Sandstone & Tile, Winter 2013
Volume 37, Number 1

Women's Sports at Stanford: Forty Years of Title IX

Members of Stanford’s women’s basketball team posed less than three weeks before playing the nation’s first women’s intercollegiate athletic event, against Cal at the San Francisco Armory on April 4. Until that game, the Stanford team played Castilleja and other local schools. Stanford women beat Cal 2 to 1. Photo: Stanford University Archives

I was Sports Information Director at Stanford in 1974, when we started adopting Title IX. Ironically, when the law first passed, a lot of people didn’t really think of it in terms of sports, but that quickly became its focus.

To fully appreciate the changes it introduced, it’s helpful to look at women’s sports at Stanford before Title IX. In 1896, Stanford played Cal in basketball in what was the first women’s intercollegiate athletic event in the United States. It was held in the San Francisco Armory, behind closed doors, and no men were admitted because the women athletes in those days played in bloomers. That day, the Stanford women scored a 2-to-1 victory over Cal’s team. Seventy years later, in the 1960s, most Stanford women’s teams were still intramural. Female athletes had to train individually and compete on their own.  (read more)

The Art of History: Recreating Stanford's Lost Statues

In this photo, taken before the 1906 earthquake, the original statues of Johannes Gutenberg (left) and Benjamin Franklin adorn the exterior of Wallenberg Hall, then the Thomas Welton Stanford Library. Photo: Stanford University Archives

By Susan Wels

Wallenberg Hall, located on the east side of the Main Quad (Building 160) was originally constructed in 1900 as the Thomas Welton Stanford Library. Two years later, a pair of marble sculptures by master Florentine carver Antonio Frilli adorned its second-story facade. The large white figures of Benjamin Franklin and Johannes Gutenberg flanked a second pair of Frilli sculptures—of Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz—installed symmetrically on the west side of the Quad, over Jordan Hall (Building 420).

In 1906, the Agassiz statue gained notoriety when the earthquake knocked it from its perch and it plunged head-first into the pavement. Remarkably, the sculpture suffered only a broken nose and a cracked neck and was returned to its pedestal on the exterior of Jordan Hall. Then, more than 40 years later, the Franklin and Gutenberg statues disappeared from Building 160 after they were removed in 1950 during its renovation for the Law School, which occupied the building until 1975.  (read more)

In This Issue:

• Women’s Sports at Stanford: Forty Years of Title IX
• The Art of History
• Stanford through the Century
• Stanford Historical Society Update
• Upcoming Society Activities
• Read More...