Free Course Correction by Ginny Gilder Page B

higher institutions of learning, as recipients of federal funding, could not legally discriminate against women, she planted the seeds for Title IX.
    From there, the first flakes of change coalesced rapidly, and thegrowing clamor for legislation snowballed over the next three years. Representative Martha Griffiths (a Democrat from Michigan) gave the first speech in Congress focused on discrimination against women in education on March 9, 1970. Only three weeks later, Harvard University gained the dubious distinction as the site of the country’s first contract-compliance investigation of sex discrimination.
    During the following summer, Representative Edith Green, a Democrat from Oregon, in her capacity as chair of the subcommittee that dealt with higher education, took the first legislative steps that resulted in the passage of Title IX, overseeing the first congressional hearings on the topic of education and employment for women. She partnered with Representative Patsy Mink, a Democrat from Hawaii, to draft the legislation that would prohibit sex discrimination in education.
    The first woman of color elected to Congress, Mink had extensive and relevant personal experience. Turned down by twenty medical schools, she completed law school instead, only to discover no law firm would hire her. Motivated to fight to remove the barriers she encountered, she entered politics.
    In 1972, Mink and Green introduced, and Congress passed, the legislation whose preamble reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” With his signature, President Nixon enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments, codified as United States Code, Title 20, Chapter 38, Sections 1681–1686.
    Title IX applies to all educational institutions receiving federal financial assistance, from kindergarten through graduate school. It addresses ten key areas, including access to higher education, career education, education for pregnant and parenting students, employment, learning environment, math and science, sexual harassment, standardized testing, and technology, and extends to all of an institution’s operations, including admissions, recruitment, educational programs and activities, course offerings and access, counseling, financial aid, employment assistance, facilities and housing, health and insurance benefits and services, and scholarships. And athletics.
    The first women who enrolled as freshmen at Yale graduated in 1973, a year before I submitted my application. I started my freshman year with a student body that was still two-thirds male. When I started rowing, I had no idea I was entering a cultural battleground, where the fight to define femininity commingled with the fight for equality. Only four years earlier, a Connecticut judge had rejected a high school girl’s petition to join the boys’ indoor track and cross-country team because there were no girls’ teams, declaring, “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls.”
    The women’s rowing program at Yale started as a club sport in the fall of 1972 and retroactively earned varsity status in 1974, after only two years, thanks to a strong showing that spring racing season. That year also marked the establishment of the Eastern Association of Women’s Rowing Colleges and the first EAWRC Sprints Regatta in which the Yale women’s eight took second behind their instant nemesis, Radcliffe. Nineteen schools participated in that spring competition, held in Middletown, Connecticut: the first championship competition for women in any sport, in any Division I conference, although back then women’s rowing was not exactly on the roster of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA)