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Title IX provided opportunity
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“Before Title IX, the notion of equal opportunity wasn’t present. It wasn’t even an idea.”
Some of the most memorable lessons former UB women’s swimming and diving coach Dorsi Raynolds taught Katrina Sinclair had more to do with the past than the pool.
“She was an educator,” Sinclair, a UB doctoral student who graduated in May says of Raynolds. “She made sure we understood how female athletes were given the opportunity to compete by telling us the history and describing the battles.”
Many of those opportunities derive from what is known as Title IX, a small part of the larger Educational Amendments Act of 1972.
Sinclair wrote her dissertation on the history of Title IX, a law originally meant to address gender discrimination in education that eventually would be applied to high school and college athletics as well.
Sinclair’s work focuses on how Title IX relates to sports and she says that competing for Raynolds as an undergraduate led to her asking the kinds of questions she addressed in her graduate work.
“It’s important to realize, especially for female athletes, that it wasn’t a given that girls and women would be provided with an opportunity to take part in sports,” Sinclair says. “Before Title IX, the notion of equal opportunity wasn’t present. It wasn’t even an idea.”
In fact, few supporters of Title IX, signed into law 40 years ago on June 23 by President Richard Nixon, had any idea that it would transform intercollegiate athletics. The bill did not mention sports, but Sinclair says there were some people who glimpsed the future, including Sen. Birch Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who was the bill’s chief Senate sponsor.
But understanding the bill’s potential was only the beginning to implementing its possibilities and several groups worked to create awareness for Title IX.
“Because of the larger women’s movement going on in the 1970s, there was a network of organizations that pulled together from different areas, including the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Equity Action League,” notes Sinclair.
The Women’s Sports Foundation would later play a key role, she explains. Founded in 1974 by tennis great Billie Jean King, it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that this group started leading the movement in terms of creating awareness.
Much of the work accomplished by these groups was a competition itself, with the push for equality and opportunity frequently met with resistance and controversy.
“Most of the athletic directors of the time were male and fought against the requirements with arguments that claimed that the legislation took opportunities away from men’s sports,” Sinclair says. “But there was that core group of activists who made sure Title IX didn’t get cut away.”
Even now, 40 years after becoming law, she says Title IX is still a present debate.
“And rightly so,” she says. “This is a fundamental right—the right to have an opportunity.”
But while Title IX’s supporters may be prominent, its historical opponents are more difficult to find.
“It’s difficult to find the backlash, to find evidence of those who argued so strongly against Title IX,” she says.
In the mid-70s, Yale University had been co-educational for only a few years. Even before Title IX was implemented, the university established a women’s crew team, with two members who would go on to compete in the Olympics. Yale may have created an opportunity for its female athletes, but it failed to provide them with facilities equal to those of men competing in the same sport. When advocates failed to convince the Yale administration of a disparity, The New York Times wrote a story that drew national attention and helped convince school leaders of the need to improve conditions for Yale’s female athletes.
Sinclair went to Yale to do research, but the process was frustrating.
“I wasn’t allowed to see the complete records from that time,” she recalls. “Even some of the files I did see had some of their contents removed.”
She worked around gaps in the historical record, and looks optimistically to the future.
“We are already witnessing some integration of men’s and women’s teams—competing together, training together and traveling together,” she says. “Some of that is budgetary—done to save money—but who knows where female athletes will be in 10 years?”
What is certain for Sinclair is the need to move beyond participation and begin looking at other areas of athletics.
“We talk about how Title IX created opportunities for female athletes to compete, but we don’t talk about the difficulties women face in coaching and athletic administration,” she says. “I think this is still a battle that needs to be fought. It is still a concern.”
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