'Someone asked if my uterus would fall out ski jumping.'

Lindsey Van, U.S. Ski Jumper who cannot compete in the Winter Games; she's a woman ski jumper.

The Winter Olympics are underway. Even more than the Summer Games, sports played on ice and snow turn out to be male dominated. Women have fought for recognition since the first Winter Olympics in 1924; in those games, women were confined to figure skating events and represented just 4.3 percent of participants.

By 2014, women comprised 40.3 percent of competitors overall. Yes, change is happening, albeit gradually.

So let's start by exploring how women were only recently allowed to compete in ski jumping at the Olympic Games – in 2014, and still aren't permitted to compete in Nordic Combined – ski jumping + cross-country.

“‘Someone asked if my uterus would fall out ski jumping,’ said ski jumper Lindsey Van. ‘People asked me that. I’m serious. Sometimes I thought, ‘I don’t even know how to answer your stupid question.’”

— Lindsey Van, record holder in ski jumping

In the 2022 games, they will compete in Nordic Combined, according to this story – "The Winter Olympics: Where Women Are Slowly Gaining Ground" – since the men who run Nordic sports told women they'd have to wait. Something about what's involved in adding a "new" sport, though, of course, this isn't a new sport, just a new gender doing it. All of the excuses, Lindsey Van, who holds the record for longest jump by male and female competitors, isn't buying. After all, she's gone to court to try to be allowed to compete.

“Ski jumper Lindsey Van, who holds the record for the longest jump among both male and female competitors, says the men’s arguments make no sense – not least because women already have their own international championships and ‘meet all the technical requirements.’”

— Lindsey Van, ski jump record holder

Last weekend, The New York Times magazine featured women and ski jumping in this story – "Once Prohibited, Women’s Ski Jumping Is Set to Take Flight."

“Other turn-of-the-century objections were pseudoscientific, often focused on the uterus. Amazingly, these lasted through the turn of our century. By 2005, men had been ski jumping in the Olympics for 81 years, but the International Olympic Committee still refused to sanction a women’s event. That year, the president of the International Ski Federation explained to NPR that the sport “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view” — to which the American ski jumper Lindsey Van artfully responded, ‘I kind of want to vomit.’ Van found herself burdened with explaining that for her, unlike for all those ski-jumping men, ‘my baby-making organs are on the inside.’”

— The New York Times magazine, Feb. 6, 2018

Next up – the bobsled. The four-man sled had its first runs at the first Winter Olympic Games in 1924; the two-man version eight years later. Women weren't allowed to compete for another 70 years, in 2002, with the two-woman sled. In these Olympics, Jamaica and Nigeria will have female bobsledders competing. The women representing Nigeria, all raised in the U.S., will mark another first – until now, no African country has sent bobsledders of either gender to compete in the Winter Olympics.

Nigerian Women's Bobsled team members.

in their "Compete Like a Woman" newsletter, Ambassador Melanne Verveer and Kim Azzarelli, co-authors of the best-selling book Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose, give all sorts of reasons why girls ought to be involved in sports – from an early age. Leadership skills. Confidence. Empowerment. A sense of knowing they can do what they never thought they could.

And so the world will know that uteruses don't fall from the sky when women ski jump.

   

She Fought and Died For Women's Suffrage, But Did She Make Her Husband's Tea?

Daily thought sign at Colliers Wood Station a day after the 100 year anniversary of women in England gaining the right to vote,

Today my message is short, but not so sweet. Summed up in the visual that leads off this blog post.

On the day after we explored how sexist descriptions follow women to the grave, somebody at London Transport thought it would be a good idea to perpetuate the notion that women's foremost duty in life is to be sure her husband is served his cup of tea.

The London Transport referred to its signage as a "joke" after rider Evelyn Clegg, 30, tweeted a photo of this sign – with her comment about its offensive content:

“Like a lot of people, yesterday I was celebrating 100 years of the first women getting the vote, and in fact spent yesterday evening at an event celebrating the suffragettes and modern feminists. After such a positive and inspiring day, to see that sign this morning was an unpleasant shock and reminded me how far we have to go until women are taken as seriously as men. ... “I’m sure I’ll be accused of ‘not being able to take a joke’ but humour based on the death of a woman who was fighting for basic equality is completely inappropriate.”

— Evelyn Clegg

So let's pause to take in what is closer to the totality of Emily Davison's life, as rendered by The BBC.

“In 1906, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst. Three years later she gave up her job as a teacher and went to work full-time for the suffragette movement. She was frequently arrested for acts ranging from causing a public disturbance to burning post boxes and spent a number of short periods in jail.

In 1909, she was sentenced to a month’s hard labour in Strangeways Prison in Manchester after throwing rocks at the carriage of chancellor David Lloyd George. She attempted to starve herself, and resisted force-feeding. A prison guard, angered by Davison’s blockading herself in her cell, forced a hose into the room and nearly filled it with water. Eventually, however, the door was broken down, and she was freed. She subsequently sued the wardens of Strangeways, and was awarded 40 shillings.

By 1911, Davison was becoming increasingly militant. On 4 June 1913, she ran out in front of the king’s horse as it was taking part in the Epsom Derby. Her purpose was unclear, but she was trampled on and died on 8 June from her injuries.”

— The BBC

Emily Davison

In 1906, she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst. Three years later she gave up her job as a teacher and went to work full-time for the suffragette movement. She was frequently arrested for acts ranging from causing a public disturbance to burning post boxes and spent a number of short periods in jail.

In 1909, she was sentenced to a month's hard labour in Strangeways Prison in Manchester after throwing rocks at the carriage of chancellor David Lloyd George. She attempted to starve herself, and resisted force-feeding. A prison guard, angered by Davison's blockading herself in her cell, forced a hose into the room and nearly filled it with water. Eventually, however, the door was broken down, and she was freed. She subsequently sued the wardens of Strangeways, and was awarded 40 shillings.

By 1911, Davison was becoming increasingly militant. On 4 June 1913, she ran out in front of the king's horse as it was taking part in the Epsom Derby. Her purpose was unclear, but she was trampled on and died on 8 June from her injuries.

The Real Rosa Parks: She's Still Got Lessons to Teach

Rosa Parks and her niece, Urana McCauley

The telling of women's lives – in history and obituaries – suffer similar fates due to a societal impulse to adhere to images of feminine virtues that make their lives and actions more palatable for us. Yet in doing this, the totality of women's lives – the significance of their actual accomplishments – remains hidden or untold.

This treatment of women was brought to mind when I read this story about Rosa Parks – "Rosa Parks Was My Aunt. Here's What You Don't Know About Her: Last week marked her 105th birthday — it's time to move beyond the quiet seamstress narrative."

Told by her niece, in this excerpt she asks us to appreciate the totality of her aunt's life – what she accomplished (not just on that one day), what she endured due to the person she was and the actions she too, and how she improved the lives of others:

“My aunt was a known person in the community. She became the recording secretary for the NAACP almost 15 years before she refused to give up her seat on that bus. ... I know people might still try to belittle my Auntie Rosa by saying, ‘Oh she was just a little seamstress.’ But that ‘little seamstress’ is proof you can be anything out here and still make changes in your community.”

— URANA MCCAULEY AS TOLD TO LIZ DWYER

Through the decades words slipped through to me about how my own mythologize introduction to Rosa Parks as "tired seamstress" who took a white person's seat on a Montgomery bus didn't capture her essence. Yes, by taking that seat and refusing to move Rosa Parks ignited the racial boycott of the city's busses. But it's essential that I know more about her life than this one tale. It's vital that all of us do, most of all children who still being taught only this about Rosa Parks.

We do this to women, and to men though not so much and without the gender overlays being so visible. Rosa's niece encourages all of us to drop our myth making and get on with learning the fuller story about her aunt's life and those of other women.

Which makes me think about women's obituaries. Here is the opening paragraph of an obituary about author Colleen McCullough:

First of all, there are a lot fewer obituaries about women than about men. Women are quoted a lot less on the pages of newspaper, such as The New York Times, so we should not be surprised to discover that as death mimics life we get to read less about women's lives than we do about men's.

When women's obituaries appear the stories told tend to perpetuate the sexism that a lot of women contend with in life. Take a read of this Guardian column. "Obituaries show that sexism follows women to the grave." An excerpt:

“That there is such a thing as post-mortem misogyny might be funny if it weren’t so depressing. Because as unbelievably eye-rolling as they are – a literal rocket scientist reduced to a dinner dish – they’re also a clear reminder to women that their most important accomplishments will always be shadowed by their gender.”

— Jessica Valenti, The Guardian

Which makes me think about women's obituaries. Here is the opening paragraph of an obituary about author Colleen McCullough:

“COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: ‘I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting thing is I never had any trouble attracting men.’”

— The Australian, Obituary

After this obituary went viral, this satirical Washington Post column, "Obituaries for Men" appeared in which famous men's obituaries were patterned after its style and tone with a physical description seems mandatory. A few examples:

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Though he looked like a wrinkly potato that had not slept in six years, some people liked his social policies okay.

James Joyce: Despite a marked resemblance to Henry Bemis in that “Time Enough At Last” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” nevertheless, this unappetizing little fellow wrote a couple of books.

Ernest Hemingway: This man looked like a big drunk cat. Contributed to literature in some way, possibly.

Charles Darwin: This man looked like something that came out of the ice just slightly to your left on the evolutionary scale, which was strangely apt given what he spent his life doing.”

— Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post

Here's my idea: Women should write their own obituaries. Two words I will put in my first paragraph: resisted and persisted. 

RBG calls for ERA: I'm With Her!

Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls for equal rights amendment to the Constitution

This headline of last Friday's Washington Post story caught my eye. RBG is a hero of mine. Not only do I admire her physical workouts, especially her push-ups, but I am grateful for her ever-watchful eye and  lifetime of steadfast actions she's taken to protect and promote women's rights.

To absorb RBG's legal reasoning about why the United States needs both the ERA and the 14th Amendment to protect sexual equality, read her cogent argument in the January 1979 Washington University Law Review – Symposium: The Quest for Equality.

When the ERA deadline for ratification was reached in 1982, I was in my early 30s, living in heady times when women were on the march and I could see women's lives changing around me. In my federal court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, Judge Constance Baker Motley's ruling moved a mountain of resistance to secure equality for women sportswriters – and though there weren't many of us, the ruling's symbolic import was huge. Perhaps because I existed in my euphoric bubble I trusted that progress towards gender equality was inevitable and unstoppable; it would be only a matter of time before the ERA would be in our Constitution. After all, who could object to works with legal standing that achieve what is fair, just and right?

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

It was suffragist Alice Paul who in 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, had introduced the "Lucretia Mott Amendment. It read: "Men and woman shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." This was introduced in every session of Congress until a slightly reworded ERA amendment passed in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification. When favorable state votes stalled as the seven year window was about to end, Congress extended the deadline by three years. Alice Paul died in 1977, which was the year when Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the ERA before the deadline came.

In 1980 the Republican Party dropped the ERA from its party platform.

In my book proposal for Locker Room Talk, I noted the similarities in how people talked about gender and locker rooms during my equal rights case in the late 1970s and the debates about the designation and use of bathrooms that have assumed such a central role in the transgender rights movement today. From my book proposal:

“Perhaps our enduring fascination with - and the on-going political currency of – the question of who gets into what restroom tugs our generations together. Back in my day, Phyllis Schlafly, the self-proclaimed defender of women’s propriety and place, put toilets at the moralizing core of her separate spheres campaign against the ERA. Her side won, and many credited the specter of shared toilets as the key in dooming the amendment, along with the fear she instilled about women being forced to assume combat roles in the military. Today women have gone to court so that they can serve in combat alongside men, arguing they are able to perform as the equal of men. Now, too, the politics around transgender people is at its fiercest at the bathroom door. Who enters what door? Who decides? ”

— Locker Room Talk, book proposal

In 1923, Alice Paul, rallied support for the cause of equal rights, by observing that "if we keep on this way they will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Convention without being much further advanced in equal rights than we are. . . .  We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government."

Alice Paul was right. By 1998, the ERA was dormant. Only recently, and with good reason as women experience setbacks in the successful struggles we've waged and won, is there talk of reviving the ERA. And action, too: On March 22, 2017, the 45th anniversary of the day that Congress sent the ERA to the states, legislators made Nevada the 36th (of 38 needed) to ratify the ERA. There's debate, of course, about their timing given that the Congressional deadline of 1982 long ago ended.

So if that's the fight we need to have in Congress, I'm with RBG. I say let's do it.

Excellent interview with RBG in The Atlantic, published after I wrote this post.

Pay Inequity: We're Tired of Talk and Watching the Wheels Turn Slowly

My Sports Illustrated co-workers at our annual [Walter] "Bingham Bowl." We worked and played sports together, but when it came to the paychecks we received for the jobs we did I'm pretty sure the women, including me, were paid less than the guys. And since men were promoted more often than women, their salaries rose quicker and higher, too.

I'll never know if I was paid the same as what the guys I sat next to at Sports Illustrated and Time were paid. I never saw their paychecks. They didn't see mine, and it wasn't something we talked about except in legal actions. Newsweek's gender discrimination case – The Good Girls Revolt – led the way, and soon women at Time, Inc. followed, forcing the corporate officials to release documentary evidence of lots of gender inequity, including hiring, promotion and pay. Other media women's lawsuits dotted the 1970s adding to the plethora of legal evidence of women's unequal pay and treatment.

After seven courageous women at The New York Times took that newspaper into federal court with charges of gender discrimination, evidentiary documents revealed that in 1975 men at the Times were paid $98.67 cents per week more than women and $5,160 more per year. Among notes the court rescued from the files was this one, quite typical of many others:

“We’ll take your word on Pamela Kent, of course. What does she look like? Twiggy? Lynn Redgrave? Perhaps you ought to send over her vital statistics, or a picture in a bikini.”

— Written by Dan Schwarz, Sunday Editor to a Times employee who had recommended an application for a job in Sunday Department

Yet as a young woman at Sports Illustrated I wasn't protesting my pay but basking in the privilege I had of doing a man's job which I loved – covering Major League Baseball. I refused to whine about how tough it was to do my job reporting on baseball with the gender handicaps the sport placed on me. Here's how I'm writing about this in my opening chapter of Locker Room Talk:

“Complaining about bothersome things that routinely happened by dint of being female – both in SI’s office and at the ballpark – tagged us as whiners. Still does. Even the word “whiner” sounds blackboard scratchy and irritating. I had only to gaze down rows of reporters’ offices at SI to realize that plenty of my peers, a lot of them guys, would happily take my place on the baseball beat. Enough complaints from me and one probably would since it was a whole lot easier to replace me than to argue with baseball about access. ”

— Melissa Ludtke, Locker Room Talk

So how far have we come in four decades? Well, check this headline ‘Selfish young ladies’: Massachusetts publisher fires newspaper editor after pay-equality spat" atop this Washington Post story. The young ladies in question are women reporters who found out they are being paid less than their male counterparts at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, a newspaper in Western, MA.

Or dip into the Carnegie Mellon University study which found that when an equal number of job-seeking men and women visited 100 recruitment sites, men were shown the ad for the highest-paying job (jobs with salaries of more than $200,000) six times more often than women were.

Or absorb this business mom's essay: Moms are punished in the workplace, even when we own the business

Or join Ms. Webster, one of five career women who got together with a New York Times reporter to talk about women's pay inequities. 

“Ms. Webster, 36, who says she left the law firm she was working for in 2016 after she wrote a letter to the partners suggesting that they were acting out unconscious bias. ‘At least for one case, and it may have been for multiple cases, my time was being billed out at a lower rate than two of the three white, male paralegals,’ Ms. Webster said. ‘The very next business day, I got put on a performance improvement plan,’ she added. ‘They were putting the paperwork in motion to either justify firing me or getting me to leave.’””

— Ms. Webster in New York Times roundtable on women's pay inequities

I read all of these stories within the past week. So is there progress? Yes, mainly because women keeping fighting to make progress on pay inequity happen. So grudgingly, it has, though much too slowly, as any of us paying attention know all too well.

“Just know you’re not alone.”

Superbowl Sunday: #52 and my New England Patriots are on the field. Again. And here's what I see and what I'm reading today:

I see brains, like the colorful slices you see above. Images of the brains of football players – men in the prime of life with their brains destroyed and the lives of those who love them ruined by the game that they loved to play – set aside brains like yours and mine. 

I think of my friend Frank Gifford who played the game long before we had the capacity to look inside of brains in the way we can now and label his brain at death as CTE, an acronym that's made parents fearful of allowing their children to play this game. Frank gave me my start in sports media – more bluntly stated he gave me my life in journalism!

I read a wife's words this morning about the gentle man she married, the one who played a brutal sport and in his 40s turned into a man she doesn't know. She seeks comfort in talking with wives whose husbands played football and now are lost to them, too: "Just know you're not alone." She vividly describes her husband's transformation and responds to those who say that knowing about CTE won't stop them from watching grown men bang their heads in football games. It's their decision to do what they do, she hears people say – yet when her husband played, he didn't know.

“Who these men have become is not who they are, and I write that with conviction. The symptoms they display are beyond their control and occur through no fault of their own. These men chose football, but they didn’t choose brain damage.”

— Emily Kelly, wife of Rob Kelly, football player

I absorb Joe Drape's words as he writes of "The American Dilemma" in the same newspaper on the same day as Emily Kelly does. Drape tells us why so Americans who now know of football's gruesome injuries continue tuning in and celebrating what some call America's version of the Roman gladiators.

“I have no problem watching the N.F.L. — these are grown men making grown men’s decisions,” said Schwarz, whose investigative articles from 2007 to 2011 compelled new safety rules for players of all ages. “After being kept in the dark for so many years by their employers, they now know they could wind up brain-damaged. Fine. They’re professional daredevils. It wasn’t immoral to watch Evel Knievel. We watch stuntmen in movies.”

— Joe Drape, writing in The New York Times

I cringe when I read in that same newspaper on the same day about how more girls now play tackle football – More Girls Are Playing Football. Is That Progress?. 

“We can thank a constellation of cultural forces for women’s involvement in football today, from Title IX to the women’s movement, to strong female athletes who have persisted in pursuing their athletic dreams despite a lack of broader cultural support.”

— Valerie Palmer-Mehta, a professor of communication at Oakland University whose work focuses on women and rhetoric, who contends the change is evidence of larger cultural shifts.

I'm a huge proponent of girls having every opportunity that boys do – and that includes playing sports, of course, and having their sports be paid attention to. Yet I'd like to see equality played out in football not by increasing the number and gender of youngsters who tackle each other at young ages but by eliminating tackles from the game. 

Welcome FLAG FOOTBALL

As my generation of young women found out in the 1970s, when the only role models we had were the men doing the jobs we wanted to do, men don't always possess the only wisdom about how something should be done. Now that brain scans are schooling us in disastrous consequences of following their men's ways on a football field, let's us, as parents and women, campaign to institute flag football for all youngsters – boys and girls – through high school.

Just because the boys do it doesn't mean girls who want to play football should follow their example. Let's find a better way.

 

 

Sad Goodbye to My First Journalism Home

A few days ago Vanity Fair paused to take note of the end of an era in American journalism – the sale of Time Inc, where I arrived as a "girl who knew sports," as ABC Sports broadcaster Frank Gifford once dubbed me in complimenting me on my ability to talk sports. And when I left my job at Sports Illustrated five years I'd learned journalism, written some stories and fact checked a lot of other, and defeated Major League Baseball in a federal court case that leveled the playing field for women sports reporters by giving us the equal access to locker rooms that we needed to do our jobs.

Vanity Fair's headline stopped me cold.

“I’D RATHER WATCH MY PARENTS HAVE SEX”: INSIDE THE FINAL DAYS OF TIME INC.

Executives count their payouts, staffers worry about layoffs, and 100 years of media history comes to an end with Meredith’s takeover of Time.

Soon Time Inc alums gathered on Facebook to reminisce about the good old days with requisite call outs to how grand life our lives were back then, with late night dinners served on china, fully stocked liquor cabinets in editors' offices, and expense accounts that gave many of us first class lives on the road. It was the heyday of print advertising that kept the company's coffers full, but what I noticed in my colleagues' words was less about how good our lives were as journalists at Time Inc, but how meaningful it felt to have the privilege of working as a reporter or researcher, correspondent or photographer, writer or editor in the Time & Life Building at the corner of 50th and Avenue of the Americas.

A sampling of comments, below, became a Rip Van Winkle experience as one by one we recalled memories of how journalism – at least at Time, Inc. – used to be.

High journalistic standards (which are harder and harder to hold on to)

Fact-checkers! Whole floors of fact-checkers! Imagine.

It could be a very feisty company, in the day, challenging powerful interests. I remember our lawyer saying, after reviewing a story, "They may sue us if you run this, but we'll win. Go for it." Such a great attitude!

Totally. Lawyers who thought their job was to help you publish the story rather than keep the company from getting sued.

4 month paid maternity leave

Got to do great, rewarding work that was valued by my bosses and peers ... was fairly compensated ... hung out with bright, talented people ... and met my wife. Loved every day of it—even the bad ones. Made my father inordinately proud. Not a bad list, for starters.

My honor to work with smart, brilliant people, many of whom would go to bat for any of us. The late-night closes in London — what a bonding experience! Making friends all around the world and, most importantly of all, introducing me to the love of my life. Xo

It taught me journalism standards I still treasure and now labor to try and pass down to the young writers I work with today. It introduced me to three presidents, several wannabe presidents and a whole world of interesting and insane people. And it taught me that a magazine is only as strong as the people who work there, and that you attract great people by treating them well and inspiring them ... at least until AOL shows up.

Here's another perspective – Who killed Time Inc.? – published in Columbia Journalism Review.

Is Vigilante Feminism on a Rebound in the #MeToo Era?

"Vigilantism is the new black, and it’s not a good look for feminists. Sanctifying accusations of sexual misconduct as proof of guilt, effectively blacklisting alleged abusers, #MeToo activists celebrate mob rule."

Wendy Kaminer, a civil liberties lawyer, opens her essay by examining if the #MeToo movement is driving feminism toward what she sees as potentially a revived era of undesired vigilantism over women's hard-won freedoms and equality. Kaminer has written widely on this topic in her essays and books, and in this essay she summarizes historic evidence and arguments that buttress her perspective that if women move down the "victimized" route with legal protectionism, they will challenge the sustaining of the sturdy roots of equality that have been won through tough-fought campaigns. 

In the concluding paragraph of her thoughtful essay (below), Kaminer cautions against regressive actions in the wake of these challenging times of #MeToo revelations. There can be no doubt that women experience personal trauma due to sexual harassment and abuse and that many women's careers have been jeopardized by men's use of power in demanding sexual favors in exchange for their advancement. Such assaults should not continue. This is a reason I am grateful for Kaminer's plea that we bear in mind women's roller-coaster experiences through history in attempting to secure equality and freedom as we seek solutions to this current crisis. She also warns us to stay acutely aware of missteps we could make that could hurt women, among whom as those who've been victimized already. Finding remedies for sexual abuse and harassment involves discussions about gender in an extremely polarized society, which seems a potentially worrisome sign that misjudgments could end up driving solutions.

"Restoring double standards of sexual behaviour and underlying sex/gender stereotypes will not free or safeguard women, much less imbue feminism and the #MeToo movement with renewed regard for fairness and individual liberty. Nor would a regression to double standards advance equality. It requires what Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton envisioned centuries ago: the recognition that all of us – men, women and transgendered people alike – are ‘human creatures’, burdened by the same existential anxieties and entitled to the same rights and liberties. The challenge for contemporary feminism and the #MeToo movement is the challenge of equality – if that’s still what feminists want."

I encourage you to read her essay and scroll though some of the online comments.

When I Became Murphy Brown

At the age of 27 – when baseball and I were in court – the thought of being an unwed mother wasn't even a blimp on my radar screen. Heck, I'd just gotten married and hoped soon to have children. And I decided to get married in large part to demonstrate that I could be a wife AND a woman who wrote baseball. The way the guys were writing about me back then it sounded like I was leader of the women libbers with all of the "manly" adjectives possible to muster tossed in. I hardly recognized myself in what they were writing about me, and that bothered me, a lot. Being a wife and mother, I reckoned, would go a long ways toward restoring my sense of my own identity as a woman.

In May of 1992, a week before my 41st birthday, Murphy Brown, a fictionalized unwed mother, became a target of male rage – this time Vice President Dan Quayle, who made front page news by blaming Murphy Brown and her "life style" choice for causing the LA riots. (At least that was the essence of his speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.) Within a week Random House bought my book proposal for "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America," and in 1997, my one-year old daughter Maya was with me on my book tour. After I wrote about unwed motherhood, I became her unwed mom.

I've never written about before about my sudden decision to get married during my legal action against baseball. I accepted a marriage proposal from Eric Lincoln, a fellow sportswriter, within a month of our first date in the early winter of 1978. In "Locker Room Talk" I intend to describe the emotional factors and societal pressure points that pushed me to make this rash decision, which I soon regretted.