Patsy Mink & Birch Bayh – The Unsung Heros of the US Women’s Soccer Triumph

The subtitle of the post could be – Yes, politics matter.

A mere 40 years ago women’s soccer wasn’t a thing. Women’s sports in general were an oddity. Girls and women were discouraged from taking part in sports because some people thought that their uterus might fall out.

“Sorry Jane. You are way more experienced, but we are hiring Bill for this job because he is a man.” was a thing you could, and did, legally say. It seems crazy now, but I’m old enough to remember the bad old days.

But by the the late 1960’s and early 1970’s women were pressing to be included under the umbrella of equal rights protection established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination religion, race, color, or national origin. In 1967 President Lydon Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, which required all entities receiving federal contracts to end discrimination on the basis of sex in hiring and employment.

In 1970 an early draft of what became Title IX was authored by Representative Patsy Mink, focusing on the hiring and employment practices of federally financed institutions.

At the time, Bayh was working on numerous constitutional issues related to women’s rights, including the Equal Rights Amendment, to build “a powerful constitutional base from which to move forward in abolishing discriminatory differential treatment based on sex”.[7] As they were having some difficulty getting the ERA out of committee, the Higher Education Act of 1965 was on the floor for reauthorization, and on February 28, 1972, Senator Bayh introduced the ERA’s equal education provision as an amendment.[8]

In his remarks on the Senate floor, Bayh said, “We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex’ and it is time to change our operating assumptions.”[9]

“While the impact of this amendment would be far-reaching”, Bayh concluded, “it is not a panacea. It is, however, an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs—an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work”.[10]

Title IX became law on June 23, 1972.[11][12] When President Nixon signed the bill, he spoke mostly about desegregation busing, which was also a focus of the signed bill, but did not mention the expansion of educational access for women he had enacted.[7][13]