Free Course Correction by Ginny Gilder Page A

his freshman year on the Old Campus, his upper-classman’s life at Branford College, and his tenure with the radio station, but he somehow neglected to mention that the school was only for men. Of course, I knew nothing about the status of girls and women beyond my school’s front door. It was normal for mothers not to work. I didn’t wonder why mine didn’t. Fritzi’s mom was a lawyer, but I knew she was special, especially because she passed the New York State bar exam without ever attending law school.
    I didn’t know that in those days, marriage automatically excluded women from employment and educational opportunities; even Luci Baines Johnson, the daughter of President Lyndon Johnson, was refused readmission to Georgetown University’s School of Nursing following her marriage, as the school did not permit married women to matriculate.
    I didn’t know that Billie Jean King won her first Wimbledon title in women’s doubles as a seventeen-year-old in 1961, long before she turned pro in 1968, and was never offered a college scholarship. I didn’t know that women were considered too weak to run as far as men and were, in fact, barred from doing so. In 1966, a woman secretly ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time, although she didn’t enter the race. Bobbi Gibb hid in some bushes near the starting line and waited until about half the entrants passed, then jumped out and ran without a number. In 1967, the first woman formally entered the race, but because she used her initials on her entry form, “K. V. Switzer,” her name slipped by the race officials. Around the four-mile mark, one of the race’s cofounders, Jock Semple, recognized Kathrine Switzer forwho she was and physically accosted her, yelling, “Get the hell out of my race.” After escaping from his grasp, she managed to complete the full 26.2-mile course without further incident.
    I didn’t know that colleges all over the country were closed to women. For example, Virginia state law prohibited women from admission to the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Virginia, the most highly rated public institution of higher education in the state: only under court order in 1970 was the first woman admitted. Yale was not the only Ivy League school that reserved its hallowed halls for half the educable population. Princeton University was for men only, while Brown, Columbia, and Harvard maintained affiliations with women’s colleges (Pembroke, Barnard, and Radcliffe), but remained single-sex institutions. Only Cornell and University of Pennsylvania were well ahead of their Ivy League brethren, accepting women beginning in 1870 and 1880, respectively.
    I was too young to notice the sea changes rippling through American culture at the time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 expanded access to the Constitution’s promise of equal opportunity and represented a national commitment to end discrimination. The legislation prohibited discrimination in employment based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion, but didn’t address access to education. In 1965, President Johnson extended the antidiscrimination laws when he signed Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. He amended the order, effective October 13, 1968, to include discrimination based on sex, thus preparing the legislative soil for the passage of Title IX.
    Against this backdrop, all the Ivies began accepting women. Yale accepted its first female undergraduates as transfer students in 1969 but capped the number of admits to satisfy its restless alums, who doubted the wisdom of such a monumental change. That same year, a part-time lecturer at the University of Maryland, Bernice Sandler, became the first complainant to invoke Executive Order 11246 to fight for her job and equal pay. In applying the rationale that