These Are the Bodies

would be frozen. When we came back in, your hands would stick to the ore because they'd be frozen. Then, after hours of training in the wind and the rain and the snow, it's time for the Yale men's rowers to hit the showers. The women didn't get showers. They had to wait on an unheeded bus. While every last Yale member of the men's rowing team would shower, come out steaming pink, and the women were shivering. They were getting pneumonia. The women petitioned Yale for their own shower facilities.

For months, no help came. Finally, the women were like, all right, we've had enough of this, And so one frigid evening. Waiting there on that unheeded bus, wet and shivering, the members of the nineteen seventy six Yale Women's Crew team hatched a plan. They decided to do something really bold, and the impact of what they did continues to be

felt today. To peacefully protests their plight, yasies had to strip for their rights, that old nine Hadden and Plain sign a message clear as day, let us play, Let us Play. I'm Sean Braswell and welcome to The Threat, a podcast where we unraveled the stories behind some the most important lives and events in history. This season, we began with a major event in sports districts. That goal

of Women's World Cup marked a pivotal moment. Brandy Chastain's penalty kick had the weight of women's soccer on it. If she scored it, there was gonna be one story and it was going to change soccer and change the way people thought about soccer. If she didn't, maybe that doesn't happen, but it did happen, and one of the reasons it happened for THEE were the efforts of the women who wore the USA jersey before them, Starting with the very first women's national team team had literally nothing.

I think we maybe went home with a T shirt. That first team played under harsh conditions for little pay and even less recognition, but they were given something more valuable, a chance to play. That was because of Title nine, the law that banned sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. But a law like Title nine means nothing if it is not enforced, which is why what the women of the Yale crew team decided to do that cold winter

in ninety six still means so much. When you think back before Title nine, which is before nineteen seventy two, you have to imagine world that's really hard to conceive of today. Karen Blumenthal is a journalist and author of Let Me Play, The Story of Title nine, the law that changed the future of girls in America. Back then, women were really second class. There were almost no organized sports for girls. You could play tennis, you could swim, maybe you could run track, but that was it, just

the individual sports. For most of American history, sports was the exclusive preserve of men. Women were expected to be feminine and delicate and to avoid strenuous activity. It was often said that quote nice girls don't sweat, and when women and girls were allowed to take the playing field, it was not to play the same sports as men or in the same way today. Miss Undergraduate plays field hockey.

She has an enthusiastic archer, and since the game was always to combine, stenu was exercised with grace and charm. She participates in the modern dance. I think the best way to think about that period is almost to imagine it as a treehouse which says on the outside, no girls allowed. Susan Ware is a historian an author of Game Set Match, Billy Jean King and the Revolution, and

Women's Sports. Women and girls were just not encouraged or allowed to play sports that their brothers and fathers did, and somehow sports was portrayed as being entirely natural and important for boys, and it was seen as being unnatural and unladylike for girls and women. Still, generations of women and girls wanted to play sports, but what they didn't have were the kind of organized resources that were available

to boys and men in our society. While schools paid for men's teams to travel and charter buses, women's teams held bake sales to pay for their trips. They shared uniforms they practiced late at night because that was the only time that the gym, or the pool or the field was available. Nobody thought it was odd that a school sports budget would be devoted to men's sports and

the girls would maybe get one percent. In the year before Title nine was passed, girls made up only seven percent of high school athletes, and an even smaller fraction of women played college sports. That was about to change big time, But as the women of the Yale crew team later found out, that chain was not going to

happen fast enough. Title nine of the Education Amendments Act of nineteen seventy two is only thirty seven words long, but the implications of those words are enormous, author Karen Blumenthal. So Title nine it seems really simple, right, you don't discriminate on the basis of sex and education. But it's really complicated. This is a time when girls and boys

are given different career aspiration tests. This is the time when boys run the school projector and are the safety crossing guards and girls are not allowed to do that. This is a time when there are no organized sports for girls in many many places, and efforts to level an uneven playing field could not happen overnight. Especially when it came to actual playing fields, the reality was truly shocking.

Schools were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions of dollars on sports for boys and virtually nothing on sports for girls, and the idea of somehow making that equal was daunting. But the demand was there. Women wanted to play organized sports, so the laws signed in nineteen seventy two. Girls are looking at this, going where's my chance seventy three, seventy four, seventy five. Schools

and universities were reluctant to implement Title nine. It was costly and difficult, and the federal government was not exactly holding their feet to the fire, especially when it came to women's sports. Powerful groups like the n c a A were worried the Title nine with harm college football and other men's sports, and so they spent a great deal of time and money trying to smother the young law in its cradle. Historians susan ware again, so you

start to have people realizing it's out there. What you don't have is any guidelines from the federal government of out how this law is supposed to be enforced. And you have no enforcement at all. Zero. It took three years for the government to draft the regulations necessary to implement the law. Now it was up to colleges like Yale to abide by them. Once upon a time, Yale University was known as a powerhouse on the gridiron. Since its first game in eighteen seventy two, Yale has won

more games than any college in the nation. You can't name them all. Yale has had eighty one all Americans. Yale success in sports didn't stop at football, but it did stop with men. Yale was an all male school until nineteen sixty eight, and the main reason Yale finally went co ed was that it was afraid it would

lose male applicants who preferred schools that had women. Yale's president put it this way to a group of alumni at the time, our concern is not so much what Yale can do for women, but what can women do for Yale. The colleges administrators found out in nineteen seventy six just what women could do to Yale susan ware. Again. Yale had just gone co educational maybe five years before, and women were being brought into a very male institution. These were growing pains in the early days, and painful

ones at that. Mary Mazzio is a documentary filmmaker and a former Olympic rower. She wrote and directed A Hero for Daisy, a film about the nineteen seventy six Yale Women's crew team. And this was a time in the seventies where you didn't see as many women running on the track, and you didn't see as many women in the weight room. This was a time when women were booed, they were jeered. The male athletes at Yale looked down

on their female peers, sometimes quite literally. Well members of the women's crew team lifted weights, some men would stand on a platform above the weight room, hooting and hollering and calling the women names. Yale itself did not treat them much better. Historian Susan ware they were finding that they were not getting anywhere near the resources that were being given to men's teams. The Yale men's crews had state of the art boats, the women had old, worn down,

wooden ones. The disparities did not stop there. We were at a boat house where almost all of the boats belonged to the men, and the men had a locker room upstairs that they used. Cathy Pugh was a member of the nineteen seventy six women's crew team and today as a pediatrician in Seattle. So the women would come out and wait on the bus for thirty minutes while the men took a hot shower. Then you're sweatshirt is slowly throwing out in the bus, but there's not really

heat in the bus. Then the shivering women would have to endure a thirty minute unheated drive back to the Yale campus, and oftentimes we would arrive just in time to get to the last open dining hall for dinner. Mary O'Connor was also a member of the nineteen seven six crew team. Today she's an orthopedic surgeon and works at the Yale School of Medicine. So there was no time for me to go back to my dorm and and change out of my cold, wet, sweaty clothes and

then go to dinner. And some of our teammates got sick. The women started to complain about the conditions. There had been some efforts to bring to the attention of the university leadership. Are are polite? Nothing was happening, filmmaker Mary Mazio. So the women were told, the wheels of change grind

slowly here at Yale University. So after about a year of trying to pursue a diplomatic resolution to hey, maybe the bus can stay longer so that we can shower after the men, Well, then the men would be late for class. That's not acceptable, right. There were a whole series of obstacles thrown up at every juncture, and so the team's two leaders and best rowers decided something more needed to be done. When I was a freshman, Mary O'Connor,

there were two senior women on the team. Chris Ernst was the captain and Anne Warner was a junior, and they had both been on the nineteen uh national team for women's rowing and had competed at the World Championships and won silver medals. And they were like goddesses to us. They were very charismatic. They just offered a kind of world that I had never even imagined, where women, you know, like to be strong and they liked they had once and desires and they fought for them and they liked

to win, and they liked having muscles. And it was just earth shattering for me to meet these women one day. Well, they waited on the cold bus for the men to shower. Chris, Ernston and Warner discussed what to do about it with their teammates. Title nine started to be mentioned while we were sitting on the bus, when Anne and Chris were back from pneumonia and feeling angry and also feeling very scared that they might not be able to make the

Olympic team if they we're gonna get sick again. Someone on the bus joked that they should throw Johnny Barnett, the director of women's Athletics, into the river so she would know what it felt like. Other outlandish suggestions followed. So all of those those ideas were hatched because we were all wet and shivering on this bus for thirty minutes while the men took showers after practice. Then another idea was raised, one that was also unconventional, even a

bit outrageous. Chris and Anne, the two team captains, looked at each other. What they recall is that they kind of dared each other. Neither of them quite had the nerve until they just caught each other as I and said dare, and the two leaders and seventeen of their teammates accepted the dare honestly there we were at Yale.

I mean, we're at Yale University. We are incredibly bright women, and if we were to say it's okay for us to be treated this way, what kind of message would that be for us to send out into the universe? And the statement the Yale nineteen made the following day changed everything in the Yale universe and beyond. On the afternoon of March third, ninety nineteen, members of the Yale Women's crew team met in the locker room at the

Pain Whitney Gymnasium on the college's campus. The women were nervous. Team member Cathy Pew, there were some athletes who chose not to participate. Two of them were afraid of losing their scholarships and um others just didn't feel like they want to be that out there in vocal. Most of us were just devoted to both In and Chris and would have done anything. They came up with team member

Mary O'Connor. It was pretty simple, and we met down in the locker room and we had a marker and we wrote title nine in big letters on our bare chests and our bare backs, and then we put on our Yale Women's crew sweats and we had nothing on underneath. The nineteen women marched past the workout tanks toward the office of Johnny Barnett, Yale Athletic Director in charge of

women's athletics. Cathy Pew. We had a Yale Daily camera person with us, who promised us that um he would just only take pictures from the back and from the waist up. We had a New York Times reporter ready with no camera. The women marched up the steps to Barnett's office behind team leaders Chris Arnston An Warner, the Yale photographer climbed up on a desk well. The New York Times reporter sat in a chair, his back to what was about to unfold. Mary O'Connor. Chris gave us

the signal and we stripped. We we took off our sweats, and we stood there naked with our Title nine message on our chests in our backs. That's right, twenty three years before Brandy Chastain took off her jersey and exuberants at the Women's World Cup, the members of the Yale Women's crew team took off everything in protest. Cathy Pew. We were all absolutely terrified. It's super scary to walk in and be naked in an athletic director's office with

the stun Barnett looking on. Chris Ernst read the statement that the women had composed. It was not your average grievance letter. It was a manifesto. These are the bodies Yale is exploiting. We have come here today to make clear how unprotected we are, to show graphically what we are being exposed to. These are normal human bodies. On a daylight today, the rain freezes on our skin. Then we sit on a bus for half an hour as

the ice melts into our sweats. To meet the sweat that has soaked our clothes underneath, we sit for half an hour chilled. Half a dozen of us are sick now, and in two days we will begin training twice a day, subjecting ourselves to this twice every day. No effective action has been taken, and no matter what we hear, it doesn't make these bodies warmer or drier or less prone

to sickness. We are, as you can see, desperate. We are not just healthy young things in blue and white uniforms who performed tasks of strength for Yale in the nice spring weather. We are not just statistics on your wind column. We are human and being treated as less than such. Mary O'Connor again. So we did our demonstration and it was very a very silent event. We put on our sweats, we went back downstairs to the locker room and changed into our workout clothes to get on

the bus and go to the boathouse for practice. The imprint of their protests remained, especially on its intended target. One of my favorite pictures is is you can see Chris Earns back with title nine written on her back, and she's reading the statement and the athletic director is looking down at the floor, arms folded, very closed body language, because of course this was a very negative moment for her.

The following day, a brief article about the protest appeared in The New York Times, filmmaker Mary Mazzio again, and the story went around the world in a nanosecond. Yale Women's strip and this becomes this huge story. Author Karen Blumenthal again yell alumni or Paul that women have been mistreated in this way, that they haven't been allowed to shower. Alumni wrote concern letters to campus administrators, some enclosed checks

to contribute to new facilities for the women. Newspaper cartoonists lampoon the college drawing pictures of naked women inside Yale boats. The college was embarrassed. We needed to speak our truth and and we wanted our voice to be heard. Unfortunately, our voice was heard, Team member Mary O'Connor again. So the bottom line was that by the next spring, there was an addition onto the boathouse and we had a locker room. I mean like it worked. It was honestly amazing.

It worked. The Yale Women's Crew team got their locker room and their showers, but they accomplished much more than that. Word of the Yale protests spread. It became a rallying cry for women on other campuses. This Title nine was now more than an obscure law. It was a cause. And I can imagine that in other athletic departments, athletic directors all of a sudden said, oh my god, did you hear what those those women at Yale did? And

maybe they started to think, could that happen here? How are we treating are our women's teams compared to our men's teams? Team member Cathy Pew. Every time we would raise another school, they would ask us about it, and they were all kind of ashamed because they had, in many respects less for their women's crew than we had. Filmmaker Mary Masa. When the women stood up and said we are going to be counted, we are going to say something. We're gonna speak what needs to be spoken.

Athletic directors across the country stood up and they said, well, well, well, we don't want articles in the International Tribune or the New York Times like this is what gender equity means, all right, let take steps. In the end, Yale benefited hugely from the team's protest. Mary O'Connor, and we were a very successful team, producing national team rowers, Olympic rowers, We were collegiate champions. I mean, we were a powerhouse in women's rowing and created a legacy at Yale that

has continued to this day. That legacy also extends past Yale's walls. Mary Mazzio. Again, what they didn't realize was the impact that it would have on women today. If you look across the spectrum, what Title nine has done

for women has been nothing short of extraordinary. If you look at the statistics of women in sport in nineteen seventy six when the women did this and made this statement and protested in the fashion that they did, and you compare it to the number of athletes today, it is exponential, since the number of women playing college sports has gone up by three and impact. The Yale crew

team could not have imagined Cathy Pew. When I look back at myself doing that protest, I was just doing it out of that bond of friendship and for an adventure, and I did not appreciate the meaning of that at all. I really didn't, and yet it has come to affect my life. People ask me about it, and I have really come to appreciate how much that was needed. Mary O'Connor, it was a very personal moment, at least for me.

It was a moment that also really created a deep bond with those of us that experienced this, and I remained extremely close to Many of those women. Members of the Yale nineteen went on to become Olympians, doctors, professors, lawyers. They include a taekwondo world champion, the owner of a w nb A team, the head of an all female plumbing company. Many have sons and daughters who are also rowers and who continue to benefit from their mother's bold statement.

My youngest child, one of my daughters, Rose, she's a lightweight women's rower and excellent grower at Boston University. Mary O'Connor again, she never told Rose about what she did in college. And then one day and she was reading a story about Title nine and came across the demonstration at Yale and she mentioned it to my husband, and my husband said, well, you know, your mother was there, and my daughter says, what are you talking about. He said,

your mom. Your mom was part of that demonstration. So I came home and she was like, Mom, I can't believe you never told me this story. And I said, well, honey, I guess I never really found it important to tell you that story. And she said, but of course it's important that you tell me the story. She actually gave me the perspective that sharing the story matters because she needed to hear what I had done. She knew that

this demonstration made a difference for her. Mary O'Connor, Cathy Pugh, and the other members of the Yale nineteen fought to uphold the promise of the law that was supposed to protect their rights, but that law, Title nine could not have happened without the efforts of another woman. My mother was. My mother was a badass. Bernice Bunny Sandler wasn't always a badass. She was a mild mannered Jewish wife and

mother of two from Brooklyn. Then everything changed. Sandler earned a doctorate from the University of Maryland when she was forty one years old, but she wasn't considered for any of the open teaching positions she applied for. She was told she came on quote too strong for a woman. Bunny Sandler went home and cried. Then she showed just how wrong a woman she was. She had, I think a sense of righteous outrage whenever something was just, not just,

when something wasn't fair. On the next episode of The Thread, the story of the badass women like Bunny Sandler who went to remarkable lengths to get a law passed called title nine, let Us Play, Let Us Play, let Us Play, let Us Play. The Thread is produced by Robert Coulos, Shannon Williamson, and me Sean Braswell. Evan Roberts engineered our show. This episode features the song let Us Play, written and performed by teacup Jin. You can hear more of their

songs at teacup gin dot com. To learn more about the thread, visit Aussie dot com. Slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.