Locker Room Talk (e-book) (used book) | Melissa Ludtke | bookbook.eu

Description

In September 1978, Manhattan's Southern District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley, the nation's first Black woman on the federal bench, ordered Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn to provide equal access to all journalists to interview baseball players after games. Her judicial order applied only to Yankee Stadium, but her ruling's impacts were far reaching. Young women flocked to sports writing and broadcasting at the same time that girls and women began competing more widely in sports due to Title IX. Though Motley's ruling and Title IX legislation boosted opportunities for girls and women in sports, fair, just, civil, and equal treatment of them required decades of advocacy and court battles to gain.

The plaintiff in this landmark case, Ludtke vs. Kuhn, was Melissa Ludtke, a Sports Illustrated baseball writer who had been banned by Kuhn from the Yankees' locker room during the 1977 World Series, effectively barring her from performing her role as a journalist. In Locker Room Talk, Ludtke describes what it was like to be a 26-year-old woman who was the publicly ridiculed plaintiff in this media-grabbing, groundbreaking case. She relates her experiences as the only woman covering baseball nationally amid the legal sparring of Judge Motley's courtroom, describing how she came to be this plaintiff and how the media and professional baseball maligned her when this legal fight began. Readers see Judge Motley weighing the arguments and questioning the lawyers' logic, all while national media, including icons such as Johnny Carson, the cast of Saturday Night Live, and even "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, made light of her fight for equality in her professional sphere.

Ludtke's legal victory still matters. Locker Room Talk describes why. While Ludtke v. Kuhn, erased gender barriers in sports media practices, patriarchal attitudes remain embedded in American sports culture.