Title IX

This is it:

Fifty years ago, this brief provision was inserted into the education law of the United States, and it’s been long enough to be big news now, in the manner of other public anniversaries. Thirty years ago, my sister Helen Bannan-Baurecht was so concerned that this milestone be remembered that she created a great T-shirt and organized a commemoration at Florida Atlantic University where she was director of Women’s Studies. Those who saw it often didn’t know what the shirt meant.

How long does it take to see how many women are on the incoming wave? My local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, published a twelve-page “commemorative edition” with a two-page center spread of area women athletes and coaches. Lots of stories, lots of sports. Maybe they’ll get front-page coverage more often in the future. Or mentions on the local news.

This year’s historical coverage of Title IX also fascinates me. In the New York Times, Remy Tumin emphasizes its durability in contrast to two other landmarks for women in that era, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Roe vs. Wade decision, yet she calls it a “notable whisper.” U.S. Congresswomen Edith Green of Oregon and Patsy Mink of Hawaii chose to apply the language of the Civil Rights Act to end gender bias in admissions to educational institutions, but they wanted to do it “‘not by making a huge social movement driven by an aggressive stance for education equality,’ said Dr. Elizabeth A. Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. ‘They did so very subtly and quietly, and they did that on purpose because they anticipated that this idea — that we should name certain things as sex discrimination in education — could be politically contentious and they were better off finding ways to downplay it.’”

In the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins has another origin story. She begins: “One thing you learn from watching athletes closely is that muscle isn’t power and in fact can be pretty clumsy and useless. Movement is power — mobility. It’s the tremendous sense of movement created by Title IX over the past 50 years that matters. And sometimes the most powerful movements are the stealthiest.” She’d interviewed Pat Summitt, the late women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, who accepted Jenkins calling her “subversive.” In contrast, Jenkins calls Billie Jean King “the law’s most powerful original lobbyist,” and quotes her: “I’m interested in the women’s movement but from an action point of view, not an intellectual one.”

Jenkins sweeps by male coaches’ whining about the deprivations they’ve suffered to arrive at this: “Title IX didn’t lay waste to men’s athletic programs. Title IX laid waste to everything. It laid waste to ideas — men’s ideas of what women were capable of, but most importantly, women’s ideas about themselves.” And then this:

When you cure the perception of emotional frailty and physical incompetence in a young woman, you kill the idea that there are some things she is constitutionally unfit to do. And you seed a new idea in her, that she has the inalienable right to choose her professional interest and to work at it with an unembarrassed shouting passion.

So from stealth and whispers, we arrive at “an unembarrassed shouting passion.” I think of WOC actions from Pink Smoke and other Vatican brouhahas to witnesses in cities all over the United States. When Jenkins arrives at this:

Those twin towers, King and Summitt, understood that what kills ambition is an utterly impassable obstacle. They set out to remove what MIT’s first female president, Susan Hockfield, once called “the quiet oppression of ‘impossibility.’”

I think of Roman Catholic Women Priests and other persons of all genders who have been “irregularly” ordained, in the view of some. All reject their own oppression under the strictures of Canon Law and church tradition.

Let’s celebrate the revolution that Title IX symbolizes and appreciate that a wide discussion of overcoming gender inequality benefits all of us. With Susan B. Anthony, let us find failure impossible. Even Jesus said (Mark 10:27) “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.” Embrace all possibilities!