During a landmark week in 1970, lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol bore witness to the ugliest realities of an educational system that was anything but equal. They listened to testimony from undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and professional women who had been discouraged from participating in school activities, laughed out of degree programs, and dissuaded from pursuing their academic and professional passions. As the women’s testimonies made clear, sex discrimination in higher education was a pernicious reality.
Ann Sutherland Harris, an assistant art history professor at Columbia University at the time, was one of the women who testified at the hearings hosted by the Congressional subcommittee tasked with investigating gender equality in higher education. She explained that male faculty members told her female students things like “You’re so cute. I can’t see you as a professor or anything,” “We expect women who come here to be competent, good students, but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original,” and “Why don’t you find a rich husband and give this all up?” It was all part and parcel of a reality Harris called “psychological warfare.”
The hearings were the first step toward Title IX, a watershed law enacted in June 1972 that outlawed gender discrimination in federally funded education and opened up new opportunities for women in the decades that followed. Here’s how the law was passed—and why it was so urgently needed to protect women who endured harassment, discouragement, and discriminatory treatment at all levels of education.
Incomplete civil rights protections
Title IX has its roots in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation and banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Those protections applied to private employment and public accommodations, but Title VI of the law, which applied to federally funded entities like public schools, colleges, and…