Opinion: Title IX giant step in opportunity

Credit the Albuquerque Journal for launching a series on Title IX and its impact on sports, as this culture-shifting law turns 50 this year.

The series is just getting started, and the Journal says it’ll be running for weeks to come. I’m looking forward to it.

If you’re an educator, chances are you’re familiar with Title IX. It was signed into law just two years before I graduated high school, when women’s liberation was at full tilt and girls my age were growing up faster than guys like me.

I was in high school when Title IX took effect. I mainly remember six-on-six girls’ basketball, in which three forwards and three guards were split by the halfcourt line. And a few years later, I remember my sister-in-law Heather breaking barriers in cross-country and track. But mostly I remember girls’ sports years later, when I worked as a sports reporter in a new world created by Title IX.

In a way, the seeds of modern American sports began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Then came an executive order by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, prohibiting discrimination in federal contracts, pushing the law another step closer toward women’s equality in the workplace and on school campuses.

Remember that this was a time of great change, when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s inspired other movements for equality, including the Women’s Liberation Movement. From that movement came the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), explicitly outlawing all sex-based discrimination through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The ERA ultimately failed ratification by the required number of states, but Title IX had an easier path toward passage. Reps. Patsy Mink, D-Hawaii, and Edith Green, D-Oregon, along with Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, are largely credited with spearheading Title IX through the process, and in 1972, both congressional chambers passed and President Richard Nixon signed it in law.

At first, it didn’t even mention sports, but that became its primary focus after Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, proposed an exemption for revenue-producing sports. Tower’s efforts were defeated in Congress and his amendment was replaced with another by Sen. Jacob Javits, R-New York, which directed the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to include “reasonable provisions” regarding sports, taking into account that all sports aren’t equal in the money they need and the money they generate.

There have been other legislative and legal battles since then that have further defined Title IX, but they pale in comparison to the cultural impact it’s had over the last half-century. At the high-school level, it has created parallel athletic opportunities, where girls are allowed to benefit from sports just as boys have for centuries. Now, lessons in teamwork, competition and physical agility come to girls and boys alike. And our world has never been the same since.

The culture wars continue.

But there’s one thing Americans overwhelmingly agree on these days — that girls and women deserve their place in the gym and on the field just as much as the boys and men. Our schools better reflect that now than they did 50 years ago, when our nation took a giant step toward greater opportunity for all.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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