Karen Caufield

Abby Demers
Tessa Landon
Ellen Rourke
Megan Vien
Process Paper Word Count: 496
For our History Fair topic this year, we chose to focus on how women seeking education
and women athletes took a stand to fight for equal representation and rights which led to the
Federal Amendment of the Civil Rights Act to be created. This federal amendment which was
passed in 1972, was named Title IX. The amendment states that No person in the United States
shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be
subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial
assistance. This Amendment was put into place to attempt to stop the discrimination on the
sports field or in the classroom. When choosing our topic, we were interested in the womens
rights because all five members in our group are women seeking collegiate education, and we
feel this was important to address as it affects our immediate future.
Our research began with checking out many different books from libraries all around and
browsing different websites. Each individual found a collection of primary and secondary
sources which supplied us with crucial information on our topic. Throughout three weeks, we
were required to write thirty bullet points each, which made for light work when it came time to
start putting together our website. As a group, a priority that we were all looking for were
important quotes from key contributors to Title IX. We felt these quotes would help make our
project more reliable and stand out.
Collectively, we decided to use a website to present our information. Last year we had
great success in the website category. We were state finalists in the website category and we felt
pretty confident with the setup of a website, so we felt creating a website was appropriate.
Overall, websites are visually appealing and easy to construct. To start, we created a detailed
thesis and placed it on our home page to allow a smooth entrance into our website. It
immediately gives readers an idea of what is going to be shown and supported throughout the
project. Then, we met to discuss how we were going to organize our website. We decided on
making five main tabs on our website: Thesis, Historical Context, Taking a Stand, Effects and
the Bibliography tab. Next, the group distributed tasks and began to focus on each individual
page of the website. Then, we went back and worked on editing each page together.
Our word count was one of the most challenging pieces of the project. Constantly, we
found ourselves re-wording and rewriting several pieces of information. Another challenging
aspect of our project was narrowing this broad topic down into a project that was easy to
understand and avoid leave any important information out. This years theme was Taking a
Stand in History. Our topic connects with this theme because it shows a nationwide movement
that ultimately showed women taking a stand against gender discrimination in athletics,
education and more.