An article in Michigan Today on
the history of the Michigan Marching Band invoked personal memories of
exclusion from my days as a young high school girl and later as a new attorney.
The article talked about George Cavender’s resistance to allowing women to
participate in the Michigan Marching Band until 1972. He was quoted as saying: “It’s
more violent physical activity than would be proper for a lady. It would be too
hard—we couldn’t excuse a woman from rehearsals if she had ‘female problems.’ I
certainly don’t excuse any of my boys from practice.” People were still saying
ridiculous things like that in 1972! But then I remembered what happened to me
in the mid-1970s and nearly a decade later in the mid-1980s.
I attended a small high school in a Michigan farming
community. In my freshman year, the only sport open to high school girls was “powder
puff” football. Yes, it was called that. Despite the insulting name, the girls
in the Jack Pine Conference enthusiastically took the field in fierce
competition. This enthusiasm apparently alarmed school officials who throughout
that season kept changing the rules. Touch football was changed to flag football,
and by the end even the flags were removed and all touching was prohibited. The
coaches tried to demonstrate how we were supposed to position ourselves to stop
forward movement without touching. Most of the teams in the conference refused
to play after that rule change. I remember the anger and the frustration. It
took a new federal statute a few years later, Title IX, to make all the sports
available to girls in my small high school. There were only a handful of girls
who did not immediately sign up for multiple teams. I remember the joy and the
feeling that anything was possible now that we could play any sport we wanted.
Sadly, as a young lawyer, I again faced opposition to my
full participation. There was the partner who said he would never hire a woman
in his firm. There was a judge who kept asking me who I was and finally
demanded my P-number. There was the court officer who patted me on the head when
I asked for directions to a judge’s chamber and the client who returned my call to my male
associate rather than me to say “your girl called me.”
As I got older, I experienced fewer of these acts of
exclusion. Probably looking older and (I like to think) wiser made a
difference. Likely another factor was that women lawyers became less of a
novelty. But, it is important to look back and remember the feeling of being excluded.
Exclusion still happens. Sometimes a comment is directed at a lawyer who is a
woman or whose race or religion or sexual orientation does not match the common
demographics of the bar. If nothing else, remembering how it felt when such a
comment was directed at me makes me more conscious of how words and actions,
including my own, can affect others. As an older and wiser woman, I want to
speak up and intervene and help people feel included.