<p>mom- my wife ran the 60 yard dash indoors on the boys team as a sophomore. She beat every boy but one. Next year there was an indoor girls team.</p>
<p>As a kid in middle school she ran a race at summer day camp where all the kids boys and girls ran together- one lap around the track so supposedly a 1/4 mile. It was boys and girls and they went from the 6th to 9th grade. She was in 6th grade and shy as could be so she was pushed to the far outside of the track. She ran the entire race in the far out side lane. She did not know she could cut in. She still won. That camp counsellor was the HS boys coach that talked her into running track.</p>
<p>Tom - good for your wife! I never gave it a thought…I played this sport and had since i was alittle girl and I was good enough to beat enough boys to make the team. I really never gave it a thought and my mother was a very modern woman ahead of her time and my father grew up in a immigrant family where the women were strong so it never occurred to me that I couldn’t try out for the team. I really didn’t realize that it was unusual and I was also going to ballet classes 2x a week so I was a girly girl…just quite good at my favorite sport. Over time, I earned my respect, just like the guys earned their respect from team mates. The BEST thing about Title IX was that it gave MORE kids the opportunity to play on teams…if you are fielding a girl’s team AND a guy’s team that is for some sports twice as many kids that can participate. The worse thing about Title IX is jiggering of things that have to happen these days to make “equal” please everyone’s definition of equal.</p>
<p>Title IX does not require things to be equal; it only requires educational programs and activities to be non-discriminatory on the basis of sex.</p>
<p>I think the OP’s question is an interesting one–I think that often there isn’t really a rationale for the status quo (although you can always find one or more). In my opinion, before Title IX women’s sports weren’t emphasized because it was simply accepted by the vast majority of people that competitive sports were primarily for boys. There simply weren’t many people weighing the pros and cons of sports for girls. Title IX was part of a much bigger shift in attitudes about women’s roles in society.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I was the fastest runner in my elementary school. Boys showed up at my door to race me. But then when school track started, the boys ran and I stopped. My parents and I didn’t really think about it. None of us even considered asking if I could be on the track team.</p></li>
<li><p>When it came time to choose band instruments, I wanted to play the trumpet. The band director said no, that girls play the flute or clarinet. My mom and I looked at each other and decided on the flute (which I always hated and quit after a couple of years.) But neither my mom nor I even considered saying “too bad, it’s the trumpet.”</p></li>
</ol>
<p>These two experiences give me an appreciation of how easy it is to go along with the status quo, whether it is sexisim, racism, or whatever. I have such respect for the ones who challenge it because for most of us, it doesn’t even cross our minds.</p>
<p>I remember it well. The context is the end of the 1960’s, with all the social changes wrought by Vietnam and drugs and music and the rest, with Title IX being then the smaller part of a general movement perhaps summarized by the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was also passed by Congress in 1972, but it failed to gain approval in the states. Title IX was signed into law by Richard Nixon, who also backed the ERA. The ERA needed ratification from the South, which it did not get. (The mountain states also didn’t ratify it.) </p>
<p>So, the reason Title IX was passed was equality. It was bluntly obvious that women were being discriminated against in athletics. The usual excuses were made: women don’t want to be athletes; women aren’t as naturally competitive as men; women are frail creatures who need to be protected. (As a note, you could take many of the arguments against and substitute a racial reference and you’d have a recitation of many of the pre-Civil War justifications for slavery and then the justifications for Jim Crow.) </p>
<p>I don’t want to over-emphasize the 60’s. The 20’s and then WWII had as much effect on changing the roles of women - and freeing them. The 60’s brought it home again and I suppose that repetition of the truth eventually sunk in. As much as males wanted to think Rosie the Riveter was an exception and that women wanted to return to domestic chores, the repetition eventually persuaded enough people. </p>
<p>As for why it was necessary at the college level, that’s an interesting question. As much as we may think of schools as bastions of “liberality”, opening minds, teaching, etc., the truth is they tend to be deeply conservative, clubby and run by a relatively small group of powerful people. These were all men. And all white men and all Christian. In that era, they didn’t admit more than the quota of Jews and the idea of Asians and South Asians was far-fetched except for the one guy they could point to as theirs. Some schools limited the number of Catholics. It’s important to remember this context, that Title IX wasn’t necessary to address a single, isolated problem in an otherwise great system but that Title IX was one piece of a larger social struggle.</p>
My thought is that most of those justifications and arguments are post hoc–nobody decided to enslave Africans because they reasoned that this was the natural order, or that Africans were simple people who needed discipline, etc. They did it because they could, and the justifications came later. I think gender roles were the result of long-established cultural norms, and the arguments and justifications were cooked up later simply to defend the status quo–by those who benefitted from it.</p>
<p>re that worksheet assignment boys/girls… Perhaps the teacher was looking for stereotypes among the students so s/he could work on dismantling them.</p>
<p>I resented so many things about gender differences in the 1960’s. Boys could have paper routes at 12, girls 16 (so when my younger brother went off to Boy Scout camp I was forced to go with my mother to cover his route- the deal not being that I couldn’t do it myself but that I was forced to help). Cheerleading was the only big time athletic outlet for girls (sports club competing among the same school athletes was nothing). Boys has summer Little League - nothing for girls (this was before soccer became big). 6 on 6, keep to your side of the court basketball, sigh. I wonder if I would have been more phyically active if I could have done something such as running- none of the girl’s sports helped the uncoordinated.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder Women’s Lib was big time. Birth control freed up so many women from the past role in society. The Civil Rights Movement also got people thinking outside the box and this translated to gender as well as racial equality. Big social changes. Currently I believe we are also seeing this as the American demographic is changing from the white European male supremacy…</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the premise and wording of the thread title (no pun intended) is a matter of opinion, and not fact.</p>
<p>One could reasonably argue that the Title IX portions of the Education Amendments of 1972 were not necessary at all and were and have been misguided, misinterpreted and misused.</p>
<p>But I have always taken a firm stand never to discuss politics (or religion) on online fora so . . .</p>
<p>Hunt, actually the justifications for slavery and then Jim Crow were made at the time. The arguments included that blacks were weak of mind, that they lacked the competitive urges of white men to take charge and run things, that they needed to be protected from things that might hurt them (like education). All versions of the way we express dominance as flowing from the natural order.</p>
<p>I used to coach basketball. When I coached an 8th grade girls team one year we used to scrimmage the boys once/week. We had to stop when the parents of the boys found out and thought that it was “hurting” the boys confidence because the girls kept winning…:D.</p>
<p>My mom played basketball at a Big 10 school in college, no money for it back then, no recognition either, but she still had fun. My MIL would have been a DI recruit in a couple sports if she had the opportunity. Her brothers were all college DI and one even played in the pros. As it was, she didn’t even get to go to college. Too bad she wasn’t 20 years younger.</p>
My quibble with this is just the phrase “at the time.” Enslavement of Africans started long before American Southernors developed justifications for it to ease their consciences (and Jim Crow was, in my opinion, a rearguard action trying to maintain as much of that status quo as possible). I’m just saying that the first people to enslave Africans probably didn’t have–or need–any justification other than power. Gender roles are perhaps a bit different, but a lot of them are so ancient that we don’t really know where they came from. Someday people will look at some of our actions and scoff at our justifications for them–it’s just hard to predict which actions those will be.</p>
<p>My son plays Volleyball and is very good at it, but not great. Due to title IX there are now a total, yes, a total of 104 full scholarships for Men’s Volleyball at any college level. The number for women is now up to 9,000 across the NCAA, NAIA, etc… (albeit not all fulls). So, pray tell, let me know how that is fair? Title IX in nothing more than social engineering, just like the fallacy of “diversity” on the campus…</p>
<p>men’s sports grant 239 scholarships and women 223.
football takes 85 or 35% of the total. Cut football to 60 and there are the volleyball scholarships plus.</p>
<p>There’s over 23000 football scholarships for men, and 0 for women. If you are concerned about fairness and lack of opportunity, why aren’t you protesting this? The difference is far larger than it is for volleyball.</p>
<p>Guess it’s “social engineering” when you don’t get what you want, and “tradition” when you do.</p>