Equal entry to locker rooms didn’t grow to be commonplace within the N.H.L. for a few decade, with the Toronto Maple Leafs because the league’s lone holdout as late as 1987. The group’s proprietor, Harold Ballard, even went as far as to ban all reporters from the locker room somewhat than be compelled to confess feminine sportswriters. He as soon as stated that girls can be allowed in in the event that they took off their garments earlier than asking questions.
Robin Cathy Herman was born on Nov. 24, 1951, in New York Metropolis and grew up in Port Washington, on Lengthy Island. Her father, Sidney, owned a hat manufacturing facility and later taught enterprise regulation on the New York Institute of Expertise. Her mom, Mildred (Gold) Herman, was a sculptor.
Ms. Herman entered Princeton College in 1969 as a part of its top notch of feminine undergraduates and joined the campus newspaper, The Day by day Princetonian. There, every new reporter was to be given each a information and a sports activities beat, however the editors had assumed that Ms. Herman wouldn’t wish to cowl sports activities, and so gave her solely a information task.
“It struck me as inequitable,” she advised the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2013. “It was a reflex, actually,” she added, of talking as much as cowl sports activities.
She volunteered to put in writing about rugby, then lined males’s squash, males’s tennis and soccer.
After graduating in 1973 with a bachelor’s diploma in English, she was employed as a clerk in The Instances’s sports activities division and was quickly promoted to reporter. Earlier than being assigned to the Islanders, she wrote about tennis, yachting and horse racing.
Within the ESPN documentary, she recalled a specific piece of hate mail about feminine sportswriters coming into males’s locker rooms and clubhouses.
“It’s exhausting to deal with a harlot disguised as a reporter,” it learn partially, “however I simply wish to warn you that you simply can not do such a factor with impunity. It’s flawed, regardless of what number of girls libers may dumbly applaud it.”
Supply: NY Times
