Locker Room Talk: One Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside by Melissa Ludtke is a sports writer’s impressive account of her 1978 lawsuit against Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who had banned female reporters from interviewing baseball players in the locker room before and after major league games. An art history major in college, athletic Ludtke was an enthusiastic and well-informed sports fan who carried that passion into a career in sports journalism. At the age of 26, she had worked her way up to be the baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated, and she was good at it. But she was not getting the access to the players that her male counterparts had. Her lawyer, “Fritz” Schwarz, built a powerful case claiming gender discrimination, took Kuhn to court and won. (Full disclosure: Melissa is a friend, but I’d recommend this book even if she were not.)

Locker Room Talk goes into meticulous detail about the case itself.  Kuhn claimed he was protecting the players’ privacy, but Schwarz noted that Ludtke wasn’t asking that reporters have access to the shower room. In the locker room, towels or cubicle curtains could have addressed any potential privacy considerations.  When baseball teams wouldn’t let her eat with the other reporters in the dining room, she could reasonably ask whether there were any naked men in the dining room. Clearly her gender was the differentiating factor.

Elsewhere, some female sports writers were getting access to basketball and hockey locker rooms. Only one baseball team had allowed Melissa locker room access prior to the 1977 World Series. But baseball Commissioner Kuhn’s ban put an end to that.

In taking on the all-powerful Commissioner, Ludtke was subjected to worldwide disparagement, vicious attacks on her character, and threats to her personal safety. Not surprisingly, the furor affected her personal life. But she kept her head down and refused to let the woman haters and hide-bound traditionalists see her cry.  With no personal involvement in the 1970’s women’s movement, she became a symbol of the rights that women were fighting for. All she wanted was to do her job under the same conditions as male sports writers were working.

Beyond chronicling the trial itself, Ludtke dives into the history of women in sports and sports reporting, the evolution of 14^th Amendment protections from racial discrimination to issues of gender, and the social and cultural environment of that era. (The judge hearing the case was Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman named to the federal court.)

Locker Room Talk is a primer on legal strategy, jurisdictional disputes, motions and cross-motions, summary judgments, appeals and more. The heavily detailed accounting of the legal proceedings and the inclusion of many excerpts from vicious attack letters Ludtke received are interspersed with personal anecdotes that draw the reader forward. (Just one example is the serendipitous event involving Ethel Kennedy and football great Frank Gifford that drew her into sports reporting.) Ludtke’s candor and the reader’s indignation at the unfair treatment of women in the workplace drive the narrative.  

One need only look at recent Olympics coverage to recognize the tremendous gains that women sports reporters have made. But this book provides an ongoing reminder that there are still pockets of resistance to change, and the fight for equal treatment across society endures.

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