Nevertheless, she persisted

May 30, 2017
Green politics
Edith Green, education, Elizabeth Warren, Martha Griffiths, sex discrimination, Shirley Chisholm, Title IX

Part of the fun of researching Title IX history is seeing the chain of women’s activism linking so many “foremother” feminists in politics with bad-ass female public servants of today, backed by the wider women’s movement. Progress is never simple; they lobbied, persuaded, bargained, defied, and often had to trust that their efforts would cumulate into unstoppable momentum toward equity. “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the media in February, 2017 after he used an arcane Senate rule to cut off Sen. Elizabeth Warren mid-speech. Warren had been reading a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott […]

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 […]