Baseball is part of sports journalist Melissa Ludtke’s DNA, starting from the letter her grandfather wrote her mother when Ms. Ludtke was born.

“He wrote the letter three days after my birth and the reason is that the Yankees had come to town to play the Red Sox, and there was nothing more important than that in their household,” she said with a laugh. “He misspelled my name terribly in the first paragraph, and then went right into a two paragraph recitation or summary of the three-game series held in Fenway Park between the Yankees and the Red Sox.”

Ms. Ludtke is most famous for winning a 1978 federal lawsuit for the right to allow women equal access into Major League Baseball locker rooms, and writes about that moment and more in her new book, Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside. She will give a talk at the West Tisbury Library on Wednesday, August 21, beginning at 4:30 p.m.

During her career, Ms. Ludtke wrote for Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine and was editor of Nieman Reports at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Writing this book allowed her to share a national story through her eyes.

“It was a very, very well covered case, but the people who were then telling the story of my case were, for the most part, men and male sports writers,” she said. “The male sports writers didn’t really tell the story of my fight for equal access or equal rights. What they told was a story about a leering woman who wanted to go into locker rooms to see naked men. That was the perspective that they brought to the coverage.”

Constance Baker Motley, the first female Black federal court judge in the country, ruled in favor of Ms. Ludtke, stating that her 14th Amendment rights were violated. But the immediate aftermath of the decision didn’t fix everything.

“The law is changed and that matters, I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t matter,” Ms. Ludtke said. “But then the work is to foster a kind of change in attitude that can go along with it.”

Ms. Ludtke hopes that readers of her book see themselves in the pages, no matter what age they are.

“At the time I wrote the prologue, my daughter was 26 years old. That’s the same age I was when I was the plaintiff in this case,” she said. “So effectively, I’m writing a book for her and her generation, but I’m also writing it for my generation to go back in time and look at those times when we fought the battles we did.”

As a pioneer in the field, Ms. Ludtke has been pleased to see the possibilities for women expand.

“You have so many young women who are so eager to get into some aspect of sports journalism,” she said. “They are there to watch each other’s backs and to have each other’s backs.”

The fight is still being fought, according to Ms. Ludtke, and her work the past few decades is only the beginning.

“We have women across this country every single day doing the job alongside their male colleagues, and they have the same ability to do it,” she said. “When you’re already starting way behind the start line and you don’t even have access to interview the players that you need to have in your story... my god, women don’t stand a chance. So now we’ve put them at the same starting line and their work will speak for itself.”

Melissa Ludtke will speak with Jim Kaplan, her former colleague at Sports Illustrated, about her book on Aug. 21 at 4:30 at West Tisbury Library.