Maggie Mertens, sportswriter and author, will moderate this book talk about the challenges women confronted in the 1970s when we wanted to participate in sports – especially those formerly reserved for men, like baseball. Drawing from her recent book, Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, Mertens will guide us in conversation about then and now.

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum and the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) are thrilled to welcome journalist and author Melissa Ludtke to celebrate the publication of Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside. Melissa will be in conversation with the assistant managing editor overseeing features at The Seattle Times, Stefanie Loh. Join us for an author conversation and  reception.

Locker Room Talk chronicles what it took for Melissa Ludtke to go up against Major League Baseball in her groundbreaking court case for equal rights. In a talk moderated by Portland author Elizabeth Mehren (“I Lived to Tell the World”), Melissa and Elizabeth, both national journalists, talk about what it was like for women to break through gender barriers in the 1970s and why the battles fought in that era are relevant to what’s happening today.

Melissa Jacobs launched her digital platform The Football Girl “to elevate women in football,” then transitioned to advocacy for youngsters in sports with her Good Game Substack. The two Melissas will dip into the author’s legal case at Book Passage in Corte Madera before sharing the experiences they’ve had as women in two sports that historically resisted female intrusion – football and baseball.

Decades ago I attended night classes at the University of California, Berkeley. I’ll feel at home returning on a Friday night to talk about my gender discrimination case against Major League Baseball and my book, “Locker Room Talk,” in which I share what it’s like to be a woman taking on a male-only institution. This talk will be moderated by my former Neiman Foundation colleague, Connie Hale, who is the author of several books, most recently “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose.”

San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Ann Killion told Melissa Ludtke’s story in her newspaper a few years ago. Now, these two women sportswriters, separated by decades, compare notes about the joys and challenges of writing sports. In 1977, another San Francisco woman sports columnist, Stephanie Salter, was the first to write that Sports Illustrated might take Major League Baseball to court due to its unequal treatment of this book’s author; she was right. You’ll hear about what happened in that court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn.

I will be speaking with Iliana Limon Romero, the Los Angeles Times’ assistant managing editor for sports, at the USC Annenberg Lunch with a Leader series. Mickey Morabito, who as director of press relations with the New York Yankees in 1977 played a key role in facilitating my access to the Yankees’ locker room, so I could interview the ballplayers. Morabito gave me full access to the Yankees just weeks before Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from all MLB clubhouses at the 1977 World Series and led to our federal court fight, which I describe in my book, Locker Room Talk.

Karen Grimsby Bates, a Los Angeles resident, former NPR correspondent, and my Wellesley College classmate, moderates this book talk about my equal access federal court case that I write about in Locker Room Talk. In recalling our lives in the 1970s, after we graduated from Wellesley College during the second-wave of the women’s movement, we’ll share stories about women’s fights to bring down the barriers to equal treatment in the 1970s, including my experiences as the rare women covering baseball in that decade.

In the morning of this day-long symposium, I will be in conversation with a woman sportswriter to explore what it’s like to be women in sports media today. I will also be the first Claire Smith Bright Light honoree.

Claire Smith, who is the only woman baseball writer honored in Coopertown’s Baseball Hall of Fame and directs Temple University’s Claire Smith Center for Sports Media, joins me in conversation about what it was like for us, as women, to cover Major League Baseball in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In an Open Book/Open Mind event at the Montclair (New Jersey) library, co-sponsored by the Yogi Berra Museum, Kelly Whiteside, a former writer at Sports Illustrated and now a sports journalism professor at Montclair State University, will be the moderator for our conversation about sportswriting and women, and the evolving state of sports journalism today.

Lynn Povich, the author of “The Good Girls Revolt,” and I talk about the legal fights waged by women journalists in the 1970s against the gender discrimination they experienced in their jobs. At magazines, newspapers and broadcast stations, women were put in clerical rather than editorial jobs, while men with their same education and skill sets were hired as writers or producers. Women were paid and promoted less than men, too. In this context, we’ll talk about Ludtke v. Kuhn, my 1978 legal case that won equal access for women sportswriters.

Maddy Blais’s book “In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle” tells the poignant story of the season when the Amherst High School women’s basketball team won the state championship. In talking about women and sports, and my legal case against baseball, Maddy and I will dip back into my time playing basketball at Amherst High school, years earlier than the team her book profiles, when women’s rules greatly restricted our play. Ours will be a lively talk in South Hadley’s bookstore.

Together with Greensboro’s Power Plays! writer Lindsay Gibbs, I’ll be talking about women and baseball, the surge in women’s sports, and what it was like to be a young woman covering sports - baseball, in particular, in the 1970s compared with what it’s like now.

In talking with my Amherst, MA high school friend, William “Sandy” Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University and author of “From Here to Equality,” we will explore what a memorable 1978 legal case about women’s equal treatment by Major League baseball says to us today.

Joined in conversation with Charlotte, N.C. journalist Mary C. Curtis, Roll Call columnist, Host of the 'Equal Time' podcast, and contributor to the NPR-affiliate WFAE, we’ll talk about how Judge Constance Baker Motley applied the 14th Amendment to give me the equal access I needed to do my sports reporting job.

Pull up a chair and settle in for storytelling as old friends - the author of Locker Room Talk and Elizabeth Leland, local resident and award-winning former writer with the Charlotte Observer – look back at the 1970s as a time women persisted in fighting for equal rights, even when it meant taking the National Pastime to court, as it did for me.

I will join members of the Clyde Sukeforth Chapter (Maine, New Hampshire) of SABR, Society of American Baseball Research, in New London, New Hampshire to talk about my 1978 court case against Major League Baseball.

On this Saturday morning in September, I will hang out at my local women’s gym, Healthworks in Cambridge, MA, with my book, Locker Room Talk, which I will sell and sign. This is an opportunity for Healthworks members to talk with me about my court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, which gave women sportswriters the same access their male peers had to interview ballplayers in teams’ locker rooms.

At the journalism school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Steve Fox, sports journalism professor, talks with me about my legal case, my book, and sports reporting, then and now. I grew up in Amherst while my father taught at UMass for nearly 50 years, and UMass Amherst is where my mother earned her second Masters degree and her PhD. Then, my niece Allison graduated from its honors college. When I return to UMass Amherst, I feel like I’m home.

After being a guest lecturer in journalism classes at Emerson College — notably, Women in Journalism and Sports Journalism – the journalism dean has invited me to talk with students and faculty and invited guests about Locker Room Talk at the Black Box in the college’s Paramount Theater on Washington Street in Boston.

Wellesley College alumnae Melissa Ludtke, ‘73, and Geneva Overholser, ‘70 engage with students in conversation about women’s ongoing quest for equality. The speakers will share their early experiences as women journalists in the early 1970s and describe actions they took during the revolutionary times of America’s second-wave women’s movement.

Join us for this weekly discussion community as we talk about my book, Locker Room Talk, and review together the Sunday New York Times. This weekly event brings together people from many countries and the conversation is always good, at times riveting, as I hope it will be on this Sunday morning. We'll provide a specific link as the date approaches. https://www.digimentors.group/nytreadalong

Students from Boston-area colleges and universities will gather in Fenway Park’s press room to hear local sports journalists talk about coverage of baseball. Jeffrey Gerson, a journalism professor at UMass Lowell, invited me to speak with them about my book, Locker Room Talk.

Join us on Zoom as Melissa Ludtke and Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, winner of the baseball writers’ J. G. Taylor Spink Award, take us back to the 1970s as they take us back to the pivotal federal court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, that gave women sportswriters the same access to interview players as the male writers enjoyed. They assess this case’s enduring legacy in contemporary times. Bruce Markusen, the manager of digital and outreach Learning at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, will moderate this Zoom book talk.

Here is the registration link for the program: 

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrdOquqzkiGtWixb6HOiuOZdAf4HrIh3I5#/registration

Go to the link, fill out the information requested, and then hit “submit.” You will then receive the actual link for the show on September 18th 

Gwen Thompkins, the host of the city’s Music Inside Out, moderates this book talk with Locker Room Talk’s author, Melissa Ludtke.

At each year’s Journalism & Women’s Symposium (JAWS), books written by JAWS members go on sale after several authors – including me – talk about writing theirs. The JAWS conference takes place in New Orleans from Sept. 13-15, and this popular book event happens midway through our time together.

With fellow CRI rower Lisa Laskin as the event’s moderator, I will describe what it was like being the 26-year old woman reporter who took Major League Baseball to court in the 1970s. Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, a lawyer by training, contended that separating me from my male peers - which meant keeping me out of the locker room when the ballplayer interviews took place - provided me with equal access to my sources on whom I depended for my stories. I disagreed, and he lost in court.

La Saison, my go-to café in Cambridge, hosts a fun-filled, celebratory event for Locker Room Talk on Saturday, Sept. 7 (Rain Date, Sunday, Sept. 8). With music, fabulous food and a drink on me - with the purchase of a book - you’ll bump into old friends and meet new ones. Bring the entire family!

Join me and Boston Globe sports columnist Tara Sullivan in conversation about Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, at Porter Square Books, my neighborhood independent bookstore in Cambridge, MA