This is my daughter and her best friend, in front of the Women’s Rights Memorial in Seneca Falls, after they had completed a basketball game.
In 1972, 37 words were added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title IX says: “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.”
The regulations went into effect in 1975; any public school receiving federal money was to be in complete compliance with the provisions of Title IX by 1978. A quarter of a century later, it’s safe to say that a large number of programs across the country–at both the high school and college levels–are not in compliance.
A series of court rulings have established a three-prong test for determining whether girls are receiving equal participation opportunities in relation to boys. The test asks: 1) Are the numbers of opportunities to participate in interscholastic (or other school-sponsored) athletics proportionate to the enrollment of each gender at the school? 2) If one sex is underrepresented in athletics, can the institution prove that it has a history, and a continuing practice, of program expansion that reflects the interests of the students? 3) If one sex is underrepresented, and the school cannot demonstrate prong number two (above) can it show that the students’ interests and abilities are being accommodated by the present system? To be in compliance, a school must be able to answer “yes” to one of these three questions.
In 2002, an exhaustive review was conducted of Title IX by members of a panel drawn from all sectors of athletics. Their conclusion? The law was fine the way it is. Leave it alone. Three weeks ago, in a stealth move that this regime is becoming notorious for, TItle IX was quietly strangled, gutted, and left to die.
Did I mention that I’m pissed off?
In 1997, I started writing professionally about Title IX. There were interviews that stuck in my head; stories of boys playing on state-of-the-art ball fields while girls risked injury on fields that were rock-strewn. One of the most eloquent descriptions of discrimination was given to me by a mother in Kentucky, who described the differences between her son’s baseball program and her daughter’s softball program;
“I always had to go to Chrissi’s school at 2:30 to pick her and other players up and transport them to their practice field,” Egan says. “Baseball players just stayed at school since their fields were on campus. The baseball team had an indoor batting cage. Softball didn’t have a batting cage at all. Baseball had nice dugouts. Softball players just sat in the cold drizzle getting soaked. Baseball had school manpower and equipment to maintain their field. Softball parents brought their own mowers and the coach used her own vehicle to drag the field. Baseball had large sets of bleachers. One softball parent got a set of used aluminum bleachers donated. Baseball had an electronic scoreboard. Softball had a scorekeeper you could ask the score. Baseball had faculty and students stay after school to watch them play. Half of the school didn’t even know the high school had a softball team and the other half had no idea where the field was located. Baseball had direct access to locker rooms. Softball was two miles away.”
Why does it matter that girls play sports? Let’s just talk about the health benefits, courtesy of this study.
* Breast Cancer Risk: One to three hours of exercise a week over a woman’s reproductive lifetime (the teens to about age 40) may bring a 20-30% reduction in the risk of breast cancer, and four or more hours of exercise a week can reduce the risk almost 60% (Bernstein et al, 1994).
* Smoking: Female athletes on one or two school or community sports teams were significantly less likely to smoke regularly than female non-athletes. Girls on three or more teams were even less likely to smoke regularly (Melnick et al, 2001).
* Illicit Drug Use: Two nationwide studies found that female school or community athletes were significantly less likely to use marijuana, cocaine or most other illicit drugs, although they were no less likely to use crack or inhalants. This protective effect of sports was especially true for white girls (Miller et al, 2000; Pate et al, 2000).
* Sexual Risk: Female athletes are less likely to be sexually active, in part because they tend to be more
concerned about getting pregnant than female non-athletes (Dodge & Jaccard, 2002).
* Depression: Women and girls who participate in regular exercise suffer lower rates of depression (Nicoloff and Schwenk, 1995; Page and Tucker, 1994).
* Suicide: Female high school athletes, especially those participating on three or more teams, have lower odds
of considering or planning a suicide attempt (Sabo et al, 2004).
* Educational Gains: The positive educational impacts of school sports were just as strong for girls as for boys including self-concept, educational aspirations in the senior year, school attendance, math and science enrollment, time spent on homework, and taking honors courses (Marsh, 1993).
The physical and mental health benefits for girls participating in sports have been exhaustively documented. Any check of NCAA graduation rates will show that female athletes consistently graduate at higher rates than their male counterparts, and in many instances, at higher rates than other female undergraduates. Sports allow girls to develop the self-confidence in their own bodies to make decisions about sexuality that other girls, those who may not have self-confidence, are not able to make. And, female athletes who decide they are ready for sex are more likely to use contraception.
What difference does it make to a young woman to think of her body as a strong, fast, skilled instrument that can do things other than attract attention for its physical beauty? What would a world look like in which young women were praised for their minds, their athletic accomplishments, their creativity, their talents, their spirits, rather than what they looked like?
Do you want to do something to save Title IX? The Women’s Sports Foundation has got all the information.
Want to know, what as a parent you can do to guarantee your daughter’s rights to play sports? Check this out: Herb Dempsey.
Want to know more about Title IX, its history, how one goes about complying with it? Feel free to write to me at lorraine_berry at yahoo. I am happy to send you a reading list.
Yes. I know I cross-posted this over at Kos, but I’ll be goddamned if this administration is going to fuck with either of my girls’ rights to play sports.
your pic link is not working, do you have the url for it? I can’t figure out the code.
I’m an idiot. I thought I had figured out picture-posting code. WRONG. Here it is. Thanks.
What’s the purpose of this new action by Bushco? Who exactly are they trying to please? Or is it just gratuitous cruelty because they can?
How many votes from sexism? Really?
This is so fucking outrageos. Thanks lorraine, again. Keep it up.
I’m not Lorraine but my two cents: There’s a huge undercurrent of resentment towards women’s equality and even more towards feminism. And so many men in the U.S. particularly resent the funding for women’s sports.
My scariest example is that, the last time I stopped by the freepers at New Republic — two years ago or so — they had several threads going on removing the right of women to vote.
I think it is also a supply and demand thing (Capitalism at work). For instance they’ll fund softball, but not baseball. I guess soccer is pretty big here (comparatively), but in Europe it’s a man’s sport so they don’t fund the women. I think partially they’re unsure about funding something that is risky in terms of getting an audience. Funding for athletes in solitary sports is usually better. In the communist countries, women’s sports got more “funding” – such as basketball – which was very popular.
I posted part of this as a diary shortly after booman opened:
from Jesus-Is-Savior.com
Recreational sports for women is okay with the author — as long as it is on an occasional basis. That’s funny. I missed the passage in the Bible that said, “Thou shalt not play competitive women’s basketball.”
What do we know about the Christian right? They hate America for our freedoms; they see us as a land of “weak men and disorderly women”; women should stay in the home and not play competitive sports or compete with men in the community or workplace; women do not have the right to control their lives.
Do Christian fundamentalists realize how much their screeds sound like those from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban?
besides that, who wants a wife to kick your ass one-on-one? That’s just ungodly. My might make your manhood shrivel.
The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
–Lucretia Mott
I think Sojourner Truth says it quite well:
If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it. Of course, Sojourner was being all, you know, uppity and all that. ;>)
For the gems in those quotes. I am a temporary (though long-term) transplant in these parts and language like this is incredulous to me (but gives an ambivalent, sad chuckle).
Are such statements commonplace, or is this rare and extreme? Is it more prevalent now?
Frederick Clarkson would know better since’s he’s the national expert on the theocrats, but in my opinion it’s growing. The statements we find more outrageous are the ones kicking the line of acceptability further to the right and allow for those who may have thought such things to now speak them and eventually to act upon them. Scary times.
The past few weeks, and especially this week, have really highlighted the grip the theocrats have on our government. I keep wondering if we’re going to finally see a backlash against this (and I realize we have little we can do about it), . This of course alternates with wondering if I should start thinking about what color burqa they’re going to force us to wear.
It is scary.
Well… gutting or getting rid of Title IX pleases a number of groups.
There is probably other stuff going on as well, but this is what I’ve gleaned from reading right wing sites over the years.
The National Review types are always going on and on about this topic.
Who knows what the nutjobs who can’t stand the thought of athletic girls are thinking, but the tragedy is that they’ve managed to convince W-A-Y too many ordinary folks who don’t know that much about Title IX, that it mandates discrimination against boys/mens athletics.
It all goes back to the “the government is the enemy” meme so loved by the Right. If it comes from the government (eg Title IX) it must be convoluted, devoid of common sense, and have the ultimate effect of making people miserable.
So they believe the stories of all of the schools that had to eliminate boys’ football because the school couldn’t come up with enough money to fund it and girls gymnastics, too, so Title IX required that the football team had to go, even though only two girls in the whole school wanted to do gymnastics.
At my community college, we don’t have an athletic dept or any teams, but a group of young men wanted to form a baseball team as student-run extracurricular activity. The word going around was that they would not be allowed to because there weren’t any young women organizing a softball team. No softball, no baseball allowed because of Title IX. (AARRRGGHHHH!) Total bullshit, of course, but that’s what many people think Title IX is about.
Who benefits from trashing Title IX? All of the wingers who want to win people over with their, “We’re here to restore sanity and common sense,” message. Unfortunately, lots of people buy it.
I find that it does bring people around to get out the stories of female athletes that are clearly being discriminated against, like the baseball vs softball teams described in the diary. That’s obviously unfair and when real situations like these are brought to people’s attention, they get it about what Title IX is really about.
Yep, that’s the one I hear/read most… no one ever seems to be able to present a concrete example though, just the same one you have there about the boys football having to go. And even there, they can’t say where that was.
Let’s hope enough people realize what is really going on so that this elimination of the program can be stopped or reversed.
I’ve addressed this somewhat downpost. Football is usually a sport that, except for a few programs, costs schools a ton of money to run. So, when they decide to cut a men’s sport, like wrestling for example, administrators will blame Title IX instead of football.
And the number of administrators who flat-out don’t understand Title IX is mind-numbing.
Because so many administrators don’ t know how to administer Title IX, many have done incredibly lazy things–like cutting a men’s sport to bring numbers into line. So, non-revenue men’s sports–things like wrestling and gymnastics–have been cut by schools looking to cut corners. Instead of admitting that FOOTBALL is the sacred cow that’s munching a ton of the grass, they blame Title IX, thus causing resentment against women.
I don’t know who BushCo owed this one to. Somebody wanted it, and despite the exhaustive work that his own fucking commission did, OCR made an asinine rule change that will make it much, much harder to get Title IX enforced.
Thanks for the article and link and I did go and send to my senators and also asked for more alerts.
I am very concerned about his as well, I have a teenage grand daughter that is very into sports.
I am also concerned about the decling time allowed for recess here in California schools..
This is just flat out disgusting. I like men’s sports fine and dandy but I also have a daughter. She should have the same opportunities (should she have the athletic talent) that my son has, no more, but no less either.
Herb Dempsey, the person I talk about in my post, became a crusader for Title IX after one of his five children (3 boys and 2 girls), a girl, was out playing soccer in winter weather in a flimsy uniform because her school didn’t think it was worth it to equip the girls properly. He’s been at it ever since. My experience has been that fathers who have daughters who play sports are incredible proponents of Title IX.
Found this when I posted a reply to Lorraine and just had to post this. That Sojourner Truth was an inspiration, wasn’t she?
Ain’t I a woman?
Several ministers attended the second day of the Woman’s Rights Convention, and were not shy in voicing their opinion of man’s superiority over women. One claimed “superior intellect”, one spoke of the “manhood of Christ,” and still another referred to the “sin of our first mother.”
Suddenly, Sojourner Truth rose from her seat in the corner of the church.
“For God’s sake, Mrs.Gage, don’t let her speak!” half a dozen women whispered loudly, fearing that their cause would be mixed up with Abolition.
Sojourner walked to the podium and slowly took off her sunbonnet. Her six-foot frame towered over the audience. She began to speak in her deep, resonant voice: “Well, children, where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter, I think between the Negroes of the South and the women of the North – all talking about rights – the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this talking about?”
Sojourner pointed to one of the ministers. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me any best place. And ain’t I a woman?”
Sojourner raised herself to her full height. “Look at me! Look at my arm.” She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. “I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?”
“I could work as much, and eat as much as man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman?”
The women in the audience began to cheer wildly.
She pointed to another minister. “He talks about this thing in the head. What’s that they call it?”
“Intellect,” whispered a woman nearby.
“That’s it, honey. What’s intellect got to do with women’s rights or black folks’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?”
“That little man in black there! He says women can’t have as much rights as men. ‘Cause Christ wasn’t a woman.’ She stood with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. “Where did your Christ come from?”
“Where did your Christ come from?”, she thundered again. “From God and a Woman! Man had nothing to do with him!”
The entire church now roared with deafening applause.
“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right-side up again. And now that they are asking to do it the men better let them.”
MaryScott posted a diary about this yesterday on Daily Kos. As I pointed out, Bush and his ilk are ok with certain women’s sports. They just don’t want their gentlefolk to sweat, compete, or become “disorderly.”
Perhaps Title IX will be amended to fund the following proper pursuits for the sporty GOP gal:
* The Happily Hitched Sapphic Sisters Pen-Scratch
I love it as a woman who spent many years of her girlhood playing softball, but in the summers and in a high school league. I love it as a woman who attended an all girls’ school and learned how much more often, and more frankly, women speak when they aren’t concerned about what a boy will think of what they say. I love it as a female in what is still too much of a man’s profession–the law. I love it as a member of a firm where our management–a nice, not ill-intentioned group–just planned a client golf tournament assuming only men would want to participate, but reserving one “ladies’ team”, as if it was a novelty.
Your diary brought unexpected tears to my eyes. Thank you for focusing on this issue and providing a “to do” suggestion. Your daughter has an excellent role model in you!