Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, 26-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge’s order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.

Locker Room Talk is Ludtke’s gripping account of being at the core of this globally covered case that churned up ugly prejudices about the place of women in sports. Kuhn claimed that allowing women into locker rooms would violate his players’ ＂sexual privacy.＂ Late-night television comedy sketches mocked her, as newspaper cartoonists portrayed her as a sexy, buxom looker who wanted to ogle the naked athletes’ bodies. She weaves these public perspectives throughout her vivid depiction of the court drama overseen by Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal bench. She recounts how her lawyer, F.A.O. ＂Fritz＂ Schwarz, employed an ingenious legal strategy that persuaded Judge Motley to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in giving Ludtke access identical to that of her male counterparts. Locker Room Talk is both an inspiring story of one woman’s determination to do a job dominated by men and an illuminating portrait of a defining moment for women’s rights.

Melissa Ludtke is an award-winning journalist who worked at Sports Illustrated, Time, CBS News, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she edited Nieman Reports. In 1977-1978, while working as a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated, she was the plaintiff in Ludtke v. Kuhn, the federal legal case that opened doors and enabled equal access for women sportswriters. She is a recipient of the Yankee Quill Award for lifetime achievement as a journalist and was nominated by the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute as one of the ＂100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.＂ As a reporter for Sports Illustrated, she won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York (1978). She has been awarded a Mary Garber Pioneer Award (2002), been a Neiman Foundation Fellow, and a Radcliffe’s Public Policty Institute Fellow. She is the author of On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America (Random House, 1997).