The tremendous growth in the number of women in high school and college athletics – more than three million today, from 300,000 in 1972 – led to an increasing professionalization of and interest in women’s sports, and the objects in the exhibition show that depth and growth: the tennis racket of Billie Jean King, 1984 Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton’s gymnastics slipper, Serena Williams’ tennis dress, jerseys from professional women’s basketball and soccer teams, and a basketball Barbie doll.
“My entire professional career has benefited from Title IX,” said Shelia Burrell, a two-time Olympian in the heptathlon and chief cross-country and track coach at San Diego State University. But when she entered UCLA on an athletic scholarship in 1990, she knew nothing about the law. “I didn’t know about it until I graduated, made two Olympic teams and then tried to get a job,” she said. Then she watched as female coaches were hired on lower rungs than men and rarely promoted.
Nancy Lough, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, College of Education who teaches peer and professional sports management and has consulted in several states about Title IX, says discrimination against women is still very much alive, but the difference is how women respond to it. She pointed to a recent Tik Tok video that went viral during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament last year. The video focuses on the women’s weight room – a small stack of hand weights – compared to the huge room for men with a huge variety of equipment. The NCAA later apologized for the inequalities.
“Students today are not willing to put up with what my generation has to endure,” said Ms. Lough, who was also a student athlete and coach. “We were the apologetic generation; we were like, ‘Oh, thanks for all you’ll get us’; and we were so thankful because we could actually exercise. These kids of today are definitely not in that place.”
Mrs. Dunkle, Mrs. Pino-Silva, Mrs. Burrell, and Mrs. Lough were all sources for the museum’s exhibit. Ms. Dunkle, who wrote a 1974 report documenting discrimination against female athletes and which became the basis for Title IX athletic regulations, donated some 20 items, including a photo of herself lighting a candle on a cake during celebrating the third anniversary of Title IX, on Capitol Hill in 1975.
“The exhibition is a celebration of how we’ve come so far in terms of equal opportunities for female students and in education,” she said in a recent interview. “And it’s also a time to focus a laser on the remaining issues, because problems we wouldn’t have even thought about in the early 1970s are now at the center of attention.”