Overview

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, twenty-six-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."" 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.

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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. Melissa Redmond started her love affair with books when she was three. Her first introduction to audiobooks came at about the same time, when her dad, a Navy pilot, would read bedtime stories onto tapes and send them home while he was away on deployment. He did all the voices. Eventually, her love of the written word turned into a love of performance in various mediums. She graduated from the University of California San Diego with a degree in theater and has been working in theater, film, and voice-over ever since. Her voice has been described as ""A little smirk, a little sparkle . . . and just the right amount of smartass."" She's interested in a wide array of genres, with special affection for thriller, nonfiction, romantic comedy, and YA fantasy. When she isn't acting, she can be found hiking in the San Francisco Bay Area hills, dancing, and rescuing and rehabilitating injured marine mammals.

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