Women in Sports Journalism: A Conversation with Mellisa Ludtke

Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a discussion about women in sports journalism!

Using her book Locker Room Talk as a basis, Melissa Ludtke will converse with NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates about her experiences working with Sports Illustrated in the 1970s and the groundbreaking court case that followed.

About the book:

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 pervert seeking to leer at athletes’ naked bodies. She takes us inside the 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.

About the participants:

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.

Karen Grigsby Bates is a former Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR News (Code Switch), the author of the Alex Powell mystery series, and co-author, wih Karen Elyse Hudson, of the best-selling etiquette book Basic Black: Home Training For Modern Times. She and her husband, photographer Bruce W. Talamon, are the parents of a college-aged son.

Host or Publisher Village Well Books & Coffee