West Point: The Coed Class of '80

By Barbara Dolan

Dinnertime, and the cavernous mess hall is overflowing with gray-clad cadets and a sprinkling of visitors. Two women cadets sit at a table with the reporter and other guests. "They're so pretty," one woman whispers. "Why would they ever come to West Point?"

A middle-aged man approaches the table, three stars glittering on his tan Army jacket. One of the women, a captain in the cadet Brigade, turns to greet him. After a brief exchange, the lieutenant general bends forward and kisses her affectionately on the cheek. Conversation at the table halts. After a moment, a male cadet sneers: "I bet you've never seen a general kissing an officer before, have you?" The kissed cadet is the daughter of one of the general's old Army friends.

"If I hear one more call for a meeting about the women or for the women or because of the women, I'm going to get sick," a male cadet confides. He is not alone in that opinion, though a report on the Academy puts the matter more formally. "Oversensitivity to the presence of women at West Point on the part of the staff and faculty has been disruptive, serving to alienate the men, foster separatism, and delay the complete integration of the Corps of Cadets." "It's the most traumatic thing that's happened since they took away the horses," says one unhappy grad.

After nearly four years of pressure, the 62 surviving women cadets (out of the original 119) in the Class of '80, the first to admit women, are also fed up with the limelight. "I always try to avoid interviews," says one emphatically. "I say to reporters, 'Go ask that male cadet the same things.'"

At first it seemed that physique would be the only problem. Most women have less upper-body strength than men. If women are judged by the same physical standards as men, most will fail. So the Point substituted the flexed-arm hang for pull-ups. For bayonet training, it equipped the women with a lighter rifle, the 6.5-lb. M-16 instead of the 9-lb. M-14. Separate track and swimming events for women were added to intramural tournaments in place of the contact sports in which women may not take part (football, boxing and wrestling).

But many male cadets feel that lowering the physical standards for the women "debased the coinage," and the women had to pay by being patronized. "Do you know that when they gave us our first leadership ratings, they said things like 'She walks like a girl'?" one woman recalls. Women were ridiculed because their voices were higher pitched and not as "commanding." Their short marching stride was thought unmilitary.

And how would the female silhouette look in dress grays? "They thought the tailed jackets would accent our figures," says one of the women incredulously. "They thought our big rear ends would stick out, so they gave us no tails." Visitors who looked for the women on the parade fields had no trouble spotting them. They were the ones without tails.

They had no back pockets either.

More boyish. But what's a cadet going to do with comb, handkerchief and notebook without a pocket? Especially a female cadet. Put them in her hat, of course. Every time they took their hats off, the women plebes would scramble around picking up their belongings. "You would have thought that they would have looked into the uniforms before we came here," grumbles one of the women. "The jackets they gave us made us look like ten-ton trucks!"

A woman cadet works busily in her quarters, stopping to straighten her already drum-tight bunk. The door is open, not because a male cadet is visiting but because dozens of cadets keep filing back and forth from the corridor outside. (Men have had to forgo the honored custom of strolling naked through the barracks.) The woman is a top member of the cadet Brigade. A formation of her company is just now waiting for her outside the building. "Hey, Mom, it's time," calls one of the male cadets. This time it's an affectionate nickname, a mark of respect for her record, which brought her a cadet promotion. Like many of the women at West Point, she admits that she likes to cook and sew. (She's receiving a sewing machine for graduation.) She buckles on a curved saber, wraps a purple sash around her waist.

During the inspection a male cadet giggles, and jiggles his eyebrows up and down in amusement as she walks by. Because he's a classmate she says nothing. If he were a plebe she could say: "Mister, do you know the proper position of attention?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, you better get there!"

Three women sit at a makeshift table in the middle of a temporary summer encampment. The field is studded with hundreds of pup tents. A senior talks about cadet life and the coming graduation. Another woman walks casually by in shorts and T shirt, her platinum hair neatly blown in a Dorothy Hamill haircut. The reporter is startled by her own instinctive response: How could this gorgeous girl be headed for an Army career? The thought is broken by an angry shout. Off to the side, male cadets are snidely calling to the women to come to formation. "Buzz off," comes the hot answer. "People say we can run, we're big, and we're ugly, and it's just not true. They think we're either butches or amazons, looking for a man, superbright or superdumb. Actually, we're very serious," she concludes, squinching down her eyebrows and miming a grim expression.

They have some cause for seriousness.

Within their first few months as plebes, West Point was engulfed in the worst cheating scandal in its 178-year history. As first-year students, the women were ineligible for the upperclass Electrical Engineering 304 course that produced the shared exam answers and the scandal. But last year their presence caused a lesser scandal--that one involving dating cadets and outlawed hazing practices--that put the Academy on the front pages of the newspapers again. To an outsider the female attrition rate in the Class of '80, a shade under 50%, seems terribly high. But the Academy points out that it is one of the only institutions of higher learning in which 80% of every student's courses are required. In fact, the normal attrition rate for all-male classes, from failure, discipline and resignations, has hovered just under 40% since 1972.

Women cadets did not do as well at military science (tactics) and engineering as the men, but did somewhat better in the humanities and social sciences. At graduation, there will be only one wom an (Rhodes Scholar-elect Andrea Hollen) in the top 5% of the class, along with 43 men. Yet in some ways female members of the Class of '80 have entirely won the hearts and minds of some male cadets--and vice versa. Soon after graduation 30 of the 62 graduating women will marry cadets or recent West Pointers. The Cadet Chapel is scheduled for weddings, some complete with arched swords and "Army blues" (formal dress uniforms), nearly every hour on the hour for 2 1/2 days.

Class of '80 women have applied for combat-role assignments and been turned down. They are permitted "combat related" assignments, including air defense and artillery. Like all West Point graduates, they are permitted to express a personal choice but will serve wherever the luck of the draw, the needs of the nation, or the will of the Army puts them. This year for the first time, however, the Department of the Army is trying to work out "joint domicile" assignments for newly married West Pointers, which means that many women and their husbands will wind up serving with U.S. forces stationed in Germany, and in stateside posts.

"Do you know the difference between a cadet and trash?" a cadet says to the reporter as she sits down at a large kitchen table. "Trash gets taken out twice a week." Jackets off, white nonregulation T shirts and bright suspenders prominently displayed, 15 to 20 male cadets lounge in a colonel's big staff house. Across the way in Eisenhower Hall the autumn cadet hop is about to get under way. Spirits are very dampened by the afternoon's 55-0 football game, the latest in a string of defeats for the once proud Army team. Why are these cadets not sharing the misery at the dance? "What's the use?" says one, dejected. "There are about 700 men for every girl who will be there alone." The reporter asks, "Why were there no women cadets at that party?" A cadet volunteers, "Oh, ma'am, one comes around once in a while, but she's not here today."

The male cadet seems deadly serious as he pulls the reporter aside for a private conversation: "The guys in my class are dreading graduation." He speaks earnestly of the sense of loss brought about by the arrival of the women. "We've written to ask President Carter, who's been invited to our graduation, not to play up the woman issue," he continues. "After all, it's our graduation too."

--Barbara Dolan

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