Cover Art for 2023 IWPA Award-winning podcast Feminist Files: The Secret Origin of Title IX

FEMINIST FILES

The secret origin of Title IX.

Activist Pauli Murray said that all you needed to start a revolution is a typewriter…

And a lot of guts.

This is the story of how Title IX came to pass and how the women behind the scenes in Washington, D.C. created the academic sex revolution. The nerdy revolutionaries: Bunny Sandler, Patsy T. Mink, Edith Green, and Pauli Murray, among others—women who left behind clues about their lives, not just what they achieved, but how they did it, and who they were, little pieces that we pick up and find along the way.

The Feminist Files is a series that digs down into the nitty-gritty of change and mobilization: how it actually happened, how women organized and how the opposition organized against them.  The blood, sweat, and tears of that movement. The revolution which led in 1972 to the passage of Title IX:

37 words that changed the world.

Host Leigh Fondakowski and an all-star cast led by Jodie Foster and Samira Wiley, dig deep into the archives to uncover and reveal the secret origin of Title IX.

STARRING

Headshot of Jodie Foster who stars as Bernice "Bunny" Sandler in Feminist Files

Jodie Foster as Bernice “Bunny” Sandler

Samira Wiley as Pauli Murray

THE HOST

LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI

Headshot of Leigh Fondakowski, Writer, Director and Executive Producer of Feminist Files

Leigh was the head writer of The Laramie Project, co-writer of Laramie: Ten Years Later, and an Emmy Nominated co-screenwriter for the film adaptation of The Laramie Project with HBO Films. Leigh’s other original plays include, I Think I Like Girls, The People's Temple, SPILL, and Casa Cushman. 

Leigh has directed their original work at American Theater Company, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Encore Theater, Ensemble Studio Theater, The Guthrie Theater, Hartford Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, Perseverance Theater, Swine Palace, TimeLine Theater, and Z Space Studio. Leigh is a recipient of the Glickman Award for Best New Play for The People’s Temple, a 2007 recipient of the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights, a 2009 MacDowell fellow, a 2010 Imagine Fund Visiting Chair at the University of Minnesota, a 2017 Drama League Fellow, a 2018 recipient of The National Endowment of the Arts Residency for Collaborative Teams at Yaddo, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, a Sundance Theater Lab Alumni, a long time member of Tectonic Theater Project and the current Chair of the Moment Work Institute.