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. Motley's judicial order in this well-known gender discrimination case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, applied only to Yankee Stadium, but her ruling's impact was 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 passage of Title IX.
Though Motley's order and Title IX regulations boosted opportunities for girls and women in sports, it has required decades of advocacy and court battles to advance their fair, just, civil, and equal treatment-- and these fights for equality continue today. The plaintiff in this groundbreaking case was Melissa Ludtke, a Sports Illustrated baseball reporter who had been banned by Kuhn from the teams' locker room during the 1977 World Series, effectively barring her from doing her job as a journalist.
In Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside, Ludtke tells what it was like to be publicly ridiculed as a 26-year-old woman for her provocative role in this sensationalized, headline-grabbing, groundbreaking case. After describing how she became the plaintiff in this case, she reveals the tactics that sportswriters and professional baseball men used to malign her when she was the only woman covering baseball nationally. By spotlighting the legal sparring in Judge Motley's courtroom, she invites readers to watch Judge Motley weigh each side's argument, question the lawyers and determine her ruling. Outside of the courtroom, cultural bellwethers, such as Johnny Carson, the cast of Saturday Night Live, and even "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, spoofed her fight for equality.
Ludtke's legal victory mattered then, and it still does. Ludtke v. Kuhn eroded conventional gender barriers in sports media, but patriarchal attitudes remain pervasive in sports culture. Locker Room Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside resurfaces her game-changing legal case at a time when its gender lessons align with significant issues revolving around women and sports.