BREAKING OUT: VMI and the Coming of Women. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2000 by Liza Mundy

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 sanitary supplies would be free; if they were free, the administration fretted, women would be getting something, strictly speaking, that the men were not.

In one sense the discussions (did women need private showers to wash themselves? If so, would this be unfair to the men, who showered in the open?) were absurd and fetishistic. But in another sense--as Brodie insightfully points out--it was part of a bona fide effort, on the part of VMI, to think through every facet of the women's arrival, to establish the conditions and set down the rules for accommodating women in a systematic way that no workplace has ever done. Such a sublime effort is bound to have its ridiculous moments: "One of the big arguments that came up," recalled the only female faculty member at the great Tampax debate, "was that if we were going to have the products in the bathroom, you all know that the men are going to go in there and steal them, and play with them, and make whistles out of them."

Such moments abound through this incident-rich book, which basically provides a chronicle of the year VMI spent preparing for the admission of women and the year following their arrival. Brodie intuits what an editor once told me: Chronology is a writer's best friend. Together, the narrative and the details make for swift and compelling reading.

More than that, the aggregation of such close-ups--even silly ones--quickly dispelled what had been my initial reservation about the book: the fact that Brodie was on the VMI committee to "assimilate" women, and, more important, that her husband is employed as the band instructor at VMI. While I myself have written about VMI while having family connections to the school, I worried that her family's financial stake might strongly bias her perspective.

While it's true that Brodie's position is fundamentally one of sympathy--she accepts VMI's eccentricities and never questions, as did some of my journalistic colleagues, why the state didn't just close such a weird place down, rather than opening it up to women--what becomes immediately apparent is the real advantage of her insider status. It allowed her access at a time when nobody else had it, providing her with a rare firsthand account of how a powerful public institution was handling the arrival of women. Most of all, the fact that people clearly knew and trusted Brodie produced the most astonishing quotes from cadets, alumni, and administrators; not just the offhand remarks but frank and on-the-record assessments of how things were going, such as one from an administrator who, during a discussion of whether the women should be provided with drying racks for certain, ahem, female items, recalled that: