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Title IX’s purpose is to level the field for women in athletics and academics. It also has facilitated the growth of women's professional athletics, including the WNBA and WPS.
“Time will show that this is the most important law in our culture over the last 40 years,” says USA TODAY’s Christine Brennan, who will be attending the conference.
“We are empowering our daughters through sports the way we empowered our sons for generations. I believe women will be running for president every four years in the 2020s, ’30s and ’40s, and the common denominator for all of them will be that they played sports.”
(You can follow Brennan's tweets from the conference here. Also, the roundtable will be streamed live on the web.)
One of the highest-ranking women in the Obama administration offers her admiration for Title IX.
“What I learned from my coaches and teammates extended well beyond the basketball court,” United Nations ambassador Susan Rice wrote in an entry on The Briefing Room blog at whitehouse.gov. Rice played basketball, tennis and softball at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C.
“Being part of the basketball team taught me some valuable life lessons and helped shape me as a person. As the United States Ambassador to the United Nations — I’m often reminded that in basketball as in diplomacy, you have to know when to throw elbows and when to show finesse.
“So, as the 37th anniversary approaches, I’m grateful for Title IX and what it means to young women across America.”
On Wednesday afternoon, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford joined the growing list of cheating politicians. He admitted yesterday in a press conference that his 7 day absence was spent in Argentina visiting the women with whom he has been having an affair. Gov. Sanford had been a presidential hopeful in 2012 and known for following conservative values. This affair will surely have a destructive impact on his career. He recklessly left the country without telling anyone where he was headed and left the state at great risk with no one to lead in case of emergency.
The First Lady of South Carolina, Jenny Sanford, later released a statement regarding future separation and the affair. Here’s an excerpt:
In the past 35 years, the feminist revolution has claimed to have given women a sense of liberation from the restricting patriarchal system. However, a recent UPenn study shows that women have not become any happier due to the feminist movement, and it even offers a few possible theories for the disconnect between liberation and happiness.
The first theory proposed is that the feminist movement “raised women’s expectation.” With these new expectations, women will not feel as fulfilled if they are not able to have the successful career, children with or without a husband, and equal opportunities as men in every aspect of their life. The second theory is that women who are mothers and also work are unable to stand up to the pressures, and that everything they need to do to fill both roles is much too overwhelming. In her latest article, Phyllis Schlafly proposes that the feminist movement’s belief that women are constantly being pushed down by their male counterparts causes women to create a “self-imposed victimhood.”
In the 1970s, when stay-at-home moms were more respected and women did not feel as much pressure to have a full-time career, women were the happiest that they have been in the past 35 years. Maybe some type of return to these past viewpoints is in order?