Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers’ Rights addresses an important legal case that set the stage for today’s LGBTQ civil rights–a case that almost no one has heard of. Marjorie Rowland v. Mad River School District involves an Ohio guidance counselor fired in 1974 for being bisexual. Rowland’s case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices declined to consider it. In a spectacular published dissent, Justice Brennan laid out arguments for why the First and Fourteenth Amendments apply to bisexuals, gays, and lesbians. That dissent has been the foundation for LGBTQ civil rights advances since.
 
In the first in-depth treatment of this foundational legal case, authors Margaret A. Nash and Karen L. Graves tell the story of that case and of Marjorie Rowland, the pioneer who fought for employment rights for LGBTQ educators and who paid a heavy price for that fight. It brings the story of LGBTQ educators’ rights to the present, including commentary on Bostock v Clayton County, the 2020 Supreme Court case that struck down employment discrimination against LGBT workers.
 

MARGARET A. NASH is professor emerita in the School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. She is the editor of Women’s Higher Education in the United States: New Historical Perspectives and the author of Women’s Education in the United States, 1780-1840.

KAREN L. GRAVES recently retired from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she was professor in the Department of Education. She is the author of And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers and a coeditor of Inexcusable Omissions: Clarence Karier and the Critical Tradition in History of Education Scholarship.

— Jonathan Zimmerman, author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America

"In this superb combination of narrative and analytical history, Nash and Graves engage us first with the dramatic, arduous story of Marjorie Rowland and her fight for equitable treatment.  They then analyze how principles drawn from Rowland’s case have informed litigation surrounding LGBTQ educators over time, concluding with potent reflections on current prospects.  Covering vast legal ground in accessible language, this book will stand as an important marker of the history of rights for LGBTQ school professionals."

  — Linda Eisenmann, author of Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965