Women in the Barracks: the VMI Case and Equal Rights.

By Philippa Strum. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2002. Pp. x, 417. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1164-9.)

Women in the Barracks is many different studies rolled into one. It is a detailed legal history of discrimination against women's entrance into the military, complete with interviews that author Philippa Strum conducted with representatives on both sides of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1996 decision ordering that women be allowed to enroll in the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), including justices of the Court. It is a mini-history of VMI, from its founding in 1839 as an all-male institution to the continuing implications of that foundation through the present. Finally, it is a very brief history of gender roles and relationships in the South and in the United States. Strum's three-pronged approach makes for a much broader contribution than a simple case study because accepted gender roles as well as case law are factors in judicial rulings.

Gambling all or nothing by going to court was the only option for VMI's trustees. They could have transformed VMI into a private all-male institution, thereby avoiding laws that applied to public colleges. However, they wanted the state's subsidy and feared that preservation of sacred male traditions might prove too costly to be viable. The trustees had been frustrated in their last-ditch effort to make their "separate but equal" leadership program for women seem appealing. They were amazed to discover that what motivated the majority of women did not differ from what motivated the majority of men. The small number of women attracted to a rigorous military ordeal demanded the same features that attracted men; thus they rejected a separate program as a career-destroying dead end. Baffled by the women's demand to share the terrors of the initial "rat year," VMI's lawyers headed to West Point to dig for evidence that integration had hurt that academy. They calculated any substantial improvements to the facilities, such as renovations to the gymnasium (far more costly than just the new lockers and new bathrooms), as the price an institution would have to pay to allow women in their ranks. They were also displeased to find that physical hazing of West Point's male plebes had significantly decreased once women cadets were present. In short, having female cadets meant major expenditures and a feminization of the critical "rat year" that VMI used to turn boys into men.

The Supreme Court ordered that equal admission policies applied to publicly supported institutions of higher education. However, the justices could alter institutional behavior, but they could not change attitudes directly. Attitudes did evolve, with impetus from the two women justices seated on the Court as well as increasing combat and near-combat roles for women in the military. Relatively few VMI graduates, male or female, actually join the military, but they take soldiering as a high-prestige external role model, as do many Americans. Such complications make it difficult for historians to assign responsibility for major changes.

VMI was an extreme case, yet higher education constantly struggles with more subtle gender-related problems. How can deans know which behavior to encourage and which to punish, or how to draw formal lines when societal norms change so fast? Philippa Strum adds to this debate with her evenhanded, thorough, and thought-provoking monograph, which is a "must" book for students of legal, gender, and military history.

D'ANN CAMPBELL

Mary Baker Eddy Library and

Colby Sawyer College