of Fresno State College just before becoming president of the Association of American Colleges and […]

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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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Title IX foremothers gather in D.C.

I’m heading home from an intensive two weeks in Washington, D.C. doing interviews and research for my book on the people behind Title IX, and I’m especially grateful to Margaret Dunkle for inviting me to a historic gathering of 11 of the remaining foremothers of Title IX for me to witness, listen, and interview. Some brought momentos for show-and-tell. Here’s Deborah Ashford holding a poster that the Carter Administration issued to show that he’d kept his promise to appoint more women to government positions. Look who’s right next to each other — a young Hillary Rodham (center, left) and Title […]

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Name it to change it

(Video: Title IX expert Bernice Sandler on why words matter.) We swim in a sea of cultural assumptions. Norms surround us like the air we breathe, scarcely noticeable until we find them toxic, and then hard to explain to someone who isn’t feeling their poisonous effects. Parting the sea, cleaning the air of sexist assumptions takes time and effort, and even the cleaners may feel residual toxic effects. Women from the early history of Title IX have described to me insecurities from internalizing the sexism around them in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bernice Sandler initially believed a colleague when he told […]

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37 words that inspired thousands

Bernice Sandler wanted to be a professor. Patsy Takemoto Mink hoped to be a doctor. Meg Newman wanted to play baseball in high school. Emma Sulkowicz just wanted to feel safe on a college campus. Thirty-seven words make those dreams possible today — too late for some of these women, but possible for millions of others, and only because women fought back when the people in charge told them to go away. These battles are not over. They’re in the news every day. Those 37 words make up Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the most important legislation for U.S. […]

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