IB History Political and Legal Changes Including Title IX (1972) and Roe V. Wade Notes

Political and Legal Changes: Title IX, Roe, and the Limits of Law

1. The 1970s saw feminists win real legislative and judicial victories.
   1. But as you will see, winning a legal right and being able to use it are not always the same thing.

Title IX and Education

1. Title IX is a federal law passed in 1972 that banned sex discrimination in any education program receiving federal funding.
   1. Before it passed, schools and universities could legally exclude women from courses, programs, and sports.
   2. Title IX made that illegal.
2. Two women drove the bill through Congress: Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, and Edith Green, a veteran congresswoman who had spent years pushing for educational equality.
   1. Mink had faced sex discrimination firsthand when medical schools rejected her despite strong qualifications.
   2. She co-authored the bill that became law.
3. The impact was significant.
   1. Women's college enrollment grew sharply through the 1970s.
   2. By 1980, women made up nearly half of all college students in the United States, up from around 40% in 1970.
   3. Women's athletic programs, which had been chronically underfunded or simply absent, now had to be resourced on a comparable basis to men's programs.
4. Title IX changed what girls and young women could expect from their schools.
   1. It also coincided with a broader cultural shift in attitudes toward women in competitive sport.

Roe v Wade and Reproductive Rights

1. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v Wade.
   1. The 7-2 decision struck down state laws that banned abortion, establishing that the right to end a pregnancy was protected under the Constitution.
2. The ruling built on earlier precedent.
   1. In Griswold v Connecticut (1965), the Court had established that married couples had a constitutional right to use contraception, grounded in an implied right to privacy.
   2. Roe extended this logic to abortion.
3. The decision used a trimester framework to define when the state could regulate abortion.
   1. In the first trimester, the decision was left entirely to the woman and her doctor.
   2. In the second trimester, states could regulate abortion only to protect the mother's health.
   3. In the third trimester, states could restrict or ban abortion because the fetus was considered viable outside the womb.
4. For the women's movement, Roe was a major victory.
   1. Reproductive autonomy had been a core demand of second-wave feminism since the 1960s.
   2. The ruling meant women could, for the first time at a national level, legally access abortion without travelling to another state or seeking an illegal provider.

The Hyde Amendment and Its Impact

1. Three years after Roe, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment (1976).
   1. Named after Republican congressman Henry Hyde, it banned the use of federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortions, except in very limited circumstances such as rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life.
2. Medicaid is the federal health insurance program for low-income Americans.
   1. Cutting abortion from Medicaid coverage meant that poor women, who could not pay out of pocket, lost meaningful access to the procedure Roe had just guaranteed them.

1. The Hyde Amendment was challenged in court almost immediately.
   1. In Harris v McRae (1980), the Supreme Court upheld it, ruling that the government was not obligated to fund a right simply because it was constitutionally protected.
   2. The Amendment has been renewed by Congress every year since 1976.
2. The Hyde Amendment is an early and clear example of how opponents of women’s rights could chip away at a ruling without directly overturning it, not by challenging Roe in court, but by making it financially inaccessible for millions of women.

The ERA's Defeat

1. While Title IX and Roe moved through the courts and Congress, feminists were also pushing for a constitutional amendment that would enshrine sex equality directly into the Constitution.
   1. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) stated simply: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
2. Congress passed the ERA in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification.
   1. Under the Constitution, 38 of 50 states had to ratify an amendment for it to take effect.
   2. The original deadline was 1979, later extended to 1982.
3. The ERA fell three states short.
   1. It was ratified by 35 states but never reached 38.
   2. The amendment died without becoming law.
4. A key figure in the ERA's defeat was Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist who founded the STOP ERA campaign in 1972.
   1. STOP stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges.
   2. Schlafly argued that the ERA would eliminate legal protections women already had, such as exemption from the military draft, alimony rights, and gender-specific labour protections.
5. Schlafly’s campaign was effective in part because she organised at the grassroots level, lobbying state legislators directly and mobilising conservative women who felt the feminist movement did not represent them.
   1. She reframed the ERA not as protection but as a threat to traditional family life.
6. The ERA's failure revealed real limits to feminist political power.
   1. The movement had won legislative victories in Congress and landmark rulings in the Supreme Court.
   2. But at the state level, particularly in the South and in conservative rural areas, it could not build the sustained majority it needed.
   3. The ERA's defeat also showed that not all women supported the feminist agenda: Schlafly herself was a woman, as were many of her most active campaigners.
7. Without the ERA, sex equality had to rely on individual laws like Title IX and court rulings like Roe, each of which could be amended, defunded, or overturned.
   1. A constitutional amendment would have been far harder to undo.

Building Precedent Through the Courts

1. Roe and Title IX did not appear in a legal vacuum.
   1. In Reed v Reed (1971), the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that a law discriminating by sex violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, striking down an Idaho statute that automatically preferred men as estate administrators.
2. Two years later, Frontiero v Richardson (1973) extended that logic to the military.
   1. Sharron Frontiero, an Air Force lieutenant represented by a young ACLU lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg, successfully challenged a rule that gave automatic dependent benefits to wives of servicemen but required servicewomen to prove their husbands were financially dependent.
   2. These rulings built the legal foundation of sex-discrimination doctrine that made Roe's reasoning about constitutional privacy possible just months later.