BREAKING OUT: VMI and the Coming of Women.

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:

"I'm looking around the room here, and there's a Marine combat veteran, there are two Army combat veterans, a couple of unit commanders, a Green Beret, all these he-man killer people sitting around considering whether we dry undies one way or another way."

One thing I have always liked about VMI is the sense of humor of its graduates, and Brodie does a good job of bringing this out. She also evokes some memorable images that go far beyond the routine coverage: a male cadet recalling how impressed he was when he went to wake two female rats for early morning physical training, only to discover that "they were already awake, with their hays [mattresses] rolled, and their racks [bedframes] up, and they were sleeping with their heads on their desks, ready to go out to PT ... I'd never seen that. But they knew what they were getting into, so they were ready." It was also fascinating to learn that when VMI administrators talked to women at other service academies, the women said that one of the few things that really did bother them was profanity directed at the female anatomy. Accordingly, it was decided that VMI would make some effort to clean up its rampant profanity. At the suggestion of one thoughtful cadet, a belt sander was taken to the classroom desks to remove the graffiti.

There are also reminders that women brought some much-needed changes. Thanks to them the campus got better lighting. Thanks to them the toilets got doors. Thanks to them, the track-and-field coach informed his athletes: "Your locker room has new carpet. We now have central heat and air. We have the shower fixed. We have more space. And our field house has been painted for the first time in probably fifty years."

Throughout the book, there were many things I hadn't thought of--VMI had to come up with a dating policy, for example, which meant one administrator had to define "date," which is surprisingly hard--and results I never would have predicted. Whereas alumni giving declined sharply at lofty places like Princeton right after coeducation, at VMI (a phenomenally well-endowed public institution) it actually increased. Brodie speculates that this is because the alumni didn't feel the school had sold them out: As they saw it, VMI had fought the good fight in fighting against women, had lost, and there was nothing to do but make the best of it. Another intriguing tidbit had to do with physical training, which is controversial at VMI and in the military as a whole. Unlike other places, VMI refused to have a different physical test for women than men. At the end of a year the women could do far fewer pull-ups than the men--a much-touted weakness--but Brodie also reveals that the women were averaging 78 sit-ups in two minutes to the men's 76.

Brodie doesn't gloss over the downside and hardships of assimilating women into the macho culture of VMI. Well, maybe she does gloss over them. It's impossible to know and in the end I don't care. She's got too much good stuff. Overall, her book is admirably even-handed and that, combined with the details, is enough for me. But what lingers most in my mind is another offhand comment she makes halfway through. While researching the book, Brodie was talking to a friend about VMI, and the friend commented that the issues raised by coeducation seemed to crystallize the central debate among feminists; when making one's way in a man's world, do you want to be treated exactly the same or do you want to be treated differently, because in some ways you are different? This is a question that has never been resolved, anywhere, in any office or any school or any home, and Brodie's book is a fascinating study of one unlikely place that's trying.

LIZA MUNDY is a staff writer at The Washington Post Magazine.