cover image Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women

Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women

Laura Fairchild Brodie. Pantheon Books, $26 (368pp) ISBN 978-0-375-40614-0

A 1970s feminist poster featured cartoon character Nancy burning down a clubhouse that sported a ""No Girls"" sign on its front door. Nothing so dramatic happened when, in 1989, the Department of Justice told the Virginia Military Institute that it had to admit women. The school fought the order--at a cost of ten million dollars, making a small dent in its $250 million endowment--but the Supreme Court ruled against the school in 1996. In this engrossing, informed and even-handed analysis of the institution's ""assimilation"" (the word carefully chosen by VMI's administration) of women, Brodie brings a clear, feminist perspective to her analysis of the school's history, students and bureaucracy. As a part-time teacher at VMI, a member of VMI's Executive Committee for the Assimilation of Women and wife of the band director, Brodie has both an insider's and outsider's perspective. In her nuanced and surprising account of VMI's struggle to change deeply embedded traditions, she charts how specific words and phrases in the cadets' established slang had to be altered, how the school's ""Code of Gentleman"" was viewed as a rudimentary sexual harassment policy and how seriously many of the male cadets assumed the responsibility for making the new system work. She also critiques VMI's all-male history and atmosphere, which have been, in small and large ways, profoundly misogynist. Brodie's account concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, as VMI's first female cadets graduated in 1999 to little controversy. (May)