How Title IX Changed the World
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 turns 50 this year. Which doesn’t seem possible, because I was a high school freshman that year. (Stopping to count on my fingers.) Oh well, time flies when you’re kicking doors open, I guess.
The language of Title IX is dry, straight-forward, and clear: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” It does not sound like a revolutionary call to arms.
The stories surrounding its passage are anything but dry. For the last few weeks I’ve been following Nancy B. Kennedy’s weekly blog posts about Title IX: https://www.nancybkennedy.com/happy-50th-to-title-ix/
I’ve cheered for the wins, growled at the egregious acts of exclusion, and laughed out loud at brass comments by shin-kicking women and their male allies. Sometimes all in one blog post.
I strongly recommend Nancy’s blog for anyone who is interested in women’s history, the history of sports, or especially the history of women in sports.
Nancy will be posting Title IX stories throughout the year. If you have a Title IX-adjacent story to share, she’d love to hear from you, and I’d love to read about it. (You can contact her here.)
* My favorite line so far: “Is it too much for the democratic process to ask you to put your pants on?”
Dr. Mary Walker–Two Ways
This is more of a public service announcement than a blog post. Women’s History Month is almost here and cool things are popping up in my in box that I am eager to share.
For those of you who live in or near Hopewell, New Jersey, Independence: The True Story of Dr. Mary Walker will be playing at the Hopewell Theater on March 20. (It was originally scheduled to run there in March, 2020, but you know how that went.) The play is a one-person show about, surprise, Dr. Mary Walker, Civil War surgeon, suffragist, reformer, and shin-kicker. You can read information about the show here. Tickets are available from the Hopewell Theater here. The promo code to waive online ticketing fees is INDEPENDENCE22.
For those of you who are not close enough to attend the play* but are interested in Dr. Mary Walker, I recommend Theresa Kaminski’s Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War: One Woman’s Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women’s Rights . It’s an excellent biography of an often difficult woman who helped change the world.
*In another time, under different conditions, I would have been tempted to meet my BFF in New Jersey for a Women’s History Month weekend.
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And speaking of Women’s History Month, I am busy organizing my fourth year of mini-interviews with people doing interesting work in the field of Women’s History, including Theresa Kaminski. She has a new book coming out about Dale Evans, Queen of the West.
Don’t touch that dial!
Jeanne Mammen, “Neue Frau”
And speaking of the “New Woman,” as I believe we were, allow me to introduce you to German artist and illustrator Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) whose life and work in the 1920s and 1930s embodied the “Neue Frau” in Berlin.
Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890, but her family moved to Paris when she was 10. She studied art at the Académie Julien in Paris, then at the Académie Royal des Beaux-Arts in Brussels When her family was forced to return to Berlin in 1915 due to the war, she earned her living through her art, creating illustrations for the large number of magazines targeted at female customers.
Much of her work from the interwar years focuses on the lives of women in Berlin. In her drawings and watercolors in particular, she depicts socialites, members of the demi-monde, and the growing class of white collar workers on Berlin’s streets and in its bars, cafés and theaters. Whether creating caricatures for the satirical magazines that flourished during the Weimar republic or intimate drawings of women’s lives for more general magazines, Mammen combined satire with emotion.
When the Nazis took over in 1933, most of the magazines she worked for were discontinued or bought into the party line. Mammen no longer had a market for her intimate images of women, with their elegant lines and hint of decadence. Unwilling to build a new life in a foreign country for a second time, she refused to flee Germany. She survived by taking small commissions, selling books from a hand cart, and accepted a little help from her friends.