More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The women of the 1979 Oregon State University softball team used Title IX as a tool for institutional change. Decades later, they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.
“At that time the most successful teams on campus were women’s and we had to fight with the athletic department for everything … I think I just reached my limit and felt like we had an opportunity to try to do something. I wanted justice.”
In 2015, sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini, trained as professional swimmers by their father, fled Syria with hopes of escaping their war-torn homeland. During the harrowing 25-day journey, the dinghy’s motor broke and the boat began to sink—so Yusra and Sara jumped into the frigid waters to drag the boat to shore. Eventually granted asylum in Germany, Yusra began training again at a Berlin pool and was selected to compete as part of the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Their story has been captured in The Swimmers, an evocative biographical drama directed by Sally El Hosaini and released on Netflix last month. In this Q&A, Sally El Hosaini and Yusra Mardini discuss the experience of making the film, how to tell true stories, and what they hope viewers will take away.
Brenda VanLengen is a TV sports analyst and play-by-play announcer for college women’s sports. “I’m so fortunate that [Title IX] happened when it did,” she told Ms. Without it, she explained, “I wouldn’t have the life that I do or the career that I do.”
This year, she’s embarked on a new venture to produce a docuseries about the women who grew the sport of women’s basketball before Title IX, If Not for Them.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: Women brought home 17 of Team USA’s 25 Olympic medals in Beijing; Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia Republicans target abortion rights, while Vermont passes Reproductive Liberty amendment; more Latina women are running for governor than ever before; a record 36 openly LGBTQ+ athletes competed in the Winter Olympics; and more.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Activism by women and gender minorities threatens authoritarian leaders; running for statewide executive office can be especially challenging for women; ranked-choice voting helps eliminate a split vote among women candidates; the 2022 winter Olympic games are the most gender balanced ever; how did Iceland become a model of gender parity?
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: Mississippi abortion ban threatens future of Roe v. Wade; McDonald’s employees pursue anti-sexual harassment and discrimination training; Democrats demand permanent repeal of global gag rule; California signs Equal Pay Pledge; same-gender couples face $30,000 income gap; and more.
Calls for a cultural shift in figure skating have led to small changes in terminology and costume rules and larger changes that have created a more accepting culture for women and LGBTQ+ skaters.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Just 2 percent of all U.S. governors have been women; we honor the women of color behind passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965; women outpace men in medals earned at the Olympics; women hold 30 percent of seats on most S&P 500 boards; the United States and Afghanistan have the same percentage of women in Parliament (27%); and more.
Title Nine, a women’s sport apparel company in California, recently donated $1 million to the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team in an effort to narrow the wage gap.
As for equal access, Title Nine proved pivotal in my literary career: For having missed, in the late 1990s, my deadline for a major book project, I found salvation in a part-time, holiday season warehouse packing job with the company.
When the IOC announced last winter that Tokyo 2020 would be “the first gender-equal Olympic Games,” they were touting the near 50% representation of female athletes, an all-time high.
Now that the summer games have concluded, the IOC statement turned out to be prescient in other unexpected ways: fierce feminism has been on full display for the past two weeks as athletes boldly broke norms and pushed back against sexist protocols and practices.
