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Meet Authors Margaret Nash and Karen Graves

Join us when authors Margaret Nash and Karen Graves visit to discuss their book Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers’ Rights.

About the authors:

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 is Professor in the Department of Education at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
She is the author of And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian
Teachers and a co-editor of Inexcusable Omissions: Clarence Karier and the Critical Tradition in History of
Education Scholarship.

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.

Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.