On June 23, 1972, then President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments Act. The law’s Title IX, which recognized gender equity in education as a civil right, altered women’s sports forever. That massive shift was, in part, an accident. After all, nowhere in the law did the words sport or athletics or even physical education appear.
Instead, the law was written and lobbied for as a means to address vast gender inequality and sex discrimination in education. At the time, college student bodies and faculties were still majority male. In 1970 just 59% of women in the U.S. graduated from high school, and just 8% had college degrees. Institutions like the Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine enrolled only two women a year. Some schools required women to have higher grades than men to be admitted, while others restricted the subjects women could study. When Bernice Sandler, known to her friends as Bunny, finished up her Ed.D. in counseling at the University of Maryland in ’69, she was told she wouldn’t be hired there for a full-time teaching job because she came on “too strong for a woman.” At the time, all of this was legal.
Sandler scoured federal law for some kind of action she could take and found an executive order from then President Lyndon B. Johnson that disallowed discrimination on the basis of sex for organizations that accepted federal contracts—like, for instance, many universities. She gathered examples of discrimination at institutions across the country and shared her research with Representative Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon, who held seven days of congressional hearings on sex discrimination in education in 1970. The hearings revealed stories of women who weren’t paid to teach because their husbands got a salary, or who were harassed out of engineering programs, or who were told they were too pretty to take difficult classes. These hearings laid the groundwork for Title IX, and Sandler, who died in 2019, became the law’s “godmother.”
But those taking part in the hearings “were absolutely not talking about sports,” says Susan Ware, the author of Title IX: A Brief History With Documents. Not once were women’s college athletics brought up. “The initial supporters [of Title IX] were just as surprised as the athletic departments when it became clear that this law would also apply to sports programs.”