Melissa Ludtke Discusses Locker Room Talk with Mary C. Curtis
Schedule
Wed Oct 02 2024 at 06:30 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
4139 Park Rd, Charlotte, NC, United States, North Carolina 28209 | Charlotte, NC
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Join Melissa Ludtke as she discusses her book, Locker Room Talk, with Mary C. Curtis during an in person event on Wednesday, October 2, 2024 at 6:30 pm.We want to celebrate Melissa Ludtke and her new book, Locker Room Talk with an in-person event, Wednesday, October 2, 2024, at 6:30 pm. The book is available today. We look forward to seeing you at this free event.
Synopsis:
In 1977, Melissa Ludtke was a 26-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter when she accused Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn of gender discrimination and took him to court. While male sportswriters had long been a fixture of team locker rooms, Kuhn claimed that allowing women into these spaces would violate players’ “sexual privacy.” What followed was a high-profile case that affirmed the equal rights of female journalists, but also revealed ugly public prejudices about the place of women in sports.
In Locker Room Talk, Ludtke provides her first-hand account of being at the center of a case that set off a media firestorm, with comedy sketches and newspaper cartoons depicting her as a leering woman seeking to leer at athletes’ naked bodies. She takes us inside ballparks where her presence as the lone female reporter covering the MLB threatened the sport’s sexist gatekeepers. And she recreates all the courtroom drama, including the innovative legal strategy that persuaded Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to serve as a federal judge, to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause when ruling to allow female journalists the same access their male counterparts took for granted. Locker Room Talk is a vivid portrait of a vital moment for women’s rights.
Author Bio:
MELISSA LUDTKE was a reporter for Sports Illustrated and Time and edited 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.
Moderator Bio:
Mary C. Curtis, a columnist at Roll Call, is an award-winning journalist, podcast host and educator based in Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C. She is host of the CQ Roll Call podcast “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” and a guest host of Slate’s “What Next” podcast.
Her coverage specialty is the intersection of politics, culture and race, and Curtis has covered presidential campaigns since 2008. She talks politics and culture on NPR-affiliate WFAE in Charlotte, and has contributed to NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The Root, ESPN and more. She has worked at The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, the Baltimore Sun, and the Associated Press, and was national correspondent for AOL's Politics Daily.
Curtis is a Senior Facilitator with The OpEd Project, which increases the range of voices in opinion writing, facilitating “Write to Change the World” seminars, at Yale, Cornell, the Ford Foundation and Aspen New Voices Fellowship in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Curtis was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Kiplinger Fellow, in social media, at The Ohio State. She was chosen to be included in The HistoryMakers, the single largest archival collection of its kind in the world designed to promote and celebrate the successes and to document movements, events and organizations that are important to the African American community and to American society; it is available digitally and permanently archived in the Library of Congress.
Her honors include Clarion Awards from the Association for Women in Communications, awards from the National Headliners, the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Federation of Press Women, four first-place Salute to Excellence awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, four first-place SPJ DC Dateline awards, and the Thomas Wolfe Award for an examination of Confederate heritage groups. In 2022, she received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
Curtis has contributed to several books, including essays in “We Refuse to Be Silent: Women’s Voices on Justice for Black Men,” “Now What: The Voters Have Spoken, Essays on Life After Trump,” “Covering Politics in the Age of Trump” and “Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox.”
Can’t make the event? Want your own personalized copy?
Contact the store 48 hours before the event to request one.
704-525-9239 or [email protected]
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Where is it happening?
4139 Park Rd, Charlotte, NC, United States, North Carolina 28209Event Location & Nearby Stays:
