New Jersey Girl Sues for Right to Join High School Tennis Team; Ruth Bader Ginsburg Handles the Case
Fifteen year-old Abbe Seldin’s lawyers, it was reported today, filed suit for her right to join her Teaneck, New Jersey, High School boys tennis team.The school did not offer a girls tennis team.
Seldin’s parents were supportive, and her mother Shirley Seldin had contacted the New Jersey ACLU earlier in the year. Abbe’s case was taken by a young lawyer who had just started volunteering with the ACLU affiliate.
The lawyer’s name was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Seldin was a star tennis player, currently ranked #22 by the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association. The New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, however, had established the rule of no boy-girl competition on the same teams.
Ginsburg and Seldin never met in person, but had four long telephone calls. The case fit perfectly in Ginsburg’s litigation strategy (which was based on the one Thurgood Marshall used on the road to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision) of laying a foundation by taking on seemingly less serious cases and building up a body of case law affirming women’s rights. Ginsburg sued Teaneck school officials and state agencies. Ginsburg and her co-counsel argued that the sex-segregation rule violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.The case was never heard by a court, however. In part because of the considerable publicity over the case, the state of New Jersey changed its policy to allow girls to try out for boys teams.
Seldin also never played tennis for Teaneck High School. The tennis coach who supported Seldin left his job before the season started, and the new coach was not supportive and created a hostile environment. Seldin was injured and bruised in a particularly brutal exercise. She ran home and quit the team. At Syracuse University, however, she played tennis and became the first woman to be awarded an athletic scholarship.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 19, 2020, and was hailed as one of the great Americans. That year Abbe Seldin was still playing tennis in her mid-60s.
Participation in sports by girls and women received a major boost on June 23, 1972, with the passage of Title IX (always referred to as “Title Nine”) of the 1972 Education Amendments, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex by any institution receiving federal financial assistance (which, because of federal tuition assistance programs, mean virtually all educational institutions).
Read the 2020 New York Times story about Abbe Seldin, Ruth Ginsburg and the case
Read about Title IX: Deborah Brake, Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women’s Sports Revolution (2010)
Learn about the changes in the rights of women: Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of Women from 1960 to the Present (2009)
Read the great biography of RBG: Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (2018)