Jo Freeman Reviews: Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX
Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX
By Sara Fitzgerald
Published by Ann Arbor, MI: U. Michigan Press, 2020
Reviewed by Jo Freeman
This is an excellent case study of a nation-wide problem.
The universities and colleges of the 1960s might be politically liberal but were culturally conservative, especially when it came to employment. Each discipline or department favored people who looked and thought like those who were already there. For faculty and other professional jobs, women were hired reluctantly and paid poorly. Getting professional recognition and better pay was like swimming through mud. For non-professional jobs, no one thought it strange that women were generally over-qualified when they started and soon hit the glass ceiling. That’s simply the way it was.
Enter the women’s movement. Women who had put up with sex discrimination in previous years, if they even recognized that it existed, began to question the status quo. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor became the site of a major battle which went on and on and on.
In 1970, feminist flowers were bursting out all over the country and many of them had thorns. In Ann Arbor lawyer Jean Ledwith King organized a chapter of FOCUS on Equal Employment for Women. In Maryland, psychologist Bunny Sandler was looking for a way to challenge her rejection by the University of Maryland for a full-time faculty job. At that time, the one civil rights law that included "sex," excluded faculty. By extensive reading Sandler discovered that Executive Order 11375 added sex to Executive Order 11246. Together they prohibited sex (and race) discrimination by holders of federal contracts and also required affirmative action. Most institutions of higher education had federal contracts. Sandler, acting through the Women’s Equity Action League, filed a complaint against the University of Maryland in January of 1970.
That year, the author was a student at the University of Michigan, writing for the student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. "Women" and "discrimination" became her beat. She got to know many of the people involved in the subsequent struggle. Years later she went through extensive archival documents, oral histories and interviews to describe what each side did.
It was a three-sided wrestling match, which the author documents in detail. The University was just beginning to grapple with race discrimination. It didn’t understand what the women were complaining about and, for a while at least, didn’t care.
As women tackled employment discrimination, they discovered more and more inequities. The University intentionally admitted more men than women, even though women had better qualifications. Among those admitted, men got more money. Women were not allowed on the marching band or into several clubs. Job ads called for "student wives."
Capturing the essence of the traditional view toward women was a bas relief sculpture on the side of a major building. One side was called "The Dream of the Young Girl." It featured a woman holding a baby while a young child clutched her skirts. The other side was called "The Dream of Young Men." It featured an ocean voyage. It took 34 years to get it relocated to someplace less obvious.
In 1972 the author became the first woman to be editor-in-chief of the Daily. Some took a while. The first female president of UM took office in 2002. In a final chapter the author describes how different UM is today.
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