Melissa Ludtke and Jenny Cavnar Live at Tattered Cover Colfax

For the first time in Locker Room Talk, the woman who waged the equal rights legal fight against Major League Baseball in the late 1970s reveals the personal and professional challenges she confronted in going up against the male-dominated fortress that was America's national pastime.

Melissa Ludtke will be in conversation with Jenny Cavnar, the first woman to serve as a primary television play-by-play announcer for a team in Major League Baseball at our Colfax location on Tuesday, February 4th at 6PM.

Registration includes the following options:

• A signed copy of the book … OR

• A 5$ Gift Card to Tattered Cover Book Store

We will have additional books for guests to purchase in store!

If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 7 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A vivid account of how one female reporter sued the commissioner of Major League Baseball for gender discrimination - and won.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Ludtke was a reporter for Sports Illustrated, a correspondent for Time, and editor of Nieman Reports at Harvard University. Her books include On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America and Touching Home in China: In Search of Missing Girlhoods. She received the Yankee Quill Award and Mary Garber Pioneer Award and was a Nieman Fellow and a Prudential Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Jenny Cavnar is an American sports broadcaster who is the television play-by-play announcer of the Athletics of Major League Baseball. She is the first female primary play-by-play announcer in MLB history. Cavnar also does play-by-play for men's and women's college basketball on Fox Sports 1 and the Pac-12 Network.

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