Note: This program originally aired on Oct. 2, 2024.
Things look much different for women in the world of sports today than they did decades ago. Women can coach, manage, and report on men’s and women’s teams. But that wasn’t always the case — and there are people to thank who helped to pave the way.
Journalist and author Melissa Ludtke is one of those people. She knows firsthand what it’s like to fight to get into a male-dominated industry.
She made headlines across the world in the late 1970s with her groundbreaking gender discrimination court case against Major League Baseball, Ludtke v. Kuhn. At the time, she was a sports reporter for Sports Illustrated. Her lawsuit fought to prevent the New York Yankees from banning a group of accredited female sports journalists from going into the team clubhouse in Yankee Stadium.
The federal court case led sports teams and leagues to treat female writers as they did the men. Separating women from men, as baseball did, was not equal, as Judge Constance Baker Motley ruled. That decision led baseball, over time, to provide equal access to women reporters to interview ballplayers in locker rooms, alongside their male peers.
She wrote "Locker Room Talk" to share her personal and professional experiences as the female plaintiff whose motives were questioned by the men who ran and wrote about baseball, and whose case was mocked by commentators and cartoonists and satirized on TV. In the court of public opinion, she lost her case, but in the court of law, she won and, as a result, opened doors through which generations of women walked through.
GUEST:
Melissa Ludtke, award-winning journalist who reported and wrote for Sports Illustrated and Time, and was the editor of Nieman Reports at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. She is the author of "Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside"
