About me
When Melissa Ludtke was 26 years old, she challenged Major League Baseball in federal court – and won. Her charge was gender discrimination. She pursued her rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which led to women in sports media gaining equal access to locker rooms where their male colleagues worked.
Melissa was an award-winning journalist at Sports Illustrated, Time, CBS News and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she edited Nieman Reports. She received the 2010 Yankee Quill Award for lifetime achievement as a journalist and was awarded fellowships at Harvard University, Radcliffe College, and the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Random House published her book “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America,” in 1997. Her 2024 book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside, tells the story of her federal case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, in the context the fight for women's rights during the late 1970s.
