Speech given by 2018 Honors Convocation Speaker Kathy Barlow:
It is a true honor to receive this award and I hope I can do justice in representing a faculty who are passionate about teaching and have great expertise in their respective fields. If you haven’t recognized from my first few words, you will soon realize that I am from Louisiana. And like most who grow up in rural Louisiana, I come from a long line of story tellers. In academia, we must rely on best-practices in instructional pedagogy and I have found that infusing a story or two into each class setting stimulates class discussions because students become more engaged when adding their experiences and perspectives as part of an ongoing narrative.
Because this honor is a Teaching Excellence award, tonight, I hope to give you a glimpse of what you might experience in my classroom. My field of study is in Kinesiology and one of the courses I teach is Social Issues in Sport. This course is highly reflective of a liberal arts education because it explores the world of sport cutting across social institutions such as education, economics, politics, religion, and history thus we gain an understanding of social and cultural struggles of contemporary American society. Why is sport a great place to study the social struggles about race, ethnicity, religion and gender? Because it is played out in an overtly public manner, through all forms of media. My talk is titled “37 words” and I think you will realize what the impact of those 37 words are after I tell you this early memory. In third grade, I played baseball with my friends every day at recess. That spring the teacher gave us a flyer, saying those who wanted to participate in Little League Baseball should sign up on Saturday at 9:00 AM at city park. I can’t tell you how excited I was that Saturday morning as I rode with my daddy to the park talking about baseball and how much fun it was going to be playing on a team, and daddy telling me I was a natural at third base. When we arrived at the park my Daddy and I got in line to sign up. He begins writing my name on the sign-up sheet and the man sitting at the table says, “Hey, wait a minute! She’s a girl, she can’t play baseball. Of course, I was standing beside my Daddy and I said innocently but with much confidence, “Yes, I can, I can hit and run fast too”. Then the man said girls are not allowed to play baseball in Little League. My Daddy asked the man if they could have a talk and they had a lively conversation in center field. When he got in the truck, he told me that I wouldn’t be playing and the man did not know the history of women playing baseball. He assured me that there would be a day when girls and women would be playing all kinds of sports and in the meantime, we would continue to have Saturdays to hunt and fish. What I learned that day was that even though girls were just as good as boys in sports, grownups had decided that girls could not be part of the American pastime. So what experience have you had where social barriers have prevented you from having an opportunity to participate?
Now imagine the United States pre-1970. For those who cannot remember, or who had not yet been born, your reference can be the television show Mad Men which was set in the 1960s. The social norms, roles and expectations of men and women were different. Men were the figure-heads, the face of the company, while the women were the supporters and worked behind the scene. This was a time in our country when most women received an education at women-only colleges while other colleges and universities refused to admit women and this was perfectly legal. Some colleges did admit women but there was a strict quota system on the number of women who were admitted. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale restricted the number of women to about 30%. While Dartmouth still could not fathom why women should or needed to be allowed to gain access to higher education. The undergraduate admission of women was a hot topic on most campuses, with the institutions claiming that gender ratios were best for learning, and that individual institutions knew what the best ratios were---fewer women.
Now that I have provided you with the background of the time, and some of the educational and social struggles of women, I want to share with you what I believe is the most powerful piece of gender equality legislation since 1920 when the 19th amendment was passed that provided women with the right to vote. On June 23, 1972 Title IX of the Educational Amendments was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The original 37 words—yes, there were only 37 words between blocking women and girls from educational, professional and athletic opportunities and allowing women and girls access to college admission and participation in school sponsored sports teams. Those 37 words were:
No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex, Be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, Or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity,receiving federal financial assistance.
When I first said Title IX, many of you thought of athletics or maybe sexual harassment. But Title IX was originally conceived as a general tool to combat sex discrimination for admission to educational institutions, thus providing access to education for women. But I guarantee you, the senators and representatives in 1972 had no idea the potential revolutionary effect, the power and the opportunities it would give women in education and the world of sports.
Title IX originated with Bernice “Bunny” Sandler when she began her college teaching career as a part-time lecturer of educational counseling at the University of Maryland. Although she had originally applied for one of 7 tenure-track openings in the same department, she was told by one member of the hiring department that she came on “too strong for a woman”. This was often used as a rational by male faculty and administrators to limit hiring women in the 1960s. Sandler decided this type of discrimination needed to be stopped. She gathered 250 complaints from other female educators and sent the complaints to the Secretary of Labor. Upon reviewing the complaints, the American Council on Education provided the following statement, “There is no sexual discrimination in higher education and, even if it does exist, it isn’t a problem”. This didn’t stop Sandler as she sent the documents to Congress and one of the congresswomen who received the documents was Edith Green. Edith Green understood this plight, as a young girl she wanted to become an electrical engineer, but her family told her “don’t be silly”. So, she became a U.S. representative from Portland, Oregon and served as the Chair of the House on Education Committee, and Green had been waiting for a chance to introduce a bill requiring gender equality in education. So she and Sandler wrote the 37 words of Title IX.
Congressional hearings lasted two weeks with few objections from fellow congressmen. This was just what Green wanted, keep it low key, and it would sail through the hearings. Sandler and Green knew women were being marginalized in colleges and universities and the findings from the hearings proved it. Some of the findings included: graduating high school girls were required to meet higher grade and test score thresholds in order to be admitted into colleges and professional programs than boys. State universities in Virginia turned away 21,000 women and 0 men. North Carolina limited their enrollment of freshmen to 19-hundred men and 426 women; medical and law schools limited women to just 5 or 10 students out of every 100. So the results of the hearings made sex discrimination in education a legitimate issue.
Green needed help to navigate the bill through the halls of Congress, so she enlisted the help of Patsy Mink, a representative from Hawaii and the first Asian American women to serve in the US Congress. Mink had dreamt of becoming a doctor but none of the 20 medical schools she applied to accepted women.
Birch Bayh was a senator from Indiana and he was asked to manage the bill as it was debated in the Senate. He had some reservations, but after speaking with his wife who told him that you cannot ignore 53% of the American people, he agreed to sponsor the bill in the Senate. The bill encountered few problems in the senate debate, other than the concern that women might want to play football, but Bye told them not to worry about that, it would never happen.
Nowhere in Title IX were the words “athletics or sports” mentioned, yet for many, Title IX has become synonymous with women’s sports. The law was passed in 1972 and institutions were given until 1978 to get all their programs in line with the law or their federal funding would be cut. Some schools waited to make changes until they were mandated to do so, but even those that didn’t meet the deadline; yet still didn’t have their federal funding revoked. The NCAA and individual institutions fought tooth and nail against implementing the provisions and over the years, Congress continuously debates having Title IX revoked as it approaches its 50th anniversary.
The final story I want to share with you was titled in the New York Times as the “Boston Tea Party of Title IX.” This happened on March 3rd, 1976. The members of Yale’s women’s rowing team were justifiably upset because there were no shower facilities for them at the Yale boathouse---only for men. So after drenching workouts in the freezing cold, the sweat soaked women would sit on the bus that took both crews back to campus, while waiting for the men to finish their showers. One of the female rowers had already come down with pneumonia. Fed up with Yale’s inattention, future Olympian Chris Ernst and 19 other women marched into the office of the women’s athletic director, took their shirts off, revealing the words, “Title IX” written on their chests and backs. In the presence of a New York Times correspondent, Ernst read a statement that said in part: “These are the bodies that Yale is exploiting on a day like today, the ice freezes on this skin while we sit for half an hour, then as the ice melts it soaks through to meet the sweat that is soaking us from the inside.” This story in the Times got them their showers but more importantly it raised awareness of gender inequality in college sports and served notice to schools that Title IX could no longer be ignored.
So one would assume that Colleges and Universities would do the right thing and adhere to the law. Yet it was well into the 1990s and only after a scathing critique of the NCAA Gender Equity Report and a Supreme Court case ruling that monetary damages could be awarded for violations of Title IX did institutions put expansion of women’s programs and equitable facilities on the front burner, or at least they could no longer turn a blind-eye to the neglect.
So what impact did Bunny Sandler and Edith Green’s 37 words have on girls and women since 1972? According to the US Department of Education, for fall 2017, women comprised more than 56% of students on campuses nationwide. Also a larger number of women are enrolling in STEM related fields than ever before. In 2016, the American Bar Association reported that women make up a majority of law students, holding just over 50 percent of the placements at accredited law schools in the United States. The Association of American Medical Colleges 2017 report states that this year is the first time the number of women (50.7%) enrolling in US medical schools has exceeded the number of men.
There is no evidence that President Nixon saw this as an opportunity for girls and women to participate in sport but given his love for sport, even as a 135-pound reserve on the Poet football team, he knew the value he attached to his opportunity as a student-athlete at Whittier College. In fact, the first person Nixon called after he was elected President of the United States was his Whittier College football coach, Chief Newman. Last year there were over 3 million high school girls participating in athletics compared to the 295,000 in 1972. College women athlete numbers have also increased from the 30,000 in 1972 to over 400,000 in 2014 with 39.6 % of the total athletic budget going to women where in 1972, they received only 2% of the budget.
And to come full circle with this story—when I was 14, my Daddy took me to watch the Silver Bullet women’s baseball team play the minor league Shreveport Captains and last year, thanks to my colleagues Joe Price and Charles Adams, I was able to speak with Shirley Burkovich and Maybelle Blair who were members of the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League from 1949-1954.
Also the circle connects with a Whittier College alumni who signed those “37 Words” into law. Thank you!
