Title IX Scores Rewards, On and Off the Field

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law mandating equal opportunity for girls and boys in education, including sports.

Almost by accident, my high school was one of the first to be affected by the intent of Title IX. It was a private boys school that was going coed at almost the exact moment the law was signed, and the administrators were eager to be, in today’s terminology, politically correct, offering girls the same education they had offered boys for nearly 200 years.

Most of the team sports were duplicated for us, from rowing to cross-country running, soccer, lacrosse, tennis and swimming. Even ice hockey was introduced for girls while I was there. Only football and baseball were not on our list of choices. And many women took the opportunity (we called ourselves women back then, so eager were we at 17 to be taken seriously). Even if one’s first love was drama, the school newspaper or photography, it was assumed that sports was part of one’s day.

So in a way, I feel as if I had a sneak preview of what Title IX could be, were it taken to its fullest potential. The biggest impact is not felt during the hour and a half when sports are actually happening, but in the downtime between practices. It’s the self-esteem built through taking up a new sport (in my case, crew) and doing it as well as possible. It’s the idea that function is more important than form, in body-image terms. (It’s hard to look in the mirror and hate yourself when you have just completed a grueling five-mile training run.) And it is the outlook one carries into adulthood that sports are an enjoyable part of one’s life, not a dreaded part of the day. An outlook that says being active is as important as being well-read, being physically active is as legitimate as being intellectually curious and the idea of challenging yourself is as important as working in the gym to improve yourself.

In Atlanta last summer, the first full generation of women to benefit from Title IX took to the fields, the track and the pool and won 38 of the 101 Olympic medals taken home by U.S. athletes, more than any other women’s team. This remarkable performance made the clear statement that in one generation of serious greater opportunity and expanded sports programs on the college and high school level, women’s sports have caught up and even surpassed expectations.

Watching the Summer Games, I felt both proud and a bit impatient. It was like watching the rest of the world catch up to an attitude that most of the women I know have held since we were kids: “Of course women can play . . . of course we’re good at it.” Not only that, we enjoy it, and continue to be active long after our high school teams are a fading memory. A common complaint about Title IX is that it is flawed. It has been virtually impossible to enforce, definitions of compliance have defied clear-cut rules and even those athletic departments that don’t cut girls’ teams often shave other, subtler areas of the budget, in terms of new equipment, experienced coaching or transportation for teams. Still, one in three high school girls now participates in sports (compared with one in 27 in 1972), two professional basketball leagues for women are keeping post-college players in this country instead of seeing them go abroad, and there is serious talk of pro leagues for soccer and softball. On the amateur participation level, women now are more than half of all volleyball players and just under half of all bike riders, runners and soccer players.

When Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, he had no way of knowing how it would affect American women in future generations. Nor could anyone foresee the impact on those of us, now bringing up our own daughters, who have integrated sports into every aspect of our lives. It has given us a new paradigm, outside the gym and beyond the fashion magazines, where our self-image is shaped in terms of skills, achievements and commitment, not muscle tone or dress size.

I look forward to the next Olympics, when American women winning event after event no longer will be considered a story about gender breakthroughs but individuals, each one a great athlete.