Award-winning journalist Melissa Ludtke reported and wrote for Sports Illustrated and Time and was the editor of Nieman Reports at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Insidechronicles her groundbreaking 1978 federal legal case in which the judge ordered baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn to provide equal access for women so they could work alongside their male peers in Major League Baseball locker rooms. With her ruling in Ludtke v. Kuhn, Judge Constance Baker Motley opened doors that several generations of young women have walked through in filling jobs in sports media that previously were only held by men. Even with her breakthrough case, many key issues revolving around gender and equity remain in play 46 years later.
Her two other books are On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America (Random House, 1997) and Touching Home in China; in search of missing girlhood. Each has been praised for the skillful pairing of first-person storytelling with issue-oriented reporting.
“... a distinguished history of fighting for equal opportunities for women sportswriters, deft editing of one of America’s most thoughtful journalism publications, and her conscientious involvement with children.”
