Breaking Out

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

KLIATT

This is an exhaustive brief about a tumultuous period in the 161-year history of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). The story began on June 26, 1996 when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing for the majority, handed down a U.S. Su-preme Court decision that forced VMI, a latter-day bastion of the recalcitrant Confederacy, to admit women into the all-male military college. The strategies of the opponents to the Court's order ranged from open defiance to closing down the Institute forever. Eventually the ideas of the "better dead than co-ed" fringe were dismissed or slid underground (surfacing later in the guerrilla tactics of the student body.) As a last-ditch effort, hold-outs looked to "privatize" VMI but were trumped by a hard-headed account of finances. VMI's governance groups finally realized their choices were limited to methods of compliance. The school administration outlined a "triple A" [quotes mine] plan. "VMI's â?˜Adversative' style of education would remain untouched," meaning the unflinching adherence to discipline and the verbal, sometimes physical, abuse would continue to be inflicted on ALL "rats" (first-year students). But VMI would attempt to be "Accommodative" to females, "taking into consideration a woman's special emotional needs." And finally, in a chilling "resistance-is-futile" echo of a Star Trek script, women would be "Assimilated" into VMI's Borg-like collective. None of the school's presumptively stereotypical assertions about women, however, proved true. And where women were expected to fail, such as in the physically punishing, cross-country marathon called "Breakout," women often outclassed many of the men in sheer stamina and determination. Thereader will find little in this brief about standards of academic excellence. "Minutiae is what mattered." Hair, clothing, physical prowess, and vocabulary were, and will continue to be, the sticking points. The "assimilation" of women at VMI appears to be succeeding because the women recruits never asked for, nor accepted, any new rules that did not also apply to the men, and because school leadership is acting in its own enlightened self-interest, putting aside prejudices and invidious stereotypes that apparently will continue to dog the American psyche well into the 21st century. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Random House, Vintage, 367p. illus., $14.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: William Kircher; Washington, DC , November 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 6)

Library Journal

In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute would have to admit women, ending over a century and a half of state-funded single-sex education and creating great uncertainty about the future of the institution. This account, written by a feminist, part-time English professor and member of the VMI community, attempts to introduce the reader to the culture of VMI and to chronicle the process through which it underwent minimal alterations to include women. Brodie, the wife of the VMI bandleader, actually participated in the transition and was in a particularly good position to observe this period of change. This highly readable book, based primarily upon personal experience and interviews, presents a positive view of VMI's efforts to assimilate women rather than accommodate them and is the only volume published to date to deal with this aspect of VMI's history. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries.--Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

An insightful and intimate look at the last all-male military college's struggle to prepare for and assimilate women into its corps of cadets. Laura Brodie introduces herself to her readers as the wife of the Virginia Military Institute band director; she then adds that she is a feminist with a PhD (in English) from the University of Virginia and served on one of the oversight committees for the integration of women into VMI's corps of cadets in 1996. The tension of producing an intellectually honest history of the military university's growing pains while simultaneously being a full-fledged member of that institution's "family" could have turned this book into an empty panegyric to VMI's martial subculture. Instead, Brodie harnesses that tension to evoke the deeper cultural currents that underlie the integration of women into traditional male strongholds. She traces VMI's dedication to assimilating women and its discomfort with addressing the practical problems of facilities, cadet slang, and physical fitness tests with balanced and humorous anecdotes: her narrative of the women's edgy reception, their demanding training, and the identity issues with which they struggled during their transformation into VMI cadets is equally engaging. The very intimacy that lends the book its authenticity also produces its limitations, however. Brodie downplays the societal implications of VMI's integration in order to deeply explore its effects on the college's unique fraternal culture. Even so, Brodie's insider awareness of the outlandish textures of VMI's culture, and her exhaustive interviews of cadets and faculty create a solid oralhistorywhich offers a unique point of view on the struggle to assimilate time-honored traditions with progressive values. An engaging oral history that offers a snapshot of how far American military culture has come in accepting women and suggests the complexities involved in the nation's continuing struggle with issues of gender and the military.