Breaking out: VMI and the Coming of Women - Laura Fairchild Fairchild Brodie - Hardcover - 1 ED

INTRODUCTION I am the band director's wife. At first glance, that might seem irrelevant. This is not a book about snare drums and spit valves and John Philip Sousa. What lies ahead is an insider's view of a deliberately anachronistic Southern institution confronting the facts of sexual equality in the twenty-first century. More specifically, this is the story of the Virginia Military Institute, and the internal challenges it faced as it relinquished its status as the last all-male military college in the United States. The key players are a group of young women tackling a male-oriented system of education, and a community of administrators, alumni, faculty, and male cadets, all struggling to integrate women into their world, on their terms. Why does my own background matter? Because no one can talk about VMI without getting personal. In the seven years that the Institute spent waging a legal war to defend its males-only admissions policy, neutrality was a luxury few could afford. The issues were too emotional, too inflammatory. Should women be at VMI? How far should our nation's military colleges, as well as the armed services, go to accommodate women? What does equality between the sexes really mean when translated into practical terms? Answers to these questions depend on each individual's perspective. Are you a man or a woman? Were you born and bred in Virginia? Are you a Yankee? Have you ever fought in a war? What do you know about military training? Have you ever seen VMI? The questions quickly become accusations. I come to this story with as much personal baggage as any human being. My biases are all the more relevant because I was not only a witness to, but an occasional participant in, several of the events at hand-joining in committee debates, mingling at cocktail parties, teaching English to the last all-male "rat mass" in VMI's history. In the pages that follow I will occasionally metamorphose from narrator to character, Jekyll to Hyde, stepping out of the shadows to provide a more intimate, first-person view. To make that view clear, an introduction is necessary. And so, as I was saying, I am the band director's wife. I am also a doctor of English literature, a part-time professor, a full-time mother. But for my present purposes, these facts are secondary. What matters is that for the past ten years I have attended every Parents' Weekend concert at VMI. I have traveled with the band to Paris, to New York, to Mardi Gras in New Orleans (imagine thirty-eight hours round-trip on a bus with fifty cadets). I have watched VMI's Corps march in full regalia at dozens of Friday afternoon parades, framed on the left by the flat peak of House Mountain, and on the right by the early twilight reflected in the windows of the barracks. I have sat within ear-splitting distance of the VMI pep band at basketball and football games, cheering for the "Keydets," and I once spent $120 on a long white dress and a pair of elbow-length gloves, so that I could stand next to my husband underneath a giant replica of the VMI Class Ring, as he was dubbed an honorary member of the Class of 1992. In other words, I am a member of the VMI Family. Many colleges use a family metaphor to describe the relations among students, faculty, alumni, parents, and staff, but few take the metaphor as seriously as VMI. One former VMI official used to invoke the Family so often -- "We must communicate with the Family," "The Family will not like this" -- that a conversation with him felt like a scene from The Stepford Wives. At VMI, "Family" is a literal term. Many of the cadets are sons, grandsons, nephews, or cousins of former graduates. Most of the administrators are alumni, as are many of the professors. In 1995 the Dean of the Faculty distributed a memo stating that VMI's faculty needed to hire more women, more minorities, and more aluBrodie, Laura Fairchild is the author of 'Breaking out: VMI and the Coming of Women - Laura Fairchild Fairchild Brodie - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780375406140 and ISBN 037540614X.