A Brooklyn girl named Bunny
Bernice Resnick was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 3, 1928, the younger of two daughters of Abraham Hyman Resnick and Ida Ernst Resnick, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Germany who owned a women’s clothing store in Rockaway, New Jersey. Her parents were meant to name her Beryl, but a doctor’s error put Bernice on her birth certificate. Her lifelong nickname, Bunny, came from Bunya, a Yiddish form of her name. Her parents raised their daughters to embrace social justice along with their Jewish faith.
She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School at sixteen and went to Brooklyn College, then a free public college founded to give the children of immigrants and working people a path to a better life. She graduated with honours in psychology in 1948 and earned a master’s degree in clinical and school psychology at the City College of New York in 1950.
Doors that stayed closed
Sandler wanted an academic career in psychology, but she ran into antisemitic quotas in the programmes where she applied, and for more than a decade she put her ambitions on hold. In 1952 she married Jerrold Sandler, an educational broadcaster who later became a leading champion of funding for public radio; they had two daughters, Deborah Jo and Emily Maud, in the mid-1950s, and divorced in 1978. As the family moved from city to city she worked as a research assistant, nursery school teacher, guitar instructor and secretary. In Bloomington, Indiana, she was turned away from a graduate programme because of a quota on women students.
In 1964 the family moved to Washington, D.C. When her daughters were teenagers she enrolled at the University of Maryland, which first rejected her because of her age; she won admission by comparing herself to a returning veteran. In 1969 she earned her doctorate in counseling and personnel services.
Too strong for a woman
That year seven faculty positions opened in her department at Maryland, where she had been teaching part-time. She was not considered for any of them. When she asked a colleague why, he told her: “Let’s face it, you come on too strong for a woman.” Other rejections followed. One interviewer said he would not hire her because she was a mother; another dismissed her as “just a housewife who went back to school.”
Sandler had never thought of herself as a feminist. She later admitted that she had seen the women’s movement of the 1960s as somewhat suspect. It was her husband who suggested that what she was facing was sex discrimination. A self-described believer in bibliotherapy, she started reading. Wondering what law the universities were breaking, she discovered there was none: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred employment discrimination by sex but exempted educational institutions, its ban on discrimination in federally funded programmes did not cover sex, and the Equal Pay Act did not then cover professional workers such as professors.
The footnote that changed everything
Reading a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Sandler found her opening. President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of 1965 forbade discrimination by federal contractors, and in 1967 Johnson had amended it to include sex. “Even though I was alone, I shrieked aloud with my discovery,” she recalled. Almost every college and university held federal contracts, so they were already forbidden to discriminate against women in employment.
With the help of Vincent Macaluso, director of federal contract compliance at the Department of Labor, and through the Women’s Equity Action League, where she chaired a one-woman action committee on contract compliance, Sandler began filing formal complaints. She filed charges of sex discrimination against some 250 colleges and universities, backed by an eighty-page dossier of evidence, and she coordinated a massive letter-writing campaign by academic women to members of Congress and the press. The flood of complaints put the issue in front of lawmakers.
Writing Title IX into law
In 1970 Representative Edith Green of Oregon, using the material Sandler had gathered, held the first congressional hearings on sex discrimination in education, and Sandler was among those who testified. Green then hired her for the staff of the House Special Subcommittee on Education, making her the first person appointed to a congressional committee staff specifically to work on women’s rights. She compiled the record of the hearings, nearly 1,300 pages, and sent it to every member of Congress.
Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, worked with Green on the House bill, and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana carried it in the Senate. On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments, including 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.” Hardly anyone noticed at the time. Sandler herself had not foreseen how far that one sentence would reach.
What Title IX did
Title IX transformed American education. It forced colleges and schools to open admissions, scholarships, courses and jobs to women on equal terms, and it covered everything a federally funded school does, from hiring to athletics to protection from sexual harassment.
Its most visible effect was in sport. In the last school year before Title IX, fewer than 300,000 American girls played high school sports, about one in every twenty-seven girls in school. Within two years the figure had passed 1.3 million, by 1977–78 it exceeded two million, and today more than 3.4 million girls take part. Women’s college athletics, and the generation of champions it produced, grew from the same law. Drexel University’s Jesse Krohn summed it up: it is hard to overstate the impact Title IX has had.
Naming the chilly climate
Sandler spent the rest of her career making sure the law meant something. In 1971 she helped found the Project on the Status and Education of Women at the Association of American Colleges, which she directed for two decades, publishing the newsletter On Campus with Women. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter appointed her to the National Advisory Council on Women’s Educational Programs, which she chaired from 1975 to 1977.
In 1982, with Roberta Hall, she wrote the first report on what she called the chilly campus climate: the accumulation of small slights, from being interrupted and overlooked in class to biased evaluations, that dampen women’s confidence and participation. She wrote some of the first reports on peer harassment, on campus gang rape and on the barriers facing women of colour in higher education. In 1971, working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, she wrote the first federal policy report on sex discrimination in education, and in 1989 and 1990 she wrote the first reports on the chilly climate facing African American and Hispanic women on campus. She even examined how the rules for nominating students for campus prizes could quietly exclude women. Her books included The Chilly Classroom Climate: A Guide to Improve the Education of Women (1996) and Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide for Administrators, Faculty and Students (1997), and her guide to using expert witnesses in sex discrimination and harassment cases became a standard reference for educators and lawyers. In all she wrote more than a hundred articles and served on more than thirty boards. She gave more than 2,500 presentations, served as an expert witness in discrimination and harassment cases, and was a senior scholar at the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington and an adjunct associate professor at Drexel University College of Medicine.
Faith and justice
Sandler’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Germany, raised her to see social justice and Judaism as bound together. Her own encounter with antisemitic quotas, which kept her out of academic psychology as a young woman, prepared her to recognise a second, quieter quota when it was used against her as a woman. Writers have since linked her life’s work to the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam, repairing the world, and the Jewish Women’s Archive includes her among the American Jewish women who changed the country.
The godmother’s legacy
Sandler received more than a dozen honorary doctorates and was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 2010 and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, in 2013. Some of her papers are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. She died of cancer at her home in Washington on January 5, 2019, at the age of 90. The New York Times called her the godmother of Title IX. Sandra Levison, a physician who worked with her on women’s health education at Drexel, said she had advanced the rights of American girls and women in athletics, academics and the workplace further than almost any individual.
She never thought the work was finished. “We have only taken the very first steps of what will be a very long journey,” she said. But because a rejected job applicant went looking for a law and found a footnote, every girl who plays on a school team, and every woman who studies medicine, law or engineering at an American university on equal terms, walks a path Bernice Sandler helped open.
Sources & further reading
Bernice Sandler, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia · Bernice Sandler, Wikipedia · Bernice R. Sandler, Ed.D., Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame, Maryland State Archives · Bernice Sandler, ‘Godmother of Title IX’: Her Drexel Connection, Drexel University · Dr. Bernice Sandler, godmother of Title IX, dead at 90, Texas A&M University · NFHS Begins Yearlong Celebration of 50th Anniversary of Title IX, National Federation of State High School Associations · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.