‘None of this was a given’: 50 years of Title IX and fighting for equality in US education

In 1969, Bernice Resnick Sandler was a 41-year-old doctoral candidate in education at the University of Maryland, where she was also a part-time lecturer.

But while some of her male peers in her doctoral program received job offers from colleges around the country without interviewing, Sandler couldn’t even get a job interview for a tenure-track position at her own institution, according to 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Sex Discrimination, a book by Sherry Boschert published earlier this year.

That experience lit a fire under Sandler, who led a campaign with the Women’s Equity Action League to collect data on sex discrimination in universities across the country and filed more than 250 complaints against colleges and universities with the Department of Labor. That effort served as the start of an ultimately successful push to pass Title IX, the 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in any school or educational program that receives federal funding; under the Biden administration, Title IX has been interpreted to include protection for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Fifty years after the legislation’s passage, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society – Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field, on view through 4 September – surveys the enduring impacts and limits of Title IX and highlights the central roles that Sandler and other activists have played in both strengthening the law and contesting its limits.

“None of this was a given, so the transformative work that Title IX has done is certainly in large part due to the people who both conceptualized it and really pushed for institutions to fulfill promises of that law,” said Allison Robinson, a postdoctoral fellow in the museum’s Center for Women’s History and co-curator of the exhibition.

Featuring a combination of activists’ personal stories and objects, as well as objects from the museum’s collections, the exhibition explores the five-decades-long trajectory of Title IX through the five spheres in which it’s debated and shaped: in Congress and the courts, on college campuses, in sports, in classrooms, and in the future.

“The thematic approach really helps us look at the broad scope of Title IX and the different arenas where this work and action has taken place,” as opposed to only focusing on its better-known impacts on sports and sexual harassment, said Laura Mogulescu, co-curator of the exhibit and curator of the museum’s women’s history collections.

In court, activists and their opponents have sparred over defining “sex discrimination” and the boundaries of Title IX’s reach. One of the first cases in those battles, spotlighted in the exhibit, was Alexander v Yale, the 1977 case that was the first to argue that Title IX applied to sexual harassment in education. Accompanied by one male faculty member, five undergraduate Yale women – several of whom the curators interviewed for the exhibit, they said – served as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, alleging they or people they knew had experienced sexual harassment at Yale. They sought an institutional grievance procedure to deal with sexual harassment and other kinds of discrimination on campus – and while the judge ruled against the case, hundreds of college and universities across the country had implemented grievance procedures within five years.

Three years after Alexander, in 1980, Rollin Haffer, a varsity badminton player and student government advocate at Temple University, brought a class-action lawsuit against the school with eight classmates who alleged sex discrimination in women’s intercollegiate sports, the exhibit recounts. The case was settled by consent decree in 1988, with Temple agreeing to improve athletic funding and facilities for women athletes, and a judge ruling that Title IX applied to all intercollegiate sports programs.

But three decades later, female student athletes still face discrimination, as a viral TikTok video from last year, featured in the exhibit, shows. Filmed by Sedona Prince, a University of Oregon basketball player, the video shows a small rack of weights the women’s team used for training at the NCAA women’s basketball tournament before panning to a sprawling weight room reserved for the men’s team. In the aftermath, the NCAA commissioned an external gender-equity review for college basketball, which confirmed that there were “significant disparities” between treatment of the men’s and women’s teams at the championships.

The exhibit does acknowledge the gains female athletes have made over the years in both their sports and broader culture: competition outfits worn by tennis players and grand slam champions Chris Evert and Serena Williams sit alongside Newsweek covers celebrating Mary Lou Retton, the first American woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in gymnastics in 1984, and the victory of the US women’s soccer team at the 1999 Women’s World Cup.

But enduring disparities, such as those revealed in Prince’s TikTok, prove that “there’s still obviously a lot of work left to be done – and that Title IX has been an incredibly valuable tool, however, it is limited and it does not always meet the needs of students,” Mogulescu said.

That includes transgender students, who have both sought protection under Title IX and found themselves confronted with conservative groups and politicians who have tried to argue that the law prevents trans women and girls from playing on women’s sports teams (the Obama administration issued guidance in 2016 that Title IX protects students who are transgender, which the Trump administration later withdrew and the Biden administration reinstated last year). One of those trans activists featured in the exhibit is Lindsay Hecox, a long-distance runner who is attending Boise State University and suing the state of Idaho for its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which passed in 2020, making it the first state with a law banning trans women from participating in women’s sports, according to the ACLU. Since then, 17 other states have passed laws banning trans students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

As students have continued to lead fights to both end and redefine sex and gender discrimination on college campuses over the past decade, many “were inspired by earlier activists of the past”, Mogulescu said. One tactic they have borrowed: “Take Back the Night” marches, which have been popular on college campuses since the early 1980s and aim to draw attention to sexual violence. The exhibit features more than two dozen flyers and photographs from the marches from the past 30 years, showing their continued relevance even as many other aspects of life on college campuses have changed over time, Robinson said.

“The modes of publicizing and gathering people have changed over the last 50 years, particularly with the advent of social media, but … there is this real continuity and a central importance in gathering individuals in a space to demand for change that has been really powerful and effective for a very long time,” she said.

As activists seeking to end sex and gender discrimination in education continue to build and expand upon the strategies and legacies of leaders from decades past, many employ the same approach that Sandler did back in the 70s: they use their personal experiences of discrimination as an impetus to advocate for wider change, Mogulescu said.

“It’s this really fascinating story of going from individual institutions to creating a movement of advocacy to call for regulations with teeth,” she said.

“These protections weren’t written in stone from the beginning – they were created because of activists,” she added.