(Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series.)
It’s easy to forget just how different things were 40 years ago until you listen to former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh talk about the daughter of an Oklahoma wheat farmer who changed his life.
That girl was Marvella Hern, who’d been a straight-A student, class president and national speech champion in high school when she was denied admission to the college of her choice in 1951. The rejection letter from the University of Virginia was terse: “Women need not apply.”
Bayh married that girl and has told her story again and again to explain how he became known as the father of Title IX – the 1972 federal law that forbids gender discrimination at schools that get federal aid and changed the male-dominated culture of American sports.
As the retired Indiana senator recounts it now, Marvella convinced him it was foolish to waste the brainpower of half the population by denying women access to equal opportunity in educational institutions.
“You’re not exactly asking anybody to be a profile in courage when you’re asking them to support a law that benefits so many people,” Bayh, 84, said in a recent interview. “Still, we had no idea just how far it would go.”
Championed by Bayh in the Senate and Hawaii’s Patsy Mink and Oregon’s Edith Green in the House, Title IX was signed into law by President Richard Nixon 40 years ago on June 23, 1972.
What started out as a means to compel equal access to education - especially in medical and law schools - also opened arenas of sport to girls and women in ways Bayh never imagined. There are nearly 10 times as many female players in intercollegiate athletics as there were in 1972; the number of girls in high school sports has jumped nearly 1,000 percent.
Bayh thinks those numbers would have pleased Marvella, who died of cancer in 1979. They also make him think of his father, who coached four sports at Indiana State University and told his son, back in the 1930s, that “little girls need strong bodies to carry strong minds around in, just like little boys do.”
‘Fairness to our daughters’
Much has been written about the cultural war over Title IX as schools at all levels across the nation wrestled with how to enforce it. It has been embraced and resisted, even litigated and challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. A 1984 decision involving tiny Grove City College, a private Pennsylvania school, and the 1988 Civil Rights Restoration Act extended the law’s reach to indirect federal aid such as student loans and grants.
Thus Title IX remains true today to its original intent, and even those who find fault with how its policy of equality falls short when put into practice still praise it.
“Title IX is about one thing,” said Christine Grant, the former athletic director of the Department of Women’s Athletics at the University of Iowa. “It’s about fairness to our daughters in the same way we have fairness to our sons.”
In two generations, it has changed the look of sports. Before Title IX, 1 in 27 high school girls played organized sports. Now it’s close to 2 in 5.
The number of women playing intercollegiate sports has risen more than 600 percent since the law’s inception, from less than 30,000 to more than 186,000. (That’s still less than the nearly 250,000 NCAA male athletes.)
Title IX’s impact on numbers off the field is evident, as well. In 1972, seven percent of the law degrees and nine percent of the medical degrees went to women; now nearly half those degrees are earned by women.
Bayh, who grew up on a farm in rural Indiana raising hogs, chickens and cattle, favors another barometer: Before the law was passed, less than 10 percent of the students in veterinary medicine schools were women. Today it’s nearly 80 percent.
Judith Sweet, who pushed for better compliance with the law when she served as president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the 1990s, worries there’s a downside to that progress. Sweet cites a recent email from a female student-athlete who said her teammates didn’t know the law even existed.
“That’s so common when we ask the question to young women: ‘How many of you know about Title IX?’” Sweet said. “So many of them don’t.”
It doesn’t bother Bayh quite as much to know there’s a generation of athletes who take Title IX, and his role in its passage, for granted. “Maybe that’s the way it should be,” Bayh said. “Equal rights should be a given.”
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