[Each
year for the last
few, I’ve used Super
Bowl week as a platform
for a series on sports
in America. This week, I’ll be AmericanStudying figures and moments related
to women in sports, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on cheerleading in
American society and culture!]
On two reasons why
it’s wrong to limit our understanding of Title
IX to sports, and one way in which that focus can still be helpful and
meaningful.
1)
The Act and Its Histories: Title IX refers to a particularly
significant section of the Education Amendments
of 1972, a law co-authored by Indiana Senator Birch Bayh and Hawaiian
Congressperson Patsy Mink (after whom the
act was re-named in 2002). Bayh was one of a number of legislators who had
been working for some time on the Equal
Rights Amendment; due to the continued challenges they encountered in
bringing that proposed law to a vote, these lawmakers turned to other means to
advance gender equality on the federal level, including the Higher Education Act of
1965. Reflecting these sweeping civil rights goals, the language of Title
IX was purposefully broad and (as much as possible) all-encompassing: “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.”
While sports became and have remained a particularly clear and compelling case
study for and application of the law, to define Title IX as in any way a
sports-related Act is to elide precisely its status as an overt and important
extension of 1960s civil rights and Great Society programs and successes.
2)
A Vital 21st Century Battle: I don’t
think it’s much of an overstatement to note that in 1972, sexual violence
against women was hardly acknowledged as a communal or national issue at all,
much less made a focus of federal lawmaking efforts. That has, of course,
rightly and dramatically changed in the four and a half decades since Title IX,
and in the last decade sexual violence on college campuses has become a new
focus of Title IX applications. Some of the first of those applications have
been linked to sports, as when two female
students at the University of Colorado (in 2006) and one
at Arizona State University (in 2008) used the law to successfully sue
their universities for damages after being sexually assaulted by football
players. But of course the pervasiveness
of sexual assault and violence on college campuses is in no way limited to
sports, and to see this evolving extension of Title IX to these issues as
simply a sub-category of sports-related applications would be to minimize or
circumscribe our understanding of sexual assault in both an inaccurate and unproductive
way. To extend my point in item one above, sexual violence has become a new and
central civil and equal rights issue for women (and all Americans), and the continued
use of Title IX to fight that vital battle reflects the act’s civil rights origins
and legacies on one more key level.
3)
Why Sports Matter: So if we think about Title IX
in any way as a law focused on athletics, we’re doing an injustice to both its
histories and its ongoing meanings. At the same time, however, there’s no doubt
that both collegiate
and high school athletics became in the years after the act, and continue
to be in 2017, a central site of Title
IX efforts and applications. And I would argue that there are symbolic and
social as well as historical reasons to remember and celebrate that connection
of Title IX to sports. For one thing, as yesterday’s story of Babe Didrikson
Zaharias illustrates, sports in American society have long been linked to gendered
images and narratives, to stereotypes of masculinity and feminity, to ideas
about what boys and girls respectively can and should do or pursue or care
about. Yet the truth is that (all
stats from this piece), if just 7% of all high school varsity athletes in
1971 were women, and if only 16,000 women competed in collegiate athletics in
1966, those statistics reflect social, educational, and funding limitations far
more than they do gender identities or realities. How do I know that? Because
by 2001, 41.5% of high school varsity athletes were women, as were 43% of
college athletes (more than 150,000 in total) in that same year. Sports thus
offer a potent site for both providing access for all Americans and revising
limiting gender stereotypes in the process—and Title IX has played a vital role
in achieving those practical and philosophical goals.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other women and sports connections or analyses you’d share?