Why Sports Nearly Didn't Make It Into Title IX

The daughter of Representative Patsy Mink, Title IX’s legislative champion, recounts the personal drama behind the near-exclusion of athletics from the law

- GWENDOLYN MINK

POLICY-WISE, 1972 MARKED A TURNING point for Congressional action to advance equality for women. The Equal Rights Amendment, which had languished in Congress for 49 years, finally advanced to the states for consideration. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act at last gave enforcement powers to the EEOC and broadened workplace protections against discrimination based on sex, as well as race, color and national origin. And then, of course, there was Title IX, part of the Education Act Amendments of 1972, which extended the concept of gender equality to a new arena, education, by prohibiting discrimination based on sex by educational institutions that receive federal funds.

Each of these advances toward gender equality was accomplished because of a wave of feminist activism that began in the late 1960s and continued into the early 1970s among women who were determined to call out inequities and push for change. My mother, Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink, a major legislative proponent of Title IX, was one of them.

Elected to Congress from Hawaii for the first of her 12 terms in 1964, my mother's service on the House Education and Labor Committee gave her a perfect venue for advocating for gender equity in education. Title IX, in particular, arose from grassroots and individual resistance to the sex-based exclusion from educational opportunities that women experienced every day. The testimony that women in educational institutions and women's organizations shared about those experiences was essential to my mother's work and helped to crystallize her legislative imagination and that of a handful of feminist allies in Congress and the women's movement.