The Godmother of Title IX
March 22, 2019
After she was turned down for a tenure-track university faculty position because she as considered too "strong" for a woman, Bernice Sandler '48 got angry, and then she went on to help champion and pass legislation that would bring equality in education to women and girls nationwide.
Title IX advocate Bernice Sandler '48 describes what sex discrimination was like in higher education for women before the passage of the law in 1972. Sandler is featured here in the 2014 documentary, Rise of the Wahine: Champions of Title IX.
"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
— Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972
From the time she attended grammar school in Brooklyn, Bernice Sandler ’48 knew there was something patently unfair about how boys and girls were treated in the classroom.
“We got a slide projector, which was the height of technical advances in schools using equipment,” she said in a 2016 interview for the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. “Only boys got to run it. Only boys could use this long pole to open the windows. There was no word for sexism and sex discrimination. Boys could be crossing guards and I could not be a crossing guard because I was female. For a while I was a runner and I went to the store to buy something, and I saw the orange sash that the crossing guards wore and I bought one for myself so I could be more visible, but really it was to make up for not being allowed to be a crossing guard.”
It was this refusal to accept the idea that the way things were would be the way they’d always be that spurred Sandler—who passed away in January at the age of 90—to become the “Godmother of Title IX,” the 1972 law that banned sex discrimination in any federally funded educational institution. “It was the most important piece of legislation since women got the right to vote in 1920,” Sandler would later say of the law.
Born on March 3, 1928, Bernice Resnick and her older sister Rhoda were raised in Brooklyn, where they also attended school. Her parents Abraham Hyman Resnick and Ida (née Ernst) Resnick owned a women’s clothing store in New Jersey.
Brooklyn College alumna Bernice Sandler talks about the impact of Title IX legislation on women's sports in schools on CUNY TV's news magazine show Study with the Best.
It was at the all-girls summer camp that young Bernice—nicknamed Bunny—got her first real taste of leadership, serving for many years on the camp council. But she didn’t see herself as a leader, “until I started doing things and people identified me as a leader,” she said in a 2006 interview for Minnesota State University. “Sometimes your self-image is behind what you are actually doing and it sort of follows you like a shadow, and it takes a while until it catches up with you.”
After graduating from Erasmus High School, Bernice Resnick attended Brooklyn College, earning a bachelor of science in psychology in 1948, and a masters in the same field from The City College of New York, CUNY. In 1952 she married Jerrold Sandler. The couple had two children, Deborah and Emily. The marriage later ended in divorce.
Sandler completed a doctorate in counseling at the University of Maryland in 1969 with every expectation of becoming a tenure-track faculty member there. Her plans were shattered when she was not considered for any of the seven available positions in her department. In a moment of candor, a male friend and fellow student her told that she would never be hired because she was “too strong for a woman.”
To find out what legal rights she and other women in education had, Sandler began to research civil rights laws in the United States. What she found, to her great surprise, was that sex discrimination—a term that only officially entered the language in the mid-1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—was legal in educational institutions. While researching, Sandler read a report on the enforcement of civil rights legislation and saw a footnote that would change everything. It stated that an executive order by President Lyndon Johnson banning federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, and national origin, had been amended to include sex discrimination.
On Overcoming Stereotypes
When I’m looking at issues or thinking about ideas I very often say, “how will this affect other people who are not like me? How would it affect immigrant women, how would it affect people of color, how would it affect people who are disabled in some form?" I try to think about this, but I have to tell you it’s very easy to develop stereotypes. You have to think about one’s own stereotypes and what they mean and then [ask] how do you get rid of them.
— Bernice Sandler '48
“I was alone at home and it was a genuine ‘Eureka’ moment,” Sandler wrote in a 2007 article for the Cleveland State Law Review. "I actually shrieked aloud 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.”
Sandler joined the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) in 1969, and as the only member of the league’s Federal Action Contract Compliance Committee, filed 250 administrative charges of sex discrimination against educational institutions under Johnson’s executive order.
“The biggest risk I took was when I started filing charges of discrimination against colleges and universities,” she said in the St. Francis interview. “I knew that by filing I would never get to teach. I also knew that I wasn’t getting anywhere because of discrimination.”
A letter writing campaign by victims of sex discrimination caused so much mail to pour into Washington D.C., that extra staff had to be hired to handle it. As a result of Sandler’s work with Democratic Party legislators Rep. Edith Green of Oregon, Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii (the first woman of color to serve in Congress), and Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who organized congressional hearings and got the bill passed, Title IX of the Education Amendments was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on June 23, 1972.
When Title IX passed, no one, not even the creators of the law, could completely envision the law’s far-reaching effects, including the dramatic change to women’s sports in schools .
Sandler went on to become the first chair of the now defunct National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs, appointed by both presidents Ford and Carter. She wrote several books and numerous articles on the topics of sex discrimination, sexual harassment, and rape at educational institutions, and was a senior scholar at the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as an adjunct associate professor at Drexel University College of Medicine.
In 2011, Sandler was presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters at Brooklyn College’s commencement ceremony. In 2013, she received a Post 50th Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn College Alumni Association. That same year, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame “as a tireless advocate of educational equality for women and girls.”
Of that decades-long advocacy, Sandler said it began with that first rejection when she was told she came on too strong for a woman. “I went home and I cried,” she said in a 2012 interview for the Montgomery County Maryland Hall of Fame, into which she was inducted that year. “It took me a while to realize [sex discrimination] was what it was, and then I got mad. . . . And then I became inspired.”
