Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, revered as the “godmother of Title IX,” died on Saturday at 90 of cancer, her daughter told The Washington Post on Monday.
Sandler’s fight against gender discrimination started in 1969, when she attempted to enter the academic workforce after earning a doctorate in education from the University of Maryland. She was turned down from one position at the university because, according to a male colleague, she “come[s] on too strong for a woman,” she recalled in an article for the Cleveland State Law Review in 2007. At another point, a researcher told her they don’t hire women because they stay home when children are sick. Another placement firm told her she‘s “just a housewife who went back to school.” Her husband, she said later, pointed out that these were cases of discrimination on the basis of sex, and by 1972, with the help of her advocacy, Title IX had passed, barring discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions that are federally funded.
Spurred by the legislative successes of the civil-rights movement, Sandler dug into federal laws. None prohibited discrimination against women in educational fields, and at the time, it was typical for universities and schools to impose quotas on women they hired, or bar female students completely “from chemistry and other departments that were deemed more suited for men.” The catalyst for Dr. Sandler, her “eureka moment” as she called it, was discovering an executive order that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed prohibiting sex discrimination by organizations with federal contracts. “I actually shrieked aloud,” she wrote, “for I immediately realized that many universities and colleges had federal contracts, were therefore subject to the sex discrimination provisions of the Executive Order, and that the Order could be used to fight sex discrimination on American campuses.”
In 1970, a campaign Dr. Sandler spearheaded as the only member of the Federal Action Contract Compliance Committee—part of the Women’s Equity Action League—called out 250 universities, and led to a federal investigation, the first of its kind, into sexual discrimination on campuses. Two years later, Congress passed Title IX. (Dr. Sandler shared her research with one of the bill’s sponsors and testified at the congressional hearing.) She devoted the rest of her life to fighting sexual discrimination, and in 2013, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
“When Title IX was passed I was quite naïve. I thought all the problems of sex discrimination in education would be solved in one or two years at most,” she added, in an article comparing the women’s movement to the Industrial Revolution. “When two years passed, I increased my estimate to 5 years, then later to 10, then to 50, and now I realize it will take many generations to solve all the problems.”
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