“You’ve come a long way baby!” used to be the tag line for a series of Virginia Slims cigarette commercials when those commercials were allowed to be aired on television and printed in magazines. They showed a devastatingly attractive young woman with an immensely long Virginia Slims cigarette dangling between her tapered fingers, a pearly white come hither smile on her face and an alluring gaze in her eyes along with the tag line “You’ve come a long way baby!” to signify the emergence of women at work, in politics and in public life generally on their way to complete equality with men. The advertising campaign began in 1968 just as the women’s movement was taking off advocating for, among other things, the Equal Rights Amendment.
As a part of that discussion and in order to further women’s equality, Title IX was introduced in 1972. Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. The act was passed to further the prospects not really of “people” per se but rather of women specifically, although some transgender activists have tried to invoke Title IX in their quest to participate in school athletics and in their struggle for recognition and equality.
When I began teaching at Mitchell High School in 1982 there was no girls’ volleyball, Competitive Cheer and Dance, high school soccer or softball etc. Basically, a girl could run track or cross-country, play basketball, tennis, golf or compete in gymnastics and cheer for a boys’ team and that’s it. We’ve made great strides since then in providing equal athletic opportunities for girls.
Title IX used to mean just “equal opportunity”, whether or not females took advantage of it was completely up to them as long as the opportunity to avail themselves of it was there. That’s what this country is based on, equal opportunity not equal results. Everyone should have a fair shake in life but not everyone is going to have the success of a Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Bill Gates and in life there are no guarantees. Over the years however, Title IX morphed from meaning equal opportunity into a federal mandate of rigidly equal numbers of male and female participants. More than 400 men’s sports programs at the collegiate level have been eliminated (mostly wrestling, swimming and track and field programs) so that the number of male and female participants in intercollegiate sports is roughly equal. When I taught at Mitchell High School I also directed plays and musicals. MHS Activity Directors loved me. Not only were the shows quality productions but also our participation numbers made MHS look good for the Title IX report. My plays were always 2 to 1 females over males and musicals were 3 to 1 more gals than guys. Those numbers helped make up for football where lots of young men were out for the sport. That imbalance in participation numbers for the plays and musicals wasn’t an attempt to appease the Title IX gods but instead a function of the fact that many more young women were interested in those extra-curricular activities than young men.
The relative success of a female program also doesn’t matter to the Title IX bureaucrats. Success for a woman’s sport is nice but the criteria remains equal number of male and female participants and not equal opportunities for women compared to men. For example gymnastics has long been a powerhouse successful program in Mitchell but the number of high school girls in the sport over the years is nothing compared to the number of high school boys in wrestling, for example. The fact that MHS Girls’ State Gymnastics titles vastly outnumber Boys’ State Wrestling titles cuts no ice with the administrators enforcing Title IX, it’s raw numbers that matter not equal opportunities or even the outstanding successes of girls’ programs that counts.
People take equal opportunity for women and girls seriously, and they should. I recall working at the Corn Palace as a tour guide in the 1990’s when the theme was “Sports”. The murals depicted a number of sports with both men and women featured, however not in the same panel. The women were concentrated on the south side of the Corn Palace where the Corn Palace Plaza is now and the men were on the front of the building. It was that time of the summer when the murals were being removed in order to put up the next year’s theme. The south side murals are always the first to go leaving a completed front of the Corn Palace for photo opportunity purposes for tourists as long as possible. That’s when a feminist from Texas stormed in and complained to me that Mitchell was discriminatory and didn’t we know about Title IX!?! I tried to placate and reason with her but to no avail. She left her address and wanted the Mayor of that time to respond.
I was delegated to reply instead on behalf of the Corn Palace and the City of Mitchell. I sent her a picture postcard that showed the complete building, which included views of the women’s sports panels along with a snap shot (yes, cameras with film were still a thing at that time) of the billboard that was then in the TMA parking lot which had all of the MHS state championships in various sports, boys’ and girls’, over the years displayed on it and a letter explaining that the redecoration process was in fact a process and something had to come off in order to facilitate redecoration and that something was never the designs on the front of the building first. I sent it certified mail with a return receipt so I know she got it but I never heard anything from her again.
The Corn Palace displays the banners of past high school championships of boys’ and girls’ MHS basketball teams as well as a DWU basketball championship banner. The boys’ banners are all in chronological order while the MHS girls’ banners are a misplaced mishmash of years. Is it too much to ask for a little pride, consideration, respect and equality in the display of the girls’ banners too?