September 20 · This Day in America
Thirty thousand people fill the Houston Astrodome and fifty million more watch on television as Billie Jean King is carried in like a queen on a feathered litter. Bobby Riggs, fifty-five and loud, has spent the summer insisting no woman can beat a man. King, twenty-nine, the best in the world, knows the match is not really about tennis. It is about whether a woman's work counts. She does not just win — she dismantles him, in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, with millions of girls watching what a woman who refuses to lose looks like. It was an exhibition match with a circus around it. It was also one of the most important things to happen to women in America, settled with a tennis racket in front of the largest crowd ever to watch the sport.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1881
Hours after James Garfield dies, the machine politician nobody trusted is woken in his New York townhouse and takes the oath of office in his own parlor by lamplight. Chester Arthur — a spoils-system man through and through — then stuns everyone by championing civil service reform, signing the law that began to end the patronage racket that produced him. Sometimes the office changes the man.
Source: www.loc.gov