ReThink History: Title IX

society, culture, history · EN-US

For most of American history the doors were simply bolted shut. Women were capped by quota at medical and law schools, turned away from the lab and the locker room, pushed out for being pregnant, and told that competition was unladylike. Then, in 1972, thirty-seven words slipped into a federal education law and quietly pried those doors open: no person, on the basis of sex, could be excluded from any education program receiving federal funds. Title IX never mentions sports, harassment, or quotas, yet it would fill medical schools, build the pipeline to the WNBA and the U.S. women's national soccer team, become the nation's main tool against campus sexual assault, and, half a century later, land at the Supreme Court over who counts as a woman in the first place. This 10-part ReThink History series tells the whole story: the godmother who filed complaints against hundreds of colleges and the congresswomen who'd been turned away from medical school; the football establishment that fought