Thom Hartmann hung up on a TIM who called in today asking about the Title IX Bill proposed by Tulsi Gabbard and he pretended like it never happened.

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[–]forwardback 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I echo your response to the hand waving about this issue by many on Ovarit. Why do some young women, many of whom claim to be feminists, fail to even search the net before being so willing to place men's interests and partisan politics over the protection of such foundationally important legislation?

Barbara Winslow, historian and teacher at Brooklyn College, eloquently described what life was like for young women before Title IX:

“Young women were not admitted into many colleges and universities, athletic scholarships for women were rare, and math and science was a realm reserved for boys. Girls square danced instead of playing sports, studied home economics instead of training for “male-oriented” (read: higher-paying) trades. Girls could become teachers and nurses, but not doctors or principals; women rarely were awarded tenure and even more rarely appointed college presidents. There was no such thing as sexual harassment because “boys will be boys,” after all, and if a student got pregnant, her formal education ended. Graduate professional schools openly discriminated against women.”

https://everfi.com/blog/colleges-universities/title-ix-positive-changes/

High up on first page of Duck Duck Go search.

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Thanks forwardback.

The passage you've quoted describes exactly what it was like prior to Title IX. But what it leaves out is that all US institutions subject to Title IX were given 6 years to implement it, and after that period institutions not in compliance were given generous grace periods so long as they had plans and intent to go along with the law (eventually). There was a lot of foot-dragging and outright barricade building.

In the late 70s and well into the 80s, sex discrimination against girls and women was a given and a norm in many areas of US education.

In 1972, I matriculated at a very prestigious, previously all-male US college/uni the first year women were admitted. But we weren't admitted on an equal basis as males - the only way the school could countenance female students was so long as the number of male students stayed the same. So we women were "add-ons" - and as a result we were outnumbered by males in our class by a ratio of 10 to 1. On the overall campus, we were a tiny minority - 100 women versus 4,000 men.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this created very different admissions standards for the two sexes. It was many times harder to gain admission to that school as a female student than as a male student.

When I graduated with highest honors in 1976, I wanted to go to grad school in architecture. But all the teachers and administrators at my undergrad institution advised against it and refused to assist me, and every program I had interviews with - Harvard, Yale, Columbia - discouraged me from applying simply because "architecture isn't a field for women." At that time, just 1% of registered architects in the US were women. By 1988 that number had risen to 4% and to 13.5% by 1999. Now it's 20%. So the progress has been much slower than in some other fields like medicine and law.

Half the students in US architecture grad programs today are female, but for various reasons women often drop out of the field.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/sunday/women-architects.html

[–]forwardback 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Six years behind you, MTwainiac. I remember.

Question for you, do you think current assault on women may have been, at least, more complicated had the ERA been ratified? It said "sex".

(I'm still mourning. It was given a 3+ year extension of ratification deadline.)

[–]MarkTwainiac 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I dunno. I'll have to think about it.

I recall marching for the ERA in DC in the late 70s, all of us dressed in white... No way back then anyone could have imagined that in 2020 we'd be fighting to hold on to our basic rights as set forth in the Civil Rights Act and Title IX, but we'd be forced to defend the very notion that biological sex is a material fact that exists and has huge implications.