BREAKING OUT: VMI and the Coming of Women.

• Author: Mundy, Liza
• Position: Review

BREAKING OUT: VMI and the Coming of Women By Laura Fairchild Brodie

Schocken Books, $26.00

THE FIRST TIME I SAW A FEMALE VMI cadet was in early 1998 when my uncle, an alumnus of the Virginia Military Institute, died of a heart attack just months before his only son was to graduate from VMI. My daughter and I went down to Richmond for the funeral, which, movingly, was attended by hundreds of VMI cadets. It was the first year of coeducation, and at the reception afterward I kept scanning the crowd, hoping to spot one of the new women "rats" (as freshmen at VMI are called, to designate their status as the lowest creatures on earth). Finally, my dad introduced me to one. It turned out I'd been standing quite close to her. I just hadn't been able to distinguish her from her male classmates.

From Laura Fairchild Brodie's fine book, Breaking Out, one learns that this was not unusual. After women came to VMI, following a Supreme Court order that they must be admitted, one of the many unexpected ordeals female rats had to endure was civilians mistaking them for men. When one rat, Nicki Myers, was traveling home to Virginia Beach over fall break, an old lady saw her in a rest-stop ladies' room, screamed "Young man, you can't be in here!", and began beating Myers about the face with her handbag. Similarly, when VMI's first group of women was invited to attend the dedication of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, they were introduced to the crowd as men--from West Point. As it happened, some West Point women were also in attendance, and when they saw the female VMI rats, their first response was "my gosh--I can't believe your hair."

VMI, determined to make the women's experience as much like the men's as possible, had cut the women's hair shorter than at any other service academy. Even so, it was about an inch longer than the men's--one of countless issues, large and small, that led some VMI men to complain, inevitably, that the women were getting preferential treatment, that they weren't being worked as hard, that Rat Line (the rats' first six or seven months, a period of intense mental and physical stress) wasn't as hellish, that VMI would never be the same, etc.

At VMI, egalitarianism is an obsession. During the year preceding the entrance of women, their "special hygienic needs" was the topic of meeting after meeting. One particular topic was the question of which bathrooms would have tampon dispensers added and whether or not those...