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Enemy Of Title Ix : The Department Of Health, Education And Welfare

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Enemy of Title IX: The Department of Health, Education and Welfare

The lack of action and the incompetence of HEW was the primary obstacle in the way of thorough enforcement of Title IX . Inspired by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Title IX took years for women to see the law enacted due to the disgraceful lack of enforcement by HEW. Experts show that the Education and Welfare did “three tenths of a complaint per person” failing to protect women to the best of its abilities for more than five years (NOW 71). The HEW did not make a priority to evaluate the claims of race or gender discrimination and after the passing of 1972 women who were excited about the passing of the law were met with one obstacle, the grace period. Feminist Susan Ware notes that The Department of Health, Education and Welfare appointed a “grace period of four to three years” for secondary institutions, meaning that some women did not see the law take hold until graduation (NOW 74). The grace period allowed schools to do as they please under the guise of evaluating results of complaints of discrimination which gave the law a sluggish start. During this period women flooded HEW with thousands of complaints by women facing gender discrimination on college campuses across the nation.
Many women quickly learned filing complaints with HEW was a wasted effort, many times the filers would have to wait “14 months” to open a case and by that time the problem had been resolved (PEER 71-74). After failure to find

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