← New Books Network
New Books Network
Celene Reynolds, "Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX" (Princeton UP, 2025)
00:45:20
Loading summary
Transcript66 lines
- [00:01]
Celine Reynolds
So good, so good, so good. New fall arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores.
- [00:05]
Jane Semeka
Now get ready to save big with.
- [00:07]
Celine Reynolds
Up to 60% off Vince, Kurt, Geiger London and more. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Cause there's always something new. Join the Nordy Club at Nordstrom Rack to unlock exclusive discounts on your favorite brands. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus get an extra 5% off every rack purchase with a Nordstrom credit card.
- [00:26]
Jane Semeka
Great brands, great prices.
- [00:28]
Celine Reynolds
That's why you Rack. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com.
- [01:02]
Commercial Narrator
Well I was down on my last dollar Then I started saving Cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving so I put my earnings in a high yield account Let the savings compound and the interest mount I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check now time is my praying and not a pain in the neck and we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet Brilliantly boring since 181865 welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Jane Semeka
Welcome to New Books in Women's History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Jane Semeka, professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Today we'll be discussing a new book by Celine Reynolds called Unlawful How Feminists Transform Title IX, published by Princeton University Press. Dr. Reynolds is assistant professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She earned a PhD in Sociology from Yale University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at both Cornell University and the Baldy center for Law and Social Policy at the University of Buffalo school of law. Dr. Reynolds is currently a National Academy of Education Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work in gender equality has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science Research, and Socius and many others. Her work received support from the National Science foundation, the National Academy of Education, Spencer foundation, and the Horowitz foundation for Social Policy, and awards from several sections of the American Sociological Association. Saleem, welcome to the show.
- [02:47]
Celine Reynolds
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:49]
Jane Semeka
You write that historical sociology can be a lot like detective work. So how were you drawn to investigate the subject for your book?
- [02:59]
Celine Reynolds
So when I started graduate School at Yale. I took a job early on in one of the offices responsible for implementing Title ix. And I had always been interested in institutions and social change and gender. But I didn't start graduate school thinking that I was going to write a book about Title 9 or even sexual harassment. And in this office where I was working, the administrators, all the staff were talking about Title IX exclusively in terms of sexual harassment and sexual assault. And like many other Americans, I had really understood Title 9 as the law that promised equity in athletics, gender equity in athletics. I later came to learn that Title I is extremely broad in its coverage and quite vague, prohibiting sex discrimination, broadly conceived, leaving lots of flexibility for that concept to be interpreted in different ways at different historical moments. So I was in this office and quite puzzled by the fact that Title IX was being discussed in this particular way. And I later came to learn that the university was in the process of implementing some recommendations from the Office for Civil Rights as a result of a complaint, a Title IX complaint being filed against it, alleging that a group of students had filed this complaint alleging that the school had mishandled sexual harassment on campus. So it was kind of part of this. The beginning of what became a national movement to confront campus sexual misconduct really exploded in the. In the early 2010s, late 2000s. So I. I discovered this and wanted to understand how it was that. That this law I had initially understood to apply mostly to athletics came to. Came to be used as it came to, became one of the most prominent tools for confronting sexual harassment. And I didn't know it at the time, but Yale was ground zero for thinking about Title IX in this way. So there was a very important lawsuit filed in 1977 deploying Title IX, deploying this interpretation of Title IX.
- [05:34]
Jane Semeka
And there you were at Yale, ready to just dig right into, to the, you know, the files right there on your campus where you already were.
- [05:42]
Celine Reynolds
Yes, it was very fortunate. And so that was the kind of, the beginning of the detective work. And then I really tried to trace the connections between the people at Yale and then the next place where this use for the law took root, which was at Berkeley. And the Berkeley case was really important because it compelled the department, then it was the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, now the Department of Education, to recognize sexual harassment as unlawful under Title ix. So the Yale case was crucial in that it introduced a new interpretation of Title ix, and the district magistrate judge in Connecticut validated that interpretation of Title ix. But, of course, the. The. That case only extended really to Connecticut. And so the Berkeley case was crucial in that it generated national recognition of this use for the law. So there are chapters on each of those cases in the book.
- [06:50]
Jane Semeka
Great. So Title IX made Federal Policy in 1973, 1972, 72. And so can you talk a little bit about the political mood and the context, the historical context that brings together the policy and the cases that you discover? Yeah.
- [07:14]
Celine Reynolds
So Title IX was sort of the direct result of second wave feminist mobilization, and it built explicitly upon the Civil Rights act of 1964. So this, you know, this was the most expansive civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and extended protections against discrimination across numerous domains of our social world. Education, voting, housing. But it, it didn't specifically address the issue of sex in education, sex discrimination in education. So Bernice Sandler, she was an employee at the University of Maryland, was told that she was too strong for a woman to be considered for a tenure track position by one of her colleagues. And she, she started mobilizing around this issue. And eventually a coalition formed, including key politicians. So Patsy Mink, Birch Bay in Indiana, a number of folks advocated for the passage of the law, but as I said, it didn't. The concept of sexual harassment at that time didn't exist. It really was considered part of life for women in the academy and in many other parts of society, the workplace. Uh, so this, this way of thinking about sex discrimination just, just didn't exist.
- [08:57]
Jane Semeka
Not in the 70s. You know, it's, you know, so sexual harassment was going on, but there was no real consciousness among people of what it really meant, right?
- [09:09]
Celine Reynolds
Yes, it was. I mean, McKinnon. Right. Catherine McKinnon, renowned feminist legal scholar, writes in, in her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women, that it really was considered natural or biological, universal men expressing their biological desires. The, the power dimension wasn't there that that piece was not acknowledged. So without acknowledging that piece, it was really difficult to claim that it was a form of discrimination. And women at Cornell, also, one chapter in the book developed the concept of sexual harassment. They were holding a consciousness raising session. One woman, Lynn Farley, she was an instructor there, and she was holding a consciousness raising session in her course on women and work. And all the students were sharing their experiences and employment, and. And they were sharing what came to be known as experiences of sexual harassment. So Lynn Farley also wrote a book called Sexual shakedown that preceded McKinnon's enormously influential book in which she describes this, this consciousness raising session. So having the language was sort of the first step in thinking about it as a form of discrimination. It allowed women to kind of come together around their common experiences, to recognize this category that hadn't been recognized before. So that was sort of the starting point for all of this.
- [10:50]
Jane Semeka
And I'll tell you, it still goes on, sadly, when I'm on panels and the issue of sexual harassment comes up when I'm talking about this with my classes and women are comfortable to share, young women are still feeling about, you know, feeling dealing with sexual harassment. And even though the consciousness has been raised and there's been so much legal change, you know, it's still a major problem in our society. So it's really important that we have your book to. To have a platform to talk about it even even further. So can you talk a little bit about how feminists play a role in using Title 9 to address sexual harassment complaints?
- [11:43]
Celine Reynolds
Yeah. So this. I mean, this really second.
- [11:46]
Jane Semeka
The.
- [11:46]
Celine Reynolds
The second wave feminist movement enabled this. This dramatic transformation in. In many different ways. I mean, perhaps the most obvious being creating Title IX to begin with. But, um, the folks who coined the term at Cornell, they were coming directly from radical feminist organizing in New York. So they. They had come to campus to. To teach as part of this unconventional academic program called human. The Human Affairs Program, which was dedicated to not just sort of the more traditional academic education in the classroom, but also to teaching students how to organize their communities. So they had people like Lynn Farley and Karen Sauvignier come to campus organizers who hadn't taught at the college level, who didn't have their PhDs to come teach students about how to organize. So here we have a network of people coming directly from the feminist movement to campus. And of course, you know, college campuses were a site for much of this activism on a number of different issues. Not just. Not just women's rights, but gay rights, the environmental movement, sexual revolution. I mean, a whole free speech, whole host of issues. But there was this very direct connection between. Between the movement in New York separate from the academy that then entered into the academy and was a crucial, you know, crucial piece of the formulation of the term. And then, you know, at Yale, I think feminism was prominent there. Especially, you know, women had just been admitted to the college in 1969. So I think, you know, regardless of whether you were a feminist, if you were a woman at Yale, you had this really kind of heightened sense of being different. And one of the women in the book, one of them who was part of this very important report written by what was called the Undergraduate Women's Caucus, was a group of undergraduate women who came together to organize on behalf of women in the university. 1. One line in that report is that we. It's. She writes, we were enormously aware of our position as. As peacocks amidst the sparrows.
- [14:26]
Jane Semeka
So, so there's.
- [14:29]
Celine Reynolds
Even if you weren't a feminist, I think at Yale, you were more sensitized to your kind of outsider status. And then Berkeley, of course, the sort of three. The third case, enormously important case for thinking about this specific transformation of Title IX was kind of ground zero for campus activism in the 60s and 70s. So I think in this period there, in the period of what historians have called the long 60s, there was this real sense that higher education was a force for liberation that could move our society in more emancipatory direction. So there was an enormous amount of hope in sort of action that was happening on college campuses and college students.
- [15:18]
Jane Semeka
Yeah. It's interesting, too, when you think about these women who are sort of the, you know, they're breaking ground as among the first class at Yale, among the first women in the. And even in the service academies like West Point and things like that. And they must be so proud that they're breaking this breaking ground being the first among the first women to attend some of these institutions. And it had to be very, in some ways, shocking that they were being harassed this way. So I think that that's a, you know, it's an interesting kind of pushback against the progress.
- [15:58]
Celine Reynolds
Right? Yes. Yes.
- [16:00]
Jane Semeka
And in your book, you also talk about examples of sexual harassment in high school. And, you know, those were very shocking examples. Very upsetting.
- [16:14]
Celine Reynolds
Yes. So this is. This is kind of. This is the period of time when this application of Title 9 to Sexual Harassment becomes both more expansive but also more contested in a way. So this is kind of post 1980s, the last chapter of the book kind of brings us up to the near present. So taking us from the mid-80s to the late 2010s, and there were some really key cases in the 90s, late 90s, early 2000s, Gebzer and Davis, that. That tackled the issue of sexual assault. So so many of the key cases in this later period centered around incidents in K through 12 schools that I think were easier in some ways for the law to recognize as instances of sexual harassment, of instances of sex discrimination. In that. In it, there was a clear, you know, there were a clear series of incidents that unquestionably were sexual harassment, although I will say that I think instances where there's positional inequality, so where it's, you know, a faculty member or a Teacher assaulting a student. Those have generally been easier for the law and American society more generally to recognize those forms of discrimination. But when it's peer to peer, I think because the gendered power dimension is what you have to recognize in order to recognize that it's a form of discrimination, not just the positional dimension of inequality, those historically have been a little bit more challenging for the courts to recognize and others to recognize as unlawful.
- [18:13]
Jane Semeka
So you've talked a little bit about a few cases, but I'm wondering, do you have a favorite story in here?
- [18:19]
Celine Reynolds
Well, I have to say, I mean, as someone who's interested in how things begin in emergence, the first case, the one at Yale, to me is the most, is the most interesting, and it's the one I write about the most. It's. It's how the idea that sexual harassment could be a form of discrepancy, sex discrimination, first emerged. And as I argue in the book, it really. It really was the result of a collaboration between different kinds of feminists, feminists situated in different arenas of the social world. So education and law students at Yale, lawyers in New Haven, many of whom were associated with or graduates of Yale Law School, came together and, you know, the students shared their experiences with faculty and also with administrators in kind of not responding in ways that they viewed as effective or prompt to complaints. And then the lawyers sort of thinking about, okay, what are the legal tools we have available to us? And both of these ingredients were necessary, both of these resources were necessary to actually conceive of sexual harassment in this way. So I think that's. That's the one that I spent most. The most time investigating when we're thinking about lawsuits. And of course, the. The case at Berkeley is also really important. That. And that was not a lawsuit. That was a federal complaint filed with. With the agency, the federal agency responsible for interpreting and implementing Title ix. So enormously important.
- [20:07]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, I would say that the stories are all told in a very interesting narrative fashion. And I think that you get really drawn in and invested in all the stories. So I really enjoyed reading them. So you mentioned college administration in your answer there. So can you talk a little bit about how did the college administrations, when these complaints are made based on Title ix, how did they respond?
- [20:34]
Celine Reynolds
So there really was this sense of befuddlement, I think, especially at Yale, which was a much smaller institution than Berkeley. So Yale, I think the way that its bureaucracy was much more personalistic than Berkeley, which had a more formalized way, a kind of more formal organization. So when students Came to administrators at Yale with this issue. There was just this sort of sense of, wow, you know, this is something that we haven't thought about before as problematic. And it really just illustrates how. How accepted it was, how one questioned sexual harassment. It was.
- [21:27]
Jane Semeka
It was normal.
- [21:29]
Celine Reynolds
It was normal, right?
- [21:30]
Jane Semeka
It was normal. I remember when I was a college student, a woman telling me, if you go to Professor X's office hours, make sure he leaves the door open. And I will never forget that because I was, like, so shocked. And it really raised my consciousness about my relationship with my professors and what I had to be, you know, prepared.
- [21:56]
Celine Reynolds
Yes, yes, yes. And I actually think that this kind of norm of leaving the door open in office hours is in large part a legacy of the story that I tell in the book. So there's. There is more. Well, as you say, the problem is still, it's. It still plagues college campuses, but there is at least a norm against this kind of behavior, especially when it comes to faculty student interactions.
- [22:28]
Commercial Narrator
Ford was built on the belief that the world doesn't get to decide what you're capable of. You do. So ask yourself, can you or can't you? Can you load up a Ford F150 and build your dream with sweat and steel? Can you chase thrills and conquer curves in a Mustang? Can you take a Bronco to where the map ends and adventure begins? Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right. Ready, set, forward.
- [22:59]
Celine Reynolds
I'm Ashley Graham, and as a parent, I know the back to school transition can be a lot when it comes to wellness. Ollie supports me and my family through it all.
- [23:08]
Jane Semeka
Kids, multi is big in my house.
- [23:10]
Celine Reynolds
It supports their immune system and they love, love to take it. A win, win for everyone. Shop these products@ollie.com or retailers nationwide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
- [23:29]
Jane Semeka
So administrators have to kind of respond across the country to this. And now we know that there's training required. I believe by law that everybody has to be trained. And in sexual harassment, what it is and what not to do as a, as a member of the faculty.
- [23:49]
Celine Reynolds
That's right. There's training and actually there's a good amount of research in social scientific research suggesting that that training is pretty ineffective at, at addressing the problem. But it is important to recognize that it is a problem and that that wasn't, you know, that that wasn't true in the 70s. It wasn't recognized as a Problem. The other thing I'll say too, about. About administrators was that they, they initiated specialized policies and procedures for addressing this problem in response to feminist student mobilization. And the first one was at Yale because that was the first case using Title IX in this way. So students wanted. They wanted. And they wanted a place to go with their compl. There was nowhere to go before. So they wanted these grievance procedures for their complaints of sexual harassment against faculty. And I think that's also a really interesting and important piece of the story that the sexual harassment response systems that exist in colleges and universities today were not the results of. Not the immediate result of administrators trying to reduce legal liability. I mean, they were trying to reduce legal liability, but the only reason why they were trying to reduce it was because these women filed lawsuits, filed federal complaints against the institutions because they didn't have these processes. So these processes originated from feminist mobilization, though. This is, this is something. I think that's. This is a different story from the workplace. The workplace that really was about kind of HR professionals creating these processes in response to anti discrimination law. And here it's. Here it's the feminists themselves that. The people who are protected by the law.
- [25:50]
Jane Semeka
All right, so you're redeeming feminists. I think that's a good thing.
- [25:55]
Celine Reynolds
Well, yeah, I am. Although I think there is a tone of. I hope that I've struck a tone of ambivalence in the book because these bureaucratic processes are. They're not as effective as they could be. I mean, this way of responding to the problem, I think isn't. Isn't the best. But having a process matters a lot. And I think, you know, that's. In some ways that's the path forward, although Title IX and related laws are currently facing much bigger assaults. So I think the sexual harassment response systems that are in colleges and universities are not going away anytime soon. So we need to. That's what I see as the frontier. How it is that these processes can be reformed to actually work better for everyone, not just for victims, but also for the accused and for universities too. What is the point? Like, what are these. What are these processes designed to do? What do we think they should do?
- [27:08]
Jane Semeka
Right. Yeah. And I only said that because in. In a joking fashion, because, you know, the, the very feminist, anti feminist mood that we're in at the moment. I like to point out some of the important gains made by the feminist movement in the long 1960s into the 70s and how they've become just part of normal life now. But were Instigated by. By feminist activism. And so I'd like to point that out just to put a little check in the feminist column.
- [27:43]
Celine Reynolds
Absolutely. I think the. It was an enormous accomplishment to make sexual harassment into a form of sex discrimination, to make abortion legal. So I think it's important not to lose sight of these achievements despite, you know, the fact that they are imperfect. I mean, every. Every gain is imperfect in a way. I think we're not gonna. We're not gonna be able to identify a case where universally we agree that it's a. That it's a perfect gain.
- [28:16]
Jane Semeka
I know someone who says, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- [28:20]
Celine Reynolds
That's right.
- [28:21]
Jane Semeka
You know, so, you know, we don't necessarily think of lawyers as creative thinkers, but this is certainly an example of creative legal thinking. And when I was reading this, I was thinking about Pauli Murray and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and some of their creative legal thinking in looking at things like the 14th amendment and interpreting the equal protection clause to fight segregation and to bring cases to fight discrimination. And so how did the lawyers or how did the legal minds change Title 9 in unanticipated. The application of Title 9 in unexpected ways?
- [29:12]
Celine Reynolds
So we had some of the most important legal minds working on this project, and one of them being Katherine McKinnon. So Katherine McKinnon, as I said, kind of wrote the book on sexual harassment. She established that her argument was that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. And. And she. She was successful in persuading the American judiciary that that was the case. So. But the creative thinking, I think, actually stemmed from, in the case of Title IX, really, their collaboration with students. Catherine McKinnon was already thinking about sexual harassment in this way because she had learned about the con that. She learned about the concept directly from the women at Cornell who had. Who had coined it. So she was. She was thinking about it in this way as a form of sex discrimination, but really in the context of the workplace, not in the context of education. So that. That shift happened when. When students came into the picture and they were sharing their experiences. So they were. They were both creative.
- [30:20]
Jane Semeka
They were.
- [30:21]
Celine Reynolds
They were able to be creative because they were collaborating and because, you know, there weren't a lot of women working in this space back then. So everyone who. Everyone who was sort of. They knew each other, and that was a really important piece of making this application of the law legitimate and valid in the eyes of both the courts and the Department of Education.
- [30:51]
Jane Semeka
That's great. So you write that the path forward is unclear. So what do you think about the future of Title ix?
- [30:59]
Celine Reynolds
Yeah, so I guess before. So before Trump was elected, I would have said trans rights. That was the future. That was going to be sort of the frontier for the law, if we're thinking about dramatic transformations. I mean, under Obama, trans. Trans rights were recognized under Title IX as protected under Title ix. Trans. Trans, students, rights. And then of course, that changed under Trump. So now, you know, we're, we're in this moment of a sort of push to return to biological difference as the, as the main axis of difference between men and women as opposed to power. And I would say gender. I mean, gender and power are intertwined. So I think if this biological difference is sort of the path forward, then Title IX becomes, in my mind, a lot less powerful. Powerful in its capacity to actually protect students from discrimination and others in education. So Title IX doesn't just apply to students, it also applies to staff and faculty, although employees tend to turn to Title VII to, To assert their claims. But I think if we, I think if we return to biology, then power is, is erased. So it becomes very difficult to make the argument that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination if we're thinking about difference exclusively in biological terms. So it'll be interesting. I mean, I, I'm not actually sure what the, what the path forward is for Title ix. I think that like a lot of our other civil rights laws, they, they are sort of being defanged. I think that Title 9 certainly won't become a tool for advancing trans rights. I think that in some ways it's actually, you know, like Title six has been repurposed in yet another way to address the claims of historically dominant groups. So we kind of see some people call it a weaponization of law. It could also be called a reversal. You know, the conditions under which laws that were designed to enhance equal opportunity for historically marginalized groups are mobilized on behalf of historically dominant groups. So that's a perhaps more pessimistic view of the path forward for clinical.
- [33:43]
Jane Semeka
You can't help but think that way when you see things get twisted around on its head in terms of the semantics of the arguments. I can think of a couple of cases recently right off the bat, where the, the arguments in favor of equality and defining discrimination have been totally turned upside down. Yes. And I had to say too, when I heard that the Department of Education was going to be dismantled, and a lot of the reporting on that focused on how this was going to harm students who were special needs and things like that. And the thing that hit me right away when I had heard that reporting was, well, who's going to enforce Title ix?
- [34:40]
Celine Reynolds
Yes, I should have mentioned this, that the complete gutting of the Department of Education, including the Office for Civil Rights within it, I mean, that really actually makes the path forward for Title IX even more unclear, perhaps even more pessimistic. Will be very interesting to see how civil rights enforcement unfolds. I mean, already we've, we've seen that it's, you know, I think, you know, under Obama, sexual harassment and assault became a flagship issue when it came to implementing Title 9. And now under the Trump administration, anti Semitism. Anti Semitism has become a flagship issue. So we'll see if, if the administration continues to dedicate most of its resources to this issue or if it, if, if it has resources available to dedicate to different or, or other agenda items. I don't know. We'll see.
- [35:42]
Jane Semeka
We'll have to see. Stay tuned. Right, so how do you think your book could be useful in the classroom used for teaching? I'm a classroom teacher, so I'm always thinking when I read, how can I use this? Did you have any thoughts?
- [35:58]
Celine Reynolds
Yeah, so I would say two things, two main things. One, it could be used as a methods book or to illustrate a mixed method approach to social scientific research. So I bring to bear multiple forms of evidence in the book. So I use, of course, archival research documents from archives across the country. I interview key people involved in the story, many of whom have actually since passed. So there's really also this oral history dimension to the project, lawsuits. And then the other big piece is this data set of federal Title IX complaints that I constructed. So it's all, all Title IX complaints filed with the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights at the post secondary level from 94 to 2018. So that data set was really helpful in that it allowed me to trace broad trends in how the law has been deployed. So if it's true that in the more contemporary moment it was used predominantly to confront sexual harassment or some other issue, what types of schools are targeted in complain? Are elite schools sort of where the action is when it comes to using Title ix? So that data set was crucial in thinking about kind of big picture patterns in the more contemporary period. So I think the book could be really useful in thinking through how we can put together different pieces of evidence in service of our research question. So that's one and then the other, I would say there are sort of three sub points. One is that it can be used to help us understand changes in our cultural norms. So how is it that something that was once completely accepted becomes unlawful or unsavory? How does that happen? The other is about organizational change, right? So, like, how is it that new, new bureaucratic structures and processes emerge? And then the third is, how does law. How can law operate as a tool for social change? What are its limits? What can it achieve successfully? How does it operate as a tool for social change? I do think that. That the text of the law has this enormous power because it is so vague statutes like Title nine, like Title seven, like the Endangered Species act, like the Antitrust act, these are really, really vague laws that allow for us to read in our present moment. You know, what does it mean in our present moment? What does sex discrimination mean in our present moment? So I. I think that there's this enormous sort of imaginative capacity in the law to think about different futures for ourselves, and also a practical capacity. I mean, there it is a practical tool that we can use to. To. To make our imagined futures, realities.
- [39:31]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's. I think this idea of reading these laws and reading the principles that they're supposed to uphold and what those. How those principles can be useful in the day, this day. And I often talk in my women's history class about things, about how do we make change? How do we change things? Do we just pass a law and say, oh, we're done with that now. That's over, you know, but there's sort of this. This dynamic process that goes on between what society wants to change and how the law has to either lead it or catch up with that. And this is a. Just a fantastic example of that kind of dynamic in society, I think.
- [40:25]
Celine Reynolds
Thank you. Yeah. And I think the more recent movement really beautifully illustrates that. So we have this action in the 70s that I'm talking about in the book. But in the late 2000s, early 2010s, there was again, this huge. I mean, there was this nationwide movement against campus sexual assault that I think actually laid the groundwork for the Me Too movement. And many of the people who were involved in that late 2000s, early 2010s movement actually weren't even aware of what had happened in the 70s. So I think that illustrates, you know, the. The sort of. The incremental nature of the change and how it is that these. These laws, these texts are really. They are wellsprings for generations for imagining these. These new worlds and. And building towards. Towards the new worlds. Right.
- [41:20]
Jane Semeka
I remember in the 80s there were take back the night marches.
- [41:23]
Celine Reynolds
Yes.
- [41:24]
Jane Semeka
So that, you know, women weren't going to be, weren't going to stand for being afraid to leave the library at 11:30 by themselves to walk back to the dorm or wherever. So, yeah, this, and that feels very connected to this earlier movement of, you know, has that kind of activist flavor to it.
- [41:44]
Celine Reynolds
Yes. And I think it is, it's all part of the same, it's all sort of everyone's swimming in the same pond. It is part of the, the feminist movement against sexual subordination. And, and also, you know, as I was maybe alluding to earlier, there is intense internal debate over how to best confront these problems within feminism. So I don't, I don't suspect that those debates are going to be going away anytime soon. And they can be, as I, as I sort of show in the book, these differences, our differences can be enormous sources of innovation. So I think thinking across our differences coming together despite our differences, especially in our current moment, is incredibly important. So it's, it's not just important for building towards change, but it's also important for actually imagining what we want that change to look like. Yeah.
- [42:47]
Jane Semeka
And I do want to mention as we finish up that the book is extremely intersectional. You take an intersectional approach and I think that academics will find that very useful as well. And I didn't ask you a particular question about that, but I want anyone listening to understand that the approach to the analysis is very clearly intersectional and very helpful in that way.
- [43:12]
Celine Reynolds
Thank you. Yeah, I do think that's a big, that's actually, you know, anyone who's a historian will already know, but it's a misconception about second wave feminism. Right. That it was a white woman's movement and when in reality it was very diverse in terms of race and class. And in this story, it is primarily white middle class women. Not exclusively. I mean, Pamela Price was a black student at Yale who has now gone on to be a prominent civil rights attorney. She was involved in the first case against Yale, but most of the other people were white middle class women making this change in the law. But even, even so, the law has been used by women of all, of all races and classes to sort of push for change. And in fact, the, the series of cases that I talk about in the last chapter of the book, the K12 cases, some of them that you were mentioning, in fact, most of those plaintiffs were women of color or girls of color. So women of color have long been on the forefront of these sorts of changes. Certainly.
- [44:30]
Jane Semeka
Thank you so much for writing this book and for joining me on the show today. I want to thank Celine Reynolds for coming on to talk about her book, unlawful How Feminists Transform Title ix, published by Princeton University Press. Until next time on new books in women's history, this is Jane Semeka. Keep reading.
- [45:05]
Commercial Narrator
Packages by Expedia. You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We were made to easily bundle your trip Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.