Motivation

As the Supreme Court would rule in June 1996, just three months before T.Y.W.L.S. opened, the legality of single-sex schools depends on context. In United States v. Virginia, a case regarding females’ exclusion from the all-male Virginia Military Institute, the justices found that the male bastion was in fact violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the state of Virginia’s proposal to open an all-girls school wasn’t a sufficient remedy because V.M.I. gave its students not just a good education but powerful connections within Virginia’s military and political elite. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who earlier in her career had been a founder of the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project (a group that has been active in suing single-sex public schools), wrote the majority opinion, composing what some people consider a condensation of feminist thinking up to 1996. Ginsburg’s opinion states that in some contexts, single-sex schools might be legal, as long as those schools worked to “dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications.” “The two sexes are not fungible,” Ginsburg wrote, quoting a 1946 decision; the physical differences between the sexes are “enduring” and “cause for celebration.” Yet, Ginsburg warned, those differences cannot be used to place “artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity.”

Single-Sex Public Education – Children and Youth – Schools – Gender – New York Times

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