Ludtke: I am going to begin my remarks this evening by stealing another woman's words. They belong to Ann Richards, a person I have admired from afar, who climbed over many barriers to be elected the first woman governor of Texas in 1990.

Ann Richards was speaking about women and all that they can accomplish when the playing field is made level. Her words are ones I return to at those times when I need what could be called "a gender lift." And let me add that she certainly had the women in this room in mind when she said:

"If you give us the chance, we can perform. After all, ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards And in high heels."

I am thrilled to be remembered this evening by women who never stop moving themselves and their profession forward and by women who never wear high heels to work!

As I flew over New York city this afternoon, I was thinking back to what many of you might rightly call the old days. In my case, the old days were the mid 1970s, the time when my parents deposited me in Manhattan with a steamer trunk full of clothes and a head stuffed full with dreams.

Those were heady days for women. Billie Jean King defied Las Vegas oddsmakers and deflated millions of male egos when she defeated Bobby Riggs in the tennis match which took on the symbolic title of "the battle of the sexes." Congress passed Title IX providing equal status for women's athletics. The Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, decided in favor of a woman's right to choose.

Young women like myself, eager to test the limits of our newly won freedom and opportunities, flocked into jobs and schools and professions that in preceding generations were reserved for men only. And we arrived with a basic strategy: we would try to fit in and flourish in an environment that was created for and by men by proving we could transform ourselves into better men!

With the wisdom that comes with hindsight, we now find fault with this strategy. But we must remember that our generation did not have female role models to show us a path, nor did we then have the numbers on our side. When I was hired at Sports Illustrated in 1974, there was no such thing as a woman governor. Women were senators only because their husbands who had been senators had died. Very few women filled any of the top editorial slots on national publications, and no one even talked about women becoming astronauts.

I mention women astronauts because it was only a few months ago that I learned for the first time that a dozen women participated in the early Mercury training programs and outperformed their male colleagues on tests of enduring heat, cold, pain, noise, and loneliness. If I had known about these women when I was growing up, would it have expanded my vision of what I might become? I believe the answer is yes.

But it is also clear when we think about these women astronauts that competence and ability did not guarantee a spot for them in the capsule: after all, if women possessed what Tom Wolfe labeled "the right stuff" would Americans have embraced their astronauts as heroes? If women had been included, would astronauts be thought of as courageous? And let us not forget that while women were sent home, a female chimp was launched into space.

This absence of women role models left many of us stumbling in uncharted territory. It was like we were trying to connect dots on an abstract painting. But despite the lack of clear direction, my generation did have some advantages: we carried with us a sense of great adventure. It was an exciting time to be young and to be an educated woman. Though our expectations were great, they seemed only to become more resolute in the face of the resistance we encountered. We were the pioneers, exploring a vast and unfamiliar landscape in 20th century America. And we were on our way to becoming a much-heralded generation of "firsts": the first woman to do this, the first to do that.

Let me take this moment to clarify the historic record on women in locker rooms. I was not the first woman reporter to go into a baseball locker room. The night of my court decision, I remained at home. I had no reason to be at the game that night, so I decided not to go. What I feared was a media circus. At home I watched on television as women news reporters—who had never covered a game before and never would again—trooped into the Yankee's locker room to tell what it was really like for women reporters to be in men's locker rooms. Lost in all of this hullabaloo was, of course, the essence of our courtroom argument—the issue of equal access for women sportswriters.

Ever since the question of equal access to locker rooms was brought into public consciousness—in the fall of 1977—those who opposed us employed a brilliant strategy by making equal access appear as a moral and not a legal problem, as a sexy idea, but not the sexist issue that it is. I, and others like me, were presented as women who wanted nothing more than to wander aimlessly around a locker room, to stare longingly at naked athletes and to invade the privacy of individuals whose privacy was already disrupted by our male colleagues.

Let me share with you a sample of headlines which summon these images to mind:

One headline writer, clearly fantasizing on the experience from the male perspective, labeled the occasion, "Babes in Boyland"

Another wrote, "She wants to be one of the guys."

Another writer mixed the language of sports with the image of nakedness—a sure winner: the headline read, "She pitches for covering where everything's bare."

Getting right to the point, at least as men saw it, another editor came up with the following headline: "Woman reporter sues to see Reggie in the buff."

Even James Michener asked me—with a degree of seriousness—to comment on the observation that if women wanted to be "equals" in the locker room they should be naked, too. If a man such as Michener could forget to whom it is women sportswriters are meant to be "equal," I didn't hold out a great deal of hope for a truly rational debate on the merits of our case to surface.

Unfortunately, I've been proven right time and time again. Whenever people learn that I was once a sportswriter, I know their question before it is asked. "did you go into locker rooms?". Unspoken is the real question, "did you see naked athletes?" If I fail to respond with a funny story which has as its central character some well-known naked athlete, the listener prods me until I do respond in suitable fashion.

Only after I have performed my requisite storytelling duties am I allowed a moment to explain why women sports-writers need equal access. Heads nod in dutiful recognition, and the subject quickly switches to something else.

Betty Cuniberti was a sportswriter during my era and left in 1980 to write political features for the Los Angeles Times. Over the years, she found this routine so tiresome that at social events she would avoid telling people about the seven years she wrote sports simply to avoid the predictable dialogue.

The Lisa Olson/New England Patriots incident, of course, rekindled these ad-hoc discussions. The old debate about whether women belonged in locker rooms came rushing back. Radio call-in shows sounded like 1990 remakes of the same stale, tired arguments of the 1970s. The possibility of women seeing male athletes naked swept away discussion of the more pressing issues: the harassment of Lisa Olson and the need for equal access. Much of the talk echoed the late Red Smith's observation when he called my lawsuit nothing more than "a note of low comedy" at the end of a baseball season.

Betty Cuniberti wrote a column for "The National" when the Lisa Olson situation erupted in which she talked about the locker room. Let me read briefly from that column:

"The locker room has come to define women sportswriters the way dentists are identified solely with pain. This is not only unfair and irritating, it has done extreme harm to the progress and reputation of women sportswriters....This is because the locker room is a no-win proposition for women: stay out and you'll get beaten in stories and fail in your profession. Go in and you're forever assigned the scarlet letter. At the least, your morals and motivations are questioned; you may even by sexually harassed or verbally assaulted, as Olson was."

One can only wonder—and worry—what Dan Quayle might have said if Murphy Brown was a sportscaster!

But we all know that women sportswriters learn early on that to complain about the little, bothersome things that happen all the time is to be dismissed as someone who can't do the job. Given enough complaints, in time, this woman won't be doing it. I remember that during my era, being a woman sportswriter meant observing unwritten rules of the road. I hope these rules no longer apply to you.

When we went into locker rooms, we felt we should tolerate the teasing, since after all we are working in the athlete's space. [This rule only applied if the locker room humor, comments, or actions by the players didn't constitute actual harassment. But as we have all learned, harassment is often difficult to define and tougher to prove.]

To manage this, we buried our female sensibilities at the door and tried, as best we could, to talk and act and move around as our male colleagues did.

Yet women reporters never assumed that they could act exactly as male reporters do, which meant lingering around the locker room or conversing in a friendly fashion with players [at the very least, the woman would be accused of flirting or she could be branded as a "looker" and targeted, as Lisa Olson was, for punishment of the players choosing.]

And each morning we did a wardrobe check, careful never to wear the wrong outfit to work. [translated that meant we didn't dress in too feminine a manner, lest we run the risk of not being taken seriously.]

The trick was to act like a man, only not totally like a man. That seemed to be the only way to gain credibility in this masculine arena. A soft-spoken, demure, charming woman would not last long at the job of reporting sports. To act or to look or to retain sensitivities which were "too" feminine was considered detrimental to performing.

More than the daily pressures of actually doing the job, the constant awareness of this dichotomy between who we were as women and who we had to pretend to be as sportswriters took an enormous emotional toll. This was one reason why so many of us left sportswriting and went on to write in other arenas.

Tonight you are honoring me—a person whose circumstance turned her into a visible symbol of our demand for equal treatment. But on this night, let us also remember that many other women were heartier warriors than I, who served far longer and under more trying circumstances on the front lines of this engagement. Let me name just a few of them who were working in the 1970s—some of whom are still at it in the 90s.:

Betty Cuniberti—sportswriter for the Washington Post who covered football and basketball

Sheila Moran—sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times who covered hockey

Lawrie Mifflin—who covered the New York rangers for the Daily News and is now the education editor for the New York Times

Robin Herman—who also reported on the rangers for the New York Times

Lesley Visser—then of the Boston Globe, now with CBS sports

Stephanie Salter—who covered the Warriors for the San Francisco Examiner

Tracy Dodds—then with the Milwaukee Journal, now with the Los Angeles Times, and on her way to becoming sports editor of the Austin American Statesman. She is truly a sturdy bridge to the past, and an inspiration for younger women considering sportswriting as a career.

Helene Elliott—with the Chicago Sun Times, now with the Los Angeles Times

Mary Flannery—with the Philadelphia Daily News

Sheryl Flatow—with UPI

Finally, I'd like to reserve a special word of acknowledgment for Jane Gross. For a brief time Jane was a colleague of mine at Sports Illustrated. She went on to cover the American Basketball Association for Newsday, and then to the New York Times. Like the hockey reporters I mentioned a few moments ago, Jane's perseverance and professionalism contributed to the smooth transition that these sports made to providing equal treatment for women reporters without the fanfare and disruption of a lawsuit. And like many of her contemporaries in sportswriting, Jane has gone on to distinguish herself in reporting on social issues: her story about zero-parent children growing up in Oakland's inner city offered a terrifying glimpse of the poverty and dire circumstances that engulfs far too many of our nation's children.

Sports reporting was—and perhaps in many ways still is—a bastion of male privilege—if one can call the job we do privileged. Frank Deford reminded you when he spoke at your convention two years ago that, "it's not a matter of you breaking into a profession. It's a matter of breaking down a culture." And that, he told you, "is eminently harder to do."

I believe Frank is at least half right when he alludes to this subculture of sports and talks about the difficulty women have in feeling themselves a part of it. But I have come to believe that women can bring with them an advantage: they can use their outsider status to see the games, the players, and the sport from a different perspective. It is not that women know less about these games men play: it is that they know and see different things their male colleagues do; often they ask different questions. And using the eyes of an outsider, women reporters may unearth dimensions that have previously gone unnoticed.

Frank Deford, in his talk to you, said that there is no such thing as a female sentence. I disagree. I believe not only that women often write different sentences than men—but that they choose different topics to write about or write from a different perspective about similar topics.

This year, while a Nieman fellow at Harvard, I studied the work of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, a woman whose work had intrigued me since I read In a Different Voice in the early 1980s. Increasingly, I have become convinced that women do bring a different voice into the public arena, a voice which conveys the different sensibilities which arise out of their social experience of being raised as girls in this culture.

Writing in your newsletter, Grace Lichtenstein revealed what she calls "a dirty little secret" about women sportswriters.

She said, "The secret is, women make better sports writers than men. They don't come to sports writing with false illusions about knowing baseball better than the players. They ask better questions, and probe more sensitive areas than run, catch and throw."

Christine Brennan—who all of you know as the former president of this association—observed that over the years you have gone from being women who are sportswriters to sportswriters who are women. I think Christine's semantic description captures the essence of what I am trying to say.

I remember back to the 1970s—before I found myself in the midst of the locker room lawsuit. I spent a season talking with catchers and umpires about the relationship they establish with each other behind home plate. The idea came to me when I was having lunch with Johnny Bench. He told me about the nine-inning dialogue he'd had with an umpire the night before. The thought of this game within the game, of this complicated relationship which was all but hidden from view yet instrumental to the outcome of a game, captivated my imagination. I needed to learn more.

I never did think that asking a batter where the pitch he hit for a home run crossed the plate was a very intriguing question—yet it was one I heard asked a thousand times. To me, unraveling the inner workings of this relationship between the catchers and home plate umpire held far greater appeal.

In those days, I didn't understand why I was so drawn to this particular story and why no one else had written it. Now, Carol Gilligan's writings about women have helped me to understand that during those years when I was trying to think and act and sound like my male colleagues, I was actually being pulled by a stronger force which was all those things that had gone into making me a woman.

What Carol Gilligan, and others who are doing similar research, are teaching me is that women tend to experience life in a relational context: as young girls, they take in knowledge about relationships at the same time young boys learn about how to be independent and separate. If as women they use their voices to express this different perspective, then what they bring to our societal dialogue will be an invaluable contribution. For too long, in our rush to be like men, women silenced these different voices. I believe the time for silence has passed, and that as women sportswriters you have an opportunity to bring what you know, what your voices can tell us, into a world where they have been absent.

Recently I read a book by Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer prize winning writer at the New York Times, who tells about the lawsuit that women at the Times filed against management in 1974. She calls her book Girls in the Balcony, a reference to the discriminatory rules at the National Press Club when lady reporters were exiled to the balcony, barely visible and certainly far enough away not to be heard. While the me dined downstairs, the women stood upstairs. It reminded me of stories I heard when I started covering baseball about how women weren't allowed to eat with their male colleagues in ballpark dining rooms or sit with them in press boxes. Certainly those banishments had nothing to do with privacy.

I was asked to comment on Nan Robertson's book—one I would recommend to any of you interested in the history of women in journalism—and I remarked on how apt I thought the title was in light of my own experience in the 1970s as well as my views about the new challenges which call us forth as women in the 1990s.

I told the interviewer that Girls in the Balcony gave me a feeling of déjà vu. When I started writing sports in the early 1970s we were regarded as girls in the press box. We were very definitely girls with the connotation that word means. We were there, we were tolerated, but we weren't heard, we weren't listened to. We certainly weren't invited to be among equals. Our status was second class. My lawsuit in 1978 enabled women to have equal access to the athletes they were covering whether the interviews took place in the locker room or elsewhere. And that is an important but often overlooked point: we weren't barging into locker rooms. We were simply asking for equal access. And what that equality of access did was to change our status. It changed us from girls into women. And when we became women we began to have our voices. I think the consequences of this transformation are still in evidence today. As women assumed their voices, they refused to be silenced.

I want to say again how delighted I am to know that the chorus of women's voices writing about sports has grown both larger and louder in the years since I left sports writing.

Locker rooms may have brought our issues of equality into public view, but all of us in this room know that equality in this profession requires more than letting women through the door. It means valuing the contributions that these women are making. It means rewarding excellence by promoting women into decision making positions. It means being vigilant for situations in which women are verbally or sexually harassed on the job and responding in a supportive fashion. It means trying to shed outdated cultural stereotypes that tell us that women don't have the genetic coding to allow them to grasp such difficult concepts as the split fingered fastball, the wishbone offense, or the triangle 2 defense.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of listening to Anita Hill when she spoke to students at Harvard law school. She came not to titillate them with stories of inappropriate sexual behavior but rather to educate them about what she has learned about an issue which affects a majority of working women. Sexual harassment, she told the students, is not about sex, it is about exclusion. It is about a mechanism that men use to display their control over women. It is not surprising, Anita Hill said, that harassment occurs disproportionately in occupations in which women are assuming roles once reserved for men.

And only a week later, Susan Faludi—author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—arrived at Radcliffe. She was greeted by a standing room only crowd eager to hear more about this movement which she so keenly uncovered. Her message that night—like the message of her book—reminded us of the sad truth that for each step we make forward, there will be pressure applied to push us back.

Clearly your generation—and those young women who will follow you—have inherited an unfinished agenda and new battle lines at which to engage your efforts.

Thinking back on what I hope to accomplish when my lawsuit was filed in 1977, my goal was not only to remove legal barriers and provide equal access for women. I hoped for much more. I thought that once women were given equal opportunity to perform in this profession then more women would enter it. As more women entered sportswriting, the prejudices, biases and sexist attitudes so familiar in my era would diminish as they proved themselves fit for the job. I envisioned a time when women would be able to retain their femininity and yet be treated as equals by colleagues and players and find more freedom to bring something of themselves, as women, to this profession.

How naive that vision seems today! How little did I understand the most simple of nature's laws: when two forces move in opposite directions along the same rail, they will inevitably collide.

As our society regrettably learned in south central Los Angeles—as it confronts its simmering racism—and as it learned in the testimony of Anita Hill and in the subsequent discussions about sexual harassment—changing the law does not by itself alter attitudes.

Stereotypical and confining images of women—as outmoded as they may be—still pop up and sting us often enough to remind us of how slow the progress will be. But these flashes of backsliding, this evidence of a backlash, as repugnant as it may be, should not be allowed to overshadow the strides towards equality that men and women are making together.

In some ways the Lisa Olson incident is an unfortunate wake up call to a new generation. It is a stark and valuable reminder to all of us that battles we fought for equality more than a decade ago didn't eradicate discrimination. Yes, my generation did open the locker room door. Now it remains the work of your generation—and those who follow you—to push forward the fight for an equality not only of law, but of spirit.

May you find the strength to hold the gains we've made, the energy to move us forward, and time to revel in the contributions which we as women can make.