As an aside, a very interesting situation occurred a number of years ago when a female grad wanted to order a "husband's ring" for her non-grad husband. USNA didn't know what to do. Finally, they allowed her to order a regular man's ring. It created a lot of angst but there weren't a lot of other options. Personally, I think they should make him wear the miniature ring. . . .
I love this! I agree... they should have made him get the date ring.
I spoke with a lady who graduated from USMA in the early '80s, and she told me she was glad to see that VMI let women choose their ring size. When she was at USMA, women were required to get a smaller ring. She said that many of the men had their rings engraved on the inside with, "Yes it was." In years to come, whenever they caught themselves saying, "Oh, it wasn't that bad," they'd have a constant reminder that Yes, it was.
She wanted that engraving, but the women's ring only had space enough for four characters. She smiled and said, "But then again, I can think of several four-letter words that could be used to describe West Point."
Another ring story... during my Second Class year, the Class of 2003 came back for their five-year reunion. I was standing by one of the arches (an entrance to barracks) with one of my male BRs, waiting for our ride to pick us up. I said, "Dude, I just saw something I've never seen before. A young couple just walked by. He was wearing a VMI sweatshirt, but
she was the one wearing the ring! He didn't have one! I think she was the Alum in the relationship!" My BR said, "Man, I'd feel like a b****." I was quiet for a moment, and then I said, "Dan, now you understand just a little bit better what it's like to be a VMI woman. It's incredibly difficult to find a man confident enough in himself to date a woman who went to a tougher school than he did."
Second, the issue of gender norming physical standards is an interesting one. The SAs have always done it that way, although some standards (e.g., crunches) are the same. Personally, I think it's the right approach -- after all, men and women don't compete against each other in track & field at the Olympics and yet I don't think I'd argue they aren't in equally good shape. The one exception, IMO, is if the job requires a certain level of strength, speed, endurance, etc. (e.g., SEALs). In that case, the standard should be the standard, regardless of gender.
The above said, I do understand why changing the standard would have infuriated most of the women . . .
The fact that VMI was the only military school in the nation that held women to the same physical standards as men was a huge selling point for me back in high school. But the #1 thing most cadets/midshipmen lack, IMNSHO, is perspective. I think I understand that issue much more clearly now... and believe it or not, I'm very thankful that the VMI administration had the accidental wisdom to work the changes on the timeline that they did.
It was a tough battle in court, but it wasn't nearly as brutal (and personal) as the court battle fought by The Citadel since our case was not based on one woman suing the Institute. There was no name and face to go with the fight to change the system. VMI was also very fortunate in that we were the last of all SAs/SMCs to go coed. We had 30 years' worth of SA successes and mistakes to learn from, and the bloodbath that was Shannon Faulkner's arrival at El Cid was still very fresh in everyone's minds. The Supreme Court granted VMI a full year to plan and prepare, as opposed to the ruling in Ms. Faulkner's personal lawsuit (but not the class action suit fighting for
all women to be admitted) just six weeks prior to her matriculation. This gave the VMI administration a chance to fall back and regroup before leading the charge, so to speak.
The basic mentality of the VMI administration and the Assimilation Committee was that any woman who wanted to come to VMI was clearly looking for the VMI experience. While many believed that the coming of women would destroy the very essence of VMI (meaning those same women would destroy the VMI experience the moment they arrived to become part of it), they resolved to maintain as much of the Ratline and other unique aspects of the VMI experience as they could those first few years. Some outside observers interpreted this to be VMI throwing a temper tantrum, saying, "You can make us admit women, but you can't make us change our ways!" But in reality, it gave considerably less ammo to the detractors. Yes, as time goes on and various issues arise, many changes have been put in place to improve civility within the Corps. But this has largely been to the benefit of male cadets, as well as females.
USMA did a short-term longitudinal study on their journey to coeducation called
Project Athena. One of the things clearly stated in the first report was that the gender norming of the USMA PT test became a rallying point for the men who were opposed to coeducation. From the get go, they were able to argue (amongst themselves, at any rate) that women didn't belong at West Point because clearly they couldn't even meet the standards. In their minds, women were already weakening the USMA system and they'd barely even arrived.
I do not share that research finding by any means to bash West Point or any of the men trained there. It's actually a great example of what I consider to be one of the greatest challenges all cadets and mids face: trying to live life and learn how to lead when you lack perspective. I saw it day after day for four years at the Institute... cadets have so much going on in their daily lives that they have no choice but to place their focus on the moment they're livin' in, even as they dream of the future (Breakout, Ring Figure, graduation, etc.). They're so caught up in the minutia of day-to-day life that they fail to maintain a focus on the big picture. They can't (or won't) think far enough beyond themselves to realize that having different physical standards is not proving the point that men are better than women, nor is it creating inherently unfair double standards. It's creating standards and expectations that make sense according to very simple principles of biology and physiology. In fact, it's good leadership, in that the leaders are not setting a certain subgroup of their followers up for failure.
Cadets in general - regardless of where they are - tend to have a very low tolerance for ambiguity. Change is inherently evil, no matter how small. While this certainly isn't the case for all cadets in all cadet programs (I'd like to think that I did a fairly good job of accepting change), I base it on 8.5 years as a cadet in three different cadet programs, as well as my admittedly limited experience (roughly 7.5 months) being an adult leader at a military high school.
Had VMI gone to a gender normed VFT in the early years, I think it would have taken longer for the standards to have been accepted as "fair" by the Corps at large. In fact, I think it would have been a major hindrance to the acceptance of women at VMI. The PE Department had 10 years' worth of VFT statistics to be able to explain it to the male cadets. When LTC Funkhouser (Cadet Government Advisor) asked a few male cadets if they thought it would be fair to create a standard that would affect GPA and the rank selection process that only 20% of the black cadets could pass while 80%+ of the white cadets could, they understood why gender norming was important.
If it hadn't been for actual statistics, the fact the initial resistance to women had largely blown over and the fact that many male cadets were questioning why VMI's standards were so different from those of the real military, the gender norming of the VFT would have only served to ostracize women even more from their male counterparts.
That said, I noticed something special in my First Class year at VMI. While cadets will always complain that the Ratline gets easier and easier every year (for all that changes, somethings never do!), they no longer openly blame it on the coming of women. They'll complain all day long that "these rats suck" and "they're so weak" and "they'll report
anything as hazing." But upperclassmen complain just as much about male rats who don't live up to their expectations as they do the females, and they no longer seem to openly blame the "weakening" of the Ratline on women in particular. I think much of this stems from the fact that while the changes that have been made to the Ratline in the past 5-8 years or so have been quite drastic, they were made gradually, so it couldn't all be pinned on female cadets.
It also really helps when Alumni like Bruno come back to visit and tell the cadets that they think the Ratline is actually run better now than it was back in their day. Cadets always expect Alums to tell them Old Corps stories about how much tougher they had it back in the days of sanctioned beatings. They
don't expect so much to hear Alums saying, "Hey, it's a lot more organized now, and it seems to be more like real military training. There's better training for Cadre and RDC, so the Ratline is more professional now." This certainly seems to be the message and influence my rat's dad (Class of '76), Bruno (Class of '80) and one of his other BRs are having on the Class of 2012 as they talk with the BRs of their kids and the Cadre who trained them. It was also mentioned in the Class of '82 Class Notes column in the most recent edition of the
Alumni Review. An exact quotation: "Progress at the Institute! What a concept!"
Jackie M. Briski
VMI Class of 2009
First Class PVT (Ret.)