In the 1970’s the nation struggled with the concept and the reality of women athletes. As women entered sports in greater numbers, particularly after the enactment of Title IX, they didn’t find open doors and welcoming facilities. Nowhere was this more evident than in the world of rowing. This diary, as part of the feminisms series, is dedicated to the first US National Women’s Rowing Team in 1975. I’ll introduce you to their challenges on and off the water, to the hallmark Yale strip-in protest, and talk a little about the ripple effects still being felt today.
Last fall I wrote a diary about my experiences learning to row. I fell in love with rowing for three reasons: rowing on the ocean into the sunrise or the sunset is a total feast for the senses; rowing is a total body workout and I learned that I enjoy feeling physically strong; and rowing brings a camaraderie between the women in the boat who are all working together toward the same goal. This spring I read a book by Daniel Boyne, The Red Rose Crew, about the 1975 National Team. I became fascinated with their story and with the gifts they bestowed on rowing, women, and the world.
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
Why do women row? As I read through The Red Rose Crew I found that the women in that boat chose rowing for the same reasons I have and they added one more. All of the oarswomen in that boat had a tremendous drive to compete—both to test their own limits and to prove to the world that it was acceptable to be strong.
Boyne described a photographer’s reaction on seeing the crew.
(C)rew seemed to have a brutal, macho aspect to it. He’d never seen any teams of women who could do what this group could do, to push themselves to the very limits of their being in order to propel a narrow boat up and down the river. He thought it was somewhat bizarre at first, then he realized that it was actually quite beautiful. In crew the rowers’ bodies became secondary, lost in the synchronous movement of the oars and the smooth movement of the shell itself. Perhaps on dry land these women didn’t fit the traditional definition of feminine beauty, being eithier too big or too muscular. But when they took to the water, they became transformed, part of a giant swan with eight wings. It was a powerful image to behold.
As part of an oral history project Eugenia Kiesling, who rowed with 2 members of the Red Rose Crew at Yale, was asked about the relationship with her teammates.
That was a wonderful thing. That was extraordinary...I wasn’t used to dealing with women. I wasn’t used to doing sport with them and it was wonderful to me how quickly we found things in common. We were physically very affectionate, a lot of hugging and backslapping and having someone you could be close to was marvelous. We’d give each other massages after a hard row, which is something that the men couldn’t do. Men are way too standoffish but we had that kind of easy relationship with one another. I had a very strong sense that you didn’t have to know a woman on the crew very well. You could ask me about one of these people. I couldn’t tell you what her religion was or her politics or a million other things that didn’t matter but I knew the things that did matter. I mean, I knew I could trust her. I knew that she would work hard. I knew she had a sense of values as an athlete that matched my own.
RESISTANCE TO WOMEN ROWING
In David Halberstam’s book about male Olympic rowing hopefuls, The Amateurs, he wrote:
It was in its way a very macho world. The egos were immense—they had to be for so demanding a spot. Men of lesser will and ambition simply did not stay around...Few sports has as great a disparity between the time committed in practice and time actually spent in game or race conditions...Rowing...inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time.
From The New Yorker:
Rowers have to face the grim consequences of starting a two-thousand-metre race with a sprint--a strategy no runner, swimmer, cyclist, or cross-country skier would consider using in a middle-distance event...Marathon runners talk about hitting "the wall" at the twenty-third mile of the race. What rowers confront isn't a wall; it's a hole--an abyss of pain, which opens up in the second minute of the race. Large needles are being driven into your thigh muscles, while your forearms seem to be splitting. Then the pain becomes confused and disorganized, not like the windedness of the runner or the leg burn of the biker but an all-over, savage unpleasantness. As you pass the five-hundred-metre mark, with three-quarters of the race still to row, you realize with dread that you are not going to make it to the finish, but at the same time the idea of letting your teammates down by not rowing your hardest is unthinkable. Therefore, you are going to die.
Finally, from Brad Allen Lewis, Olympic Gold Medallist and one of the rowers profiled in Halberstam’s book:
At the completion of the final stroke of a close race, an oarsman should collapse over his oar, having spent every possible ounce of energy. Fainting from exhaustion at the finish line, although rarely seen, is greatly respected among competitors.
There just wasn’t the sense that women were able to tolerate the amount of training and, in particular, the pain required of elite rowers. Sure, maybe they could paddle around in boats but real rowing was for men. This attitude showed up again and again in a variety of settings. Boyne mentions that, "Radcliffe women were often heckled on the Charles, and off the water they were harassed by the press." Women faced poor equipment, forbidden facilities, and lack of funding. At Yale the male rowing team’s coach was paid $5000 while the female team’s coach was paid $500.
And there was resistance from the male rowers toward the women’s program. Anne Warner and Chris Ernst, who would later become members of the Red Rose Crew, went to complain to the President of Yale about both their boat and the fact that their coach, unlike the men’s coach, did not receive a raise. When he wasn’t available the rowers met with his wife. Their coach received a salary increase and they received a new boat. But the men’s program didn't allow them to store their boat at the boathouse. Their coach had to transport the 60 foot boat on top of his VW bus back and forth to the river.
Boyne wrote: "Neither Chris nor Anne would ever forget the feeling of humiliation that overcame them as young rowers at Yale, when they had gone to the campus weight room to train. The Yale men hadn't ever seen women lift weights before and had lined up along the upper balcony of the gymnasium and leered at them, calling them names to make them leave." About Warner he adds, "When she explained her National Team and Olympic rowing plans to her Yale adviser, he simply shook his head and said: "Go ahead, ruin your figure!"
According to Eugenia Kiesling, Yale oarsmen had a great deal of resistance toward women rowers, as did some of the administration.
I was more bitter in the second year when it seemed time to build us a locker room and the complaints we had were met with such disdain. And when we said to the men look it’s not fair, their attitude was well we’ve been here a hundred and fifty years and you haven’t. It was an ugly tone. I began to think well why should we have to wait a hundred and fifty years. I got more active, more bitter over time. But I also remember some of my anger was directed towards the woman who was our representative in the athletic department, Joni Barnett, because I thought that she was much more concerned with whether we were drinking beer on road trips and how we looked in general, the aesthetics, than with how we performed. She liked the gymnastics team, the swim team, and the teams that looked cute and didn’t like the basketball team or the crew because we were not cute. We were big and strong and grubby. Some of us used bad language...
I think the worst conflict was on the bus rides. That was very nasty. I can remember days when the men were making a lot of noise and you’d try to get them to be quiet and they wouldn’t be quiet. They would say very rude things about the women, very contemptuous. I don’t know what they were thinking. Well, they weren’t rowing very well. The varsity heavyweights had a bunch of bad years and they took it out on anybody they could. I was very bitter knowing that I was training hard and I was a good athlete. I wanted them to like me. I wanted them to respect me for what I did and well, they didn’t.
Red Rose Crew member Carol Brown and her teammates at Princeton were barred from using what the men considered their boathouse. The women were allowed to come through to launch their boats in the early mornings but were banned from the toilets, the showers and the weight room.
Gail Pierson, Red Rose Crew member and the first woman economics professor at Harvard, ended up learning to row because she needed to replace swimming as her sport. Harvard had only recently gone coed; only men used the main campus pool; and they swam in the nude. Radcliffe’s pool was inferior so Pierson learned to row. At the US Nationals in 1972, Gail spoke with other oarswomen and advocated for women racing both nationally and internationally. She was elected President of the National Women’s Rowing Association and finagled a way for her and 3 other women to compete at the World Championships as scullers in a quad. The 4 women paid their own way to Germany, sewed their own uniforms, had no coach, and had to borrow an old boat in order to race. Unsurprisingly, the team didn’t do well. The U.S. rowing overseers saw this as confirmation of their decision to withhold funding, training and official support for women rowers.
Once it was announced that the 1976 Olympics would be adding a women’s 8 rowing event, Gail petitioned the National Olympic Committee to create a separate committee for women rowers with their own budget. She advocated to the Olympic Committee without notifying the US rowing organizations because she doubted the money would be dispersed fairly if a joint committee had to fund both the men’s and the women’s teams. The Women’s Olympic Rowing Committee was formed and funded by the national committee thanks to Gail’s advocacy.
According to Boyne:
You had to be guarded with reporters as a female athlete, too, and not come off sounding too strong or too masculine. They were threatened if you did that and immediately labeled you as something less than a real woman....The New York Times had given its spin to the growing interest in women's rowing, calling it the "Amazon Syndrome," where women had taken up "weightlifting, ergometers, running the steps of the stadiums, and the flattening of the bosom." When they had asked Gail for a comment on this, she had kept her words tidy and direct, hammered into a slogan: "It's all right to be strong. It's all right to compete.
An article on Gail Pearson in Sports Illustrated gave a sense of what was considered acceptable journalistic language in 1975.
Is this to be some radical confrontation on the Charles, in which outraged females will burn their oars for equal rights? Hardly. These are tough, dedicated women who meet each weekday morning to practice rowing the eight, tuning up for their ultimate goal, the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.... Pierson smiles a stunning smile, and with her high cheekbones and sweatband she looks almost Indian. She weighs 150, stands 5'9" and has the slope-shouldered posture that indicates power and quickness in women athletes....
Pierson is not a fiercely militant feminist about jobs, careers and salaries—or sport...
Pierson's social life, predictably, is also wrapped up in sports. A close friend is Seymour Cromwell, a rower of distinction some years back... "We're going to the opera tonight," says Gail, "so everything's not rowing."
Pierson has strong opinions about women in sport. "We've been trained to be competitive with one another in life to 'get the man," she says, "and that hurts women in team sports. We've got to learn to pull together, particularly in rowing." She laughs at her small joke. "Also, women have never been taught to put their hearts and souls into anything, except a family maybe. It's only total dedication that will win anything..."
In other areas, her notions are counter to the Billie-Jean-King-You've-Come-A-Long-Way-Baby militancy.
THE RED ROSE CREW
The 1975 US National Women’s Rowing Team was known as The Red Rose Crew. Harry Parker, coach of the Harvard Men’s Rowing Team, coached the team. He had planned to coach the men’s national team, as he had in the past, but was not offered the position. Parker put off the Olympic Committee when he was offered the coaching position for the women’s team. "The women's national team coaching job was, after all, a position that carried absolutely no status. Among Parker's colleagues, women's rowing was little more than a curious new phenomenon that was somehow moving forward, against the strong current of cultural resistance." (Boyne)
Parker had been very encouraging to Gail Pierson and to Anne Warner. He’d been the one to help Gail Pierson’s quad crew find a boat to borrow in Germany. And when Anne Warner had been denied the elite racing shells by the male boathouse staff, despite passing all of her time trials, Parker told the staff to let her row.
Parker eventually accepted the position as coach for the women’s team. The women who came to camp to try out for the national team saw that he didn’t play favorites and was concerned only about assembling the fastest boat. "Parker would talk very little to anyone personally, he would scrutinize each one of them with the careful eye of a jeweler—watch them from all angles, in different seats, and see who made a boat go fast... Harry Parker would cut his own mother from a boat if he thought it would make it go faster."(Boyne)
Eighty women tried out for camp and thirty-two made the first cut. In the end, the national team consisted of 8 rowers, one coxswain, and two alternates. Carie Graves, of the University of Wisconsin, stroked the boat. Gail Pierson, then an economics professor at MIT, sat in seat seven. Wiki Royden, the Radcliffe stroke, filled seat six. Claudia Schnieder, from Long Beach, CA, sat in seat 5. Anne Warner, the Yale stroke, rowed in 4 seat. Nancy Storrs, from Williams College, filled seat 3. Carol Brown, from Princeton, sat in seat 2. And Chris Ernst, the surprise from Yale, rowed bow. Lynn Silliman, a 16 year old from California, coxed the boat. In order to receive funding for the trip to the 1975 World Championships, the rowing committee insisted that they pass a time trial. When they passed their trial, the rowing committee paid for a training camp in Henley, a new boat, and uniforms.
From an article in Time 9/8/75:
They arrived in England for the world championships with an untried boat and a crew that was considered too light, too old and too inexperienced to make any sort of challenge... No one was more surprised at their high pain tolerance than Harry Parker, successful coach of men's crew at Harvard, who had signed on with no noticeable enthusiasm to coach the national women's boat. Only five years before, when Radcliffe students approached him about forming a women's crew, he had said no. "I was thoroughly a part of our culture," he says. "I never thought women would be willing to work hard enough."... "I'd have to say these girls are among the most motivated athletes I have ever met," said the coach. They were also the first Parker crew ever to race with red roses tied to their shoelaces.
How did they fare? The first day of races in Nottingham, England had the candidates divided into two races, 5 countries in each. This was the first time the national team had ever rowed together in a race. The winners of the two heats would rest up for the final on Sunday while the 2-5 place finishers would race again on Saturday in repechages. The top two crews in each repechage would row in the finals on Sunday with the winners of Friday’s heats. The Americans were expected to finish at the bottom of the field as usual. They raced the Russians, Hungarians, Polish and French on Friday. The Americans finished 4/10s of a second behind the Russians. That was surprising enough. But:
Anne Warner looked over at the boat that had just beaten them. Instead of jubilant, ecstatic faces, she saw shocked expressions filled with pain. Suddenly a few of the Russian women leaned over and threw up over the side of the boat...In her own boat, there were nine shocked women, too, but their astonishment was tinged with quiet excitement. They had rowed a mediocre race with an out-of-control stroke and a broken speaker system—and had almost won. (Boyne)
On Saturday, the East Germans and the Russians had a day of rest. The Americans easily won their repechage by half a boat length over the 2nd and 3rd place boats. Their time was 3:21:11, while Romania, the winner of the other repechage, posted a time of 3:22:22. The Americans had shocked everyone by earning a seat in the finals.
On Sunday, after carrying their boat down to the dock, the crew rolled it over to place it on the water and found a single red rose tied into the laces of each shoe. This special kindness from a supporter earned them their nickname, The Red Rose Crew.
By the halfway point in the race, 500 meters, the Americans, the East Germans and the Romanians were in the lead, with the Russians, the West Germans and the Dutch all a boat length behind. The East Germans and the Americans raced in tandem through the final strokes. The East Germans placed first by 1.6 seconds. The Americans had shocked the world of rowing with their silver medal performance.
One week later the American men, heavily favored to win, rowed a 5th place finish. This was the team Harry Parker was supposed to coach when he was offered the women’s team instead. Time magazine had sent a reporter to write a story on the men’s team. Instead, the story was called The Red Rose Crew. Time did feel the need to explain that the women’s tears at the medal ceremony were understandable given their unexpected arrival on the international stage.
As for Parker, he wrote each woman a letter thanking them for the opportunity to coach them and encouraged them to try out again next year for the Olympic team.
(T)he women had provided him with just the sort of rowing experience that he loved: to take an unheralded, even ignored, group of young rowers and make them into a successful team. It made the success all the more sweet and made him eager to coach them again. Rosenberg could keep the US men’s team; Parker wanted to continue coaching the women. (Boyne)
The women had proven they were a force to be reckoned with to other countries, to the US rowing overseers, to the coach who hadn’t really wanted them, and, most of all, to themselves. Women’s rowing would never be the same again. These women returned to their college and community rowing programs with the confidence of champions. When they continued to face resistance, they forged ahead. Each one of them went on to continue making her mark on the world.
THE STRIP-IN
photo courtesy Mary Mazzio
When Chris Ernst and Anne Warner returned to Yale with their silver medals, they found that the facilities for women’s crew had actually worsened. Seven years after women were admitted to Yale, and four years after the inception of women’s rowing, the boathouse still did not have facilities for women. Even worse, the temporary trailer from last season, which hadn't had any hot water or electricity, was not hooked up.
Yale Alumni Magazine
In the late fall of 1975, the women would end their daily workouts on the Housatonic River and stow their shells and oars just as the men did. But then, while the men showered and changed in their own locker room, the women sat huddled on the bus, their sweat mingling with the melting ice on their warmups, until the men were ready for the 30-minute ride back to Payne Whitney. That year several team members fell ill; a few developed pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. Despite repeated requests from team members for even temporary changing facilities, Yale said only that it would eventually renovate the existing structure to accommodate them. No administrator could say when.
Anne Warner was among the Yale women who caught pneumonia. There continued to be difficulties with the male rowers as well. Women rowers from Yale still have strong memories of those interactions:
(T)wo-time Olympian and Yale rower Anne Warner is still emotional. Warner describes the taunting and jeering she and Ernst endured while working out in the men's weight room. "You have no idea how that felt, as an 18-year-old female to whom it was very important to be attractive and sexual somehow," she says, "to have these large men somehow, your peers, judging you as somehow disgusting and debased because you were strong and excelling." Another rower, Jenni Kiesling, says, "We were working as hard, training as hard, winning races, and the men treated us as if we were not real athletes." As if the words "women" and "athletes" were mutually exclusive, the men of Yale rowing continued the policy of exclusion that Title IX was designed to eliminate.
The success in Nottingham followed by the barriers to participation at Yale, coupled with illness, pushed Chris Ernst, Anne Warner and that fellow crew members to consider some resistance of their own.
Furthermore, the degradation was sometimes not so subtle and often outright malicious. "We would lift weights in the gym and the football players would jeer at us. It was degrading to be female and attractive and at the same time considered disgusting because we were strong and excelling. We felt like we were not real athletes," said a former crew member. During the time the women spent waiting on the bus, cold and angered that they were paying the same tuition as the men but were denied the most basic needs such as a women's locker room, Ernst and the other rowers thought of what could be done to capture the attention of the school and the public.
Yale Alumni Magazine 1993
Change, concluded team captain Christine Ernst '76, who had rowed to a silver medal in the previous summer's world championships and went on to row in the summer Olympics, would never happen without forcing the issue. "We had plenty of time to sit on the bus and stew and plot," she recalled recently.
Chris Ernst was used to pushing through obstacles. She'd spent high school beating boys in arm wrestling in order to win gymnasium time for her gymnastics team. She was automatically dismissed as a potential rower on sight because she was much, much shorter than competitive rowers. But once she got into the boat, or on the erg machine, she proved that she had the power to make a boat move. "It was Ernst's idea to remind the athletic directors, who had been stubbornly ignoring the women's pleas, of Title IX, a much neglected congressional legislation enacted in 1972 stating that discrimination against sex was unlawful in federally funded institutions."
Eugenia Kiesling remembered that the plan began with some joking around about how to make their point but they quickly settled on a plan.
It evolved very quickly. I mean, this all happened while we were sitting on the bus while the men were showering. So, it couldn’t have been ten minutes, probably less, for us to come up with the concept...So, this was not a long planned mutiny. It was a spontaneous decision. And it was half political protest and half high spirits. We were extremely cold and miserable and it’s a sign of the high morale of the team that instead of responding to that by going into a sulk, we came up with something that was funny.
The women met as a team in the locker room a bit earlier than they would normally gather for the bus ride to the river. The high spirits from the day before were replaced by somber intensity. The 19 women removed their clothing and used blue marker to ink Title IX on their chests and backs. Then they dressed in their uniforms, marched into the athletic directors office, and stood in two rows. They stripped completely and stood silently while Chris Ernst read their statement:
These are the bodies Yale is exploiting. We have come here today to make clear how unprotected we are, to show graphically what we are being exposed to. These are normal human bodies. On a day like today the rain freezes on our skin. Then we sit on a bus for half an hour as the ice melts into our sweats to meet the sweat that has soaked our clothes underneath. We sit for half an hour chilled...half a dozen of us are sick now, and in two days we will begin training twice a day, subjecting ourselves to this twice everyday. No effective action has been taken and no matter what we hear, it doesn't make these bodies warmer, or dryer or less prone to sickness. We can't accept any excuses, nor can we trust to normal channels of complaint, since the need for lockers for the Women's Crew has existed since last spring. We are using you and your office because you are the symbol of Women's Athletics at Yale; we're using this method to express our urgency. We have taken this action absolutely without our coach's knowledge. He has done all he can to get us some relief, and none has come. He ordered the trailer when the plans for real facilities fell through, and he informed you four times of the need to get a variance to make it useable, but none was obtained. We fear retribution against him, but we are, as you can see, desperate. We are not just healthy young things in blue and white uniforms who perform feats of strength for Yale in the nice spring weather; we are not just statistics on your win column. We're human and being treated as less than such. There has been a lack of concern and competence on your part. Your only answer to us is the immediate provision of use of the trailer, however inadequate that may be. -- Yale Women's Crew 3/3/76
Yale Daily News photo photo courtesy A Hero for Daisy
Then they put their clothes back on, marched out, and got on the bus to head off to practice. Keisling said, "And we had practice and at that time morale was very high. I remember in the boat we felt really good that day because we had made a stand and we were not going to be kicked around. So, spirits were really high."
One of the most compelling aspects of "the incident," as it is called at Yale, is the sense of dignity and pride the women had in their bodies. This is a very strong point for Kiesling and one she stresses whenever she talks about the strip-in.
I did want to say something about body image though because to me the most important lesson of feminism, and I believed this at the time and I believe it now, is that we were a pretty ordinary bunch of women. I mean, we had all the usual baby fat and pimples and stretch marks and all the things that young women have. And, yet, we were very proud of our bodies. One of the reasons we wanted to take off our clothes, I think, because we wanted to make a feminist statement, look we’re not ashamed of our bodies. And, in fact, we’re proud of ourselves as athletes and we want to take care of ourselves but we are not interested in being pretty. We’re interested in being big and strong. And very few women, I have ever met, have had that attitude. Most women are taught to be modest, to hide themselves, to be ashamed...
Well, we didn’t have any of that. We were so confident that what we looked like was less important than what we did and what we did was work out really hard and race really well. So, you know, we were making a statement. We took off our clothes. The statement was we are fit athletes and appearances don’t matter. And when some of the men after said, "I can’t believe you did that, you guys are so ugly." Our reaction was not (gasp) "we’re ugly, we must conceal ourselves." It was, "you think we’re ugly that’s your problem", which is not a very common reaction from women...
So, my sense is the men learned on the bus and were flabbergasted and very quickly shifted to: "but you’re so fat, why did you do it?" I’m not sure if they said that then. I know they said it later. I suspect that may almost have been jealousy. You see they thought that we were overreacting. The male attitude towards the women’s crew was we’re always causing trouble, we’re always screaming and complaining and get so much attention, unlike the men who never complained and are just serious people. You know we’ve got all these gripes. So, I think their attitude was a) there you are again and b) and you’re so fat...
I think it was a defining moment for the women’s crew when we said we’re not going to be messed with. You know we’re not going to be treated like second-class citizens. I think that women have a tendency to be brought up to endure inequality, not to complain because it’s unfeminine to be a complainer and it’s better not to be loud and obnoxious. And what we did was extremely loud and obnoxious. I think that was an important statement. It was we are at Yale, we’re equal, we’ll get what the men get. So, I would say it was very important for the team...
Another important aspect of "the incident," as it is known at Yale, was that the women invited a reporter along. The article in the Yale Daily News was picked up by the New York Times. It said, "Nineteen members of the Yale women's varsity crew stripped naked this afternoon in the office of Joni Barnett, director of physical education, to protest the lack of shower facilities at Derby, Conn. The nude women, with the words `Title IX' emblazoned across their chests and backs in Yale-blue paint, stood at attention as Chris Ernst, a senior from Wilmette, Ill., who is captain of the crew, read a 300-word statement."
US Rowing said, "The New York Times printed the piece on the front page of its second section. Media outlets across the country picked up the story and, in the words of former Yale athletic director and legendary football coach Carm Cozza, 'Within an hour we had a problem on campus that had to be addressed.'" The article went out on the wires and was printed in papers across the country and around the world.
In eight days the women had water and electricity in the trailer, as well as plans for an addition to the boathouse. There had been a tremendous outcry from Yale alumni who were shocked and embarrassed that World Silver Medallists were catching pneumonia because Yale wouldn't allow them to shower. Even worse, the whole world knew about it. The administration was inundated with calls, letters, and donations. "'Here's a thousand dollars,' read one alumnus's letter, 'please get Anne Warner a shower!'" (Boyne) "'(Yale) faced a little embarrassment and suddenly they could do a lot of things they said they couldn't," said Ernst. Ernst and her teammates may have gotten the women's rowing team a shower facility, but they transformed the face of women's athletics for generations to come. Situations for women improved everywhere." The New York Times later reported, "Across the country, educators snapped to attention and began viewing Title IX -- which had become law four years earlier -- as legislation that required compliance."
RIPPLES
According to rowing wiki:
There has been a spectacular growth in women's rowing over the past twenty-five years. In 1985 the FISA and Olympic course distance for women was increased from the previous 1000 meters to 2000 meters (the same distance raced by men), marking significant progress in public perception of women's strength, endurance and competitive drive. Universities that have never had a men's team have added women's rowing to the athletic department and are providing funding and athletic scholarships for the expensive and demanding sport, contributing to a noticeable increase in the success and competitiveness of many collegiate women's rowing teams. This, in part, is to comply with Title IX; many of the football powers use women's rowing to help balance out the large number of scholarships awarded to male football players...The first women’s collegiate championship was held in 1980 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The Augusta Rowing Club says that, "Today, women constitute the fastest growing segment of rowing in this country. Women's Crew is the fastest growing NCAA team sport. Women are finally beginning to enjoy the competition, funding, and scholarships that were once only available to male athletes."
In 2000, Olympic rower Mary Mazzio made a documentary about her friend and mentor Chris Ernst and the Yale strip-in. Mazzio decided to make the film A Hero for Daisy while pregnant with her daughter Daisy.
From a Boston Globe review of the movie:
``I looked around and said, who the hell is she going to be like?'' said Mazzio, 38, who lives in Wellesley. ``I don't want her fretting that she doesn't look like Kate Moss or Cindy Crawford. I want her to be able to exert effort, and discover her limitations, and get out there, and get sweaty, and get dirty, and know she doesn't have to look gorgeous to have value in this society...
Ernst, now a plumber in Brookline, took months of persuading. ``She doesn't see that she did anything special,'' said Holly Hatton, the women's crew coach at Boston University, who has known Ernst for 20 years. ``I think Chris lives her life that way, that she believes this was owed to her, and this is what it took to get it. You make your statement and you move on." ....``Chris is a woman who has had a profound effect on a number of other women,'' said Mazzio. ``She'll never admit it, and I don't even know if she knows."...
Hatton said she got chills watching it. ``I'm very excited that my athletes will get to see it, because it will be good for them to know about the women who got them where they are today. Chris and her teammates, they made an impact all over the world. They were heroes."
Sports Illustrated weighed in:
In 1976 Yale oarswoman Chris Ernst did what every rower knows not to do: She rocked the boat. Upset that women didn't have shower facilities (as the men did) in the Elis' boathouse, Ernst led the crew into the office of the director of physical education, where they shed their clothes to reveal TITLE IX emblazoned on their bare chests. One rower's bold stroke, as this fantastic feature attests, was to have a ripple effect on athletic parity. Sparingly told, the 40-minute documentary wisely excises the melodrama. The irony: Ernst, who went on to become the '86 world championships gold medalist in lightweight double sculls, is now a plumber. "I've gone from fighting for showers," she says, "to fixing them."
Row2k Review of A Hero for Daisy
The opposition which Ernst and others like her faced came primarily from OFF the water as opposed to on it. While she had demonstrated time and time again that she was a more than capable rower, her opportunities were limited, and her accomplishments diminished by those who tended (and still tend) to utilize different yardsticks for measuring the achievements of men versus women...
"A Hero for Daisy" has value as a slice of rowing history, but beyond that is a well-made portrait of a woman whose experience serves to remind us that it isn't necessarily just making the boat go fast (and Chris Ernst certainly did her share of that), but that rocking it to keep everybody awake is one of the truer definitions of "heroism."
Some of the best reviews of the film can be found at Mazzio's website.
I am the head Novice Women's coach for the Lincoln Park Juniors Rowing team. One of the more pivotal moments in our season was when I organized a team movie night and decided to show the girls "A Hero For Daisy". Your landmark portrayal of the now famous "Title IX Crew" had a significant effect on me, my girls, and the rest of our season. We won the Midwest Championship races in all three of the events we entered...we broke the course record in all three events ... It was by far the greatest day of our athletic lives. For me...the single greatest day I've ever had. We have your film, and the women you showcased, to thank. So from the bottom of our hearts, THANK YOU for helping my girls believe that they were stronger than the stereotypes, stronger than the doubts, and stronger than they ever imagined possible." - Austin Work, Lincoln Park Junior Rowing Team, Chicago IL
"Your film inspired us [Connecticut College Rowing Team] to take a stand against the unfair treatment of our team by the college administration... I cannot thank you enough for making a film as empowering as "A Hero for Daisy." The story of Chris Ernst and your portrayal of it inspired 45 women to stand up for what we believe in. At dinner tonight, the captain of my team belted out "Hey, we're heroes for Daisy!" - Julia Greenleaf, Connecticut College
Teen Hannah Lawrence researched Chris Ernst for a paper and then submitted a short essay to the Title IX website. Excerpts from I Exercise My Rights
Embarrassingly, I admit that I was completely unaware of the struggle that so many female athletes endured until I happened upon Chris Ernst and her Title IX protest in my sophomore year of high school. I have been incredibly fortunate to go to school where I went to field hockey practice every day with more than adequate equipment, an available field and plenty of money for team dinners and transportation to games without ever questioning why my mom had never played sports, or why there weren’t any trophies for women’s sports in our school’s award case prior to the 1970’s...
My obsession with field hockey led me to choose the 1976 Yale crew team’s protest as my topic without realizing that it would spark my interest in Title IX and lead to Chris Ernst becoming a role model for me... (I)t was an opportunity to truly change my outlook on my right to play the sport I am so passionate about...
By protesting, Chris Ernst not only captured the attention of a few university administrators, she ignited the outrage of a nation. She took a stand for women’s sports in such a way that risked the reputation of not only herself but her teammates, coaches and family. After months of sitting in the cold waiting for the men to shower, Chris Ernst won her battle and received the funding necessary to support the women’s crew team. I may never have the same guts that Chris Ernst has, but I now understand that it was partially because of Ernst that we have those state championship trophies for women’s sports and that my mom is finally learning how to play catch. I appreciate the opportunities I have to play field hockey without men jeering at us from the sidelines and school administrators turning their backs on me because of my gender, all because of Chris Ernst.
In the foreword to the Red Rose Crew, David Halbertam wrote:
It is the spring of 1997....My daughter is rowing in her school four. ... (R)owing, (it is something my wife and I will gradually come to understand), has become a manifestation of her dedication to her colleagues, and her willpower. For this brief stretch in her life rowing has become a reflection of who she is, and who she is going to be, intense, responsible, committed to those around her, purposeful and fearless. Her crew is undefeated so far... But in the final they get off to a terrible start. They are dead last after about 150 yards. And then they begin to feel their rhythm and there is a certain magical swing to their oars, the boat smoothes out, and they start passing the other boats... I know the demands of this moment and the inevitability of the pain, and the fact that for these few minutes this is the only thing in the world that matters. They pass a third boat, and now they are closing on the lead boat, with probably 100 yards left. They close a little more-it is very tight at the end, but the other boat holds its position. They come in second...
They are caught in the sheer misery of the moment, so much at stake, coming so close, missing by so little; my wife and I, older and perhaps wiser, enough comparable defeats in our own lives when we were younger that magically some day morph into triumphs of character, are if not exhilarated, thrilled on their behalf, by their courage, their comeback from that dreadful start, and what they accomplished against terrible odds. They think it is a defeat; we think it is a victory of great proportions, a reflection of something marvelous discovered within. I am apt to think of that day as a kind of epiphany: We will see more evidence of this in years to come-when she ends up teaching kindergarten in a poor area of the Deep South and stands up again and again to some of the darker forces in our society manifested in their crudest incarnations-but as I write this, I am reminded now that this is the first evidence of the power and strength of her spirit, and her willingness, when summoned, to find and give more of herself than anyone expected...
The Red Rose Crew, about an American women's crew that came from nowhere to take second-against all odds in an international race in 1975 in England...The young women in this book are pioneers-they triumphed not merely over the favored Russian and Romanian women in England, but their greatest triumphs were back in their own country against all the prejudices of the era about what women were not supposed to do, about poor, indeed unspeakable practice facilities, obtuse, disingenuous college athletic directors and ignorant rowing officials, and narrow, smug male rowers (the gold for truly appalling behavior here goes to the crude Yale oarsmen of that era). What they did was remarkable, standing up for themselves and for those yet unborn: one has a sense reading Boyne, that they were always aware of their dual responsibilities, that they wanted to row for their own pleasure and rewards, felt they had earned the right to do it, but that they were also acting for those still to come, their daughters so to speak, asking the age old questions of those who challenge an outmoded, rotted hierarchy-if not us who, and if not now, when?
... (T)his is both a book and a boat filled with heroes, and the millions of women like my daughter who have participated in different sports since they challenged the rules, are in their debt.
And finally, from a member of a high school girl's crew, an essay at row2k.com. Here is an excerpt from Anne Schier's The Experience of High School Rowing
In short, crew is a sport where one practices six days a week, multiple hours a day, for nine months, sometimes longer. Nine months of lactic acid buildup and sweat, nine months of frustration and improvement, nine months of monster wakes from insensitive motorboats and Cal coaches and ahh-I'm-blinded salt water in the eyes and in the hair and clothes. Nine months of coming home utterly exhausted to hours of homework, nine months of blisters on the hands so bad that washing one’s hair is more painful than minor oral surgery. Nine months of ergs-- rowing machines-- which are basically raw, unadulterated pain. Don’t get me started on those.
So these nine months add up to what? On average, six seven-minute races, all in the spring. Not to mention hands calloused enough to rival a lumberjack's.
So how do I explain to my friends that no, I can’t come out Friday night because I have practice early Saturday morning. No, I can’t have Nation’s for lunch because I have an erg test this afternoon and I don’t want to throw up. No, I can’t come snowboarding with you because I can’t risk injury. No, I can’t come watch your play because I have crew...
I live for the light, barely-there rain that renders the entire estuary flat and smooth as glass, our oars and the little dimples where the raindrops hit the only disturbance. And just when it couldn’t get any better-- a rainbow that stretches all the way over Coast Guard Island and seems solid enough to touch.
I live for those practices where everything just feels good; when the bodies swing together and the legs press together, and the blades catch and release together. When everything is in perfect unison, just the way it should be, and you want to keep rowing forever.