Let's Row Together
Mother and daughter, equal rights and baseball, as I pass along my love of the game and partner with Maya's generation in renewing the necessary fight for equal rights.
Joy!
Here’s what JOY looks like to me at last night’s “Locker Room Talk” event at Porter Square Books, my local independent bookstore in Cambridge.
Last night, my dear friend Stan Grossfeld, who shoots photos for a living with The Boston Globe and has two Pulitzer Prizes to show for it, framed his beautiful image with Maya in the foreground, once again capturing the essence of a treasured moment in my life. I say this because I wrote “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside” for Maya and others in her generation - the story Stan’s photo tells.
I say “again” when I talk about Stan freezing a cherished moment that fully expresses my thoughts and emotions. Here is a photograph Stan took at the baby shower friends hosted for Maya and me after we returned from China. Yes, she’d stolen my heart!
Photo by Stan Grossfeld
Before showing more photos from last night’s book event, let me share my final few paragraphs from the prologue in Locker Room Talk. I hope you’ll emerge with a greater appreciation for why Stan’s photograph with Maya in the foreground strikes me as a bold, eloquent statement about my book.
Here goes from my prologue:
“In recent years, for all the progress made, we’ve seen startling reversals in women’s equity. I wrote this prologue on the one-year year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned settled law in Roe v. Wade. In the Court’s 1973 landmark ruling in Roe, the justices held that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.”[i] In his dissenting opinion in Dobbs[ii], then-Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that “those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights.” When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, it provided formerly enslaved people in America with “equal protection under the laws.” But it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that our highest court finally caught up with Abigail Adams’ 18th century plea to the male founders to “remember the ladies” by raising the scrutiny judges give gender. In Dobbs, however, the Court backslid on women’s rights. In his response to Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs, Breyer said the decision “consigns women to second-class citizenship,” adding that “after today young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had.”
“Maya, my only child, turned 26-years old in the year of the Dobbs’ decision. That is the age I was when Judge Motley heard my gender discrimination case. The Roe decision, then five years old, was already demonstrating its profound impact on women’s lives. With the right to make our own reproductive decisions, we gained control of our lives as no other generation of women had been able to do. Meaningful breakthroughs and huge strides happened in expanding women opportunities in the workplace and new possibilities opened in our personal lives, as well. My twenties were a time of hope, progress and promise, especially for a well-educated, white woman, as I was. Maya’s twenties were punctured by the Supreme Court’s denial of a woman’s fundamental right to make her own decision about her reproductive care, as well as by waves of limitations on voting rights that impact whether legislatures will protect basic rights, including those affecting women.
“Maya knows my locker room story. She has heard me tell it more times than she might have wished to hear it. Yet, she knows very little about how my case was won in a court of law, including the critical role that the Fourteenth Amendment played in our victory. So, I’ve written this book for her and others in her generation, just as I have for those in my own generation who are living through our uncertain times. By watching two lawyers and the judge wrestle with the legal issues of my equal rights case, I hope to inspire renewed appreciation for the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal treatment under law for all American citizens.
“In reading Letters to the Editor written just after the Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs decision, I was stopped by a sentence written by a 60-year-old woman doctor about her 21-year-old daughter. “The younger women don’t know the battles, so how can they see the benefits?” she wrote.
“I hope Locker Room Talk demonstrates why it was worth fighting for equal rights then and why it remains such an important endeavor today.”
Porter Square Books, Sept. 5, with Tara Sullivan, Boston Globe sports columnist
Photos by Stan Grossfeld and Maya Ludtke
For those in the Cambridge area — and yes, that means you in surrounding suburbs – if you missed us last night, join us tomorrow, Saturday, 11:00 - 1:00 at the best bakery in Cambridge – La Saison at 477 Concord Avenue, near Fresh Pond. La Saison is hosting this event with music and special tasty treats. And if you buy a book, your lemonade is on me!
THANK YOU, TARA for saying YES when I asked you to join me for my home city launch of Locker Room Talk. Wonderful being with you talking sports and equal rights!
Photo by David Backer
STORIES AND NOTES of INTEREST
At least of interest to me. Maybe to you, too.
HERE & NOW on NPR, Lisa Mullins talked on Tuesday with me about my life at the ballpark, in the courtroom and at home during the time I was fighting Major League Baseball.
At 5:00 this Saturday afternoon, I will be talking about Locker Room Talk at my rowing home – Community Rowing – with my fellow rower and dear friend, Lisa Laskin.
On Wednesday, I did two interviews close to home – one on radio, the other for TV. I hope I can share these stories with you soon. Callie Crossly invited me to be part of her GBH show “Under the Radar” (likely to play in October), then Douglas Kennedy, a Fox News Channel correspondent, met me at The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He wanted to talk with me there because I donated my collection of papers/documents from my legal case to its archives.
Stay tuned.
I also learned that I will appear on Boston Public Radio (local NPR, GBH) on the 1:00 hour on Thursday, September 26th.
After Jon Karl’s terrific video story last Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Locker Room Talk leapt up the book rankings on Amazon. For a while it was # 1 in a bunch categories.
IT WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED!
Now, Locker Room Talk has settled back to find its own equilibrium. So, here’s how you can help: lend me your helping hand by leaving your review on Amazon. Amazon is the king of book purchasing, and reviews really help!
I’d be grateful if you’d leave one, and I say “thank you” to the eight people who already did.
Thanks Margy Just now heading to CRI for our 5:00 book event there. Thanks for your kind words!
Fighting, voting, and driving public awareness of all that's at stake. Glad we're in this together, Mary.