With a wry smile and no apology, Liz Bouve, 78, admits she’s been a troublemaker her whole life, someone unwilling to turn a blind eye to injustice or simply go along to get along.
“I like to stir the pot,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table on Great Island this month. “But I’ve always tried to help people and be a bit of an equalizer.”
She’s not kidding.
Since the 1960s, Bouve has been a tireless advocate for gender equality in sports. As a student, teacher, coach and school administrator, she fought the blanket inequity all female athletes once faced. Bouve even took her own school to court, demanding equal pay and winning a full year before Title IX, the federal statute guaranteeing sports equality, was inked into law.
For her titanic efforts, the Maryland State Athletic Directors Association named Bouve, who spent her career in that state, to its hall of fame last month.
Despite her life’s work, sports weren’t part of Bouve’s life growing up. Though always a fast runner, she wasn’t on her high school track team in her hometown of Falmouth. In the early 1960s, there was no girls track team. However, she still managed to compete, regularly showing up at boys team practices. There, she challenged the boys to sprints, often betting on the contests and winning.
“I was making a little money doing that,” Bouve said, still relishing the wins 60 years later.
When Bouve’s family moved to Maryland, just before her junior year, she found her new school didn’t have a girls track team either. Undaunted, she entered the University of Maryland after graduation, determined to become a high school physical education teacher.
Liz Bouve’s hall of fame plaque rests on her kitchen table in Harpswell on May 6. (Troy R. Bennett photo)At college, her troublemaking continued.
“Once, they called all the girls physical education students to a meeting and said, ‘From now on, if you cross campus in your PE clothes, you have to wear a trenchcoat down to your knees,'” Bouve said.
But she was having none of it and asked if the boys would have to do the same thing. When told they wouldn’t, Bouve got up and walked out, ending talk of trenchcoats.
After earning her degree, Bouve got a job teaching and coaching girls basketball at Einstein High School, in Montgomery County, Maryland. In those days, it was understood that boys teams were more important than the girls. Once again, Bouve made some trouble.
During a girls practice, the boys coach came into the gym and demanded to use it immediately. Bouve wouldn’t budge. She instructed her team to sit down on the court, spaced out evenly, to prevent the takeover. The tactic worked and the boys coach backed down.
By 1974, Bouve was coaching the girls track team and learned the boys coach, a man, was receiving a stipend of $1,600 while she was getting just $400.
“His assistant was making $1,300,” Bouve said. “And to make it worse, we’d divided the coaching by event, so both of us were coaching both boys and girls.”
Infuriated, she filed a lawsuit, backed up by several other girls coaches in the same school system who also were getting unequal pay. After the story hit the papers, school officials caved, promising to rectify the situation if the suit was dropped. Bouve agreed. A couple years later, all coaches were making the same kind of money.
Jeffrey Sullivan, director of the Department of Athletics for Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, inducts Liz Bouve, of Harpswell, into the Maryland State Athletic Directors Hall of Fame in April. (Photo courtesy Carol Satterwhite)Jeffrey Sullivan, the current director of the Department of Athletics for the school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, presented Bouve with her hall of fame plaque on April 26. Bouve had hired Sullivan as an intern 26 years ago, when she held the same position.
“Liz was a pioneer, a trailblazer, a hero,” Sullivan said on the phone this month. “Progress was slow back then and we needed people like her.”
He said he still tries to honor her example of bringing equality to underserved communities, every day. That’s why Sullivan recently started a girls flag football program which involves more than 700 students at 25 schools in his county.
“That program wouldn’t be here without her,” he said.
Bouve retired in 1999 and moved to Harpswell, where she served as the town’s recreation director from 2002-2009. In that job, she initiated a women’s boating program called Sailing Divas.
These days, with the current Title IX controversies around transgender athletes, Bouve said she’s happy to be retired.
“It’s a complex issue and there are no easy answers,” she said. “But everyone deserves the right to play sports.”
Even retired, Bouve is still finding ways to stir the pot. When visitors leave her house, she likes to give them two things. First, Bouve hands out a roll of toilet paper marked “Who gives a crap.” Then, perhaps in answer, she gives them a colorful, palm-sized piece of paper with “woman card” written on it.
“Sometimes, it’s the card you have to play,” Bouve said, grinning.
English (US) ·