As Title IX era dawned, a first women’s athletic scholarship created national buzz

In the pivotal summer of 1972, Mary Jean Mulvaney, the chairman of the University of Chicago women’s physical education department, went to the admissions office to point out that the university had an athletic scholarship for men named after Amos Alonzo Stagg, the Hall of Fame football coach and innovator, but no equivalent for women.

By that fall, the University of Chicago established the Gertrude Dudley Scholarship, named after the administrator who came to the Windy City in 1898 and quickly created organized sports for women at the school.

The scholarship gained national headlines while Title IX, passed into law that same summer of ’72, would bring meaningful change to college sports in following years.

The Dudley scholarship was billed by media as “what may be the nation’s first academic-athletic scholarship for women.”

Wayland Baptist University in Texas previously had scholarship female basketball players. Some female track athletes from Tennessee State’s acclaimed Tigerbelles program received paying jobs before the Title IX era. Also in early 1973, the University of Miami began awarding female athletic scholarships.

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So the University of Chicago calls the Dudley the first nationally advertised athletic scholarship for women. (There was previously a Dudley scholarship at Dudley’s alma mater, Mount Holyoke, a private liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts, for a student in “good physical condition.”)

Parade magazine, inserted into Sunday newspapers across the country, mentioned the University of Chicago scholarship in its March 18, 1973 issue. In a section titled “Keeping Up … With Youth,” at the bottom of the page, under the headline, “For Girls Only,”