WEST POINT, N.Y. -- Last week, 750 miles south of here in Charleston, S.C., bumper stickers proclaimed "Shave Shannon's Head" and T-shirts bore the legend "1,952 Bulldogs and 1 Bitch" - - references to Shannon Faulkner's ongoing battle for inclusion in the Citadel's corps of cadets. But her tribulations could hardly have been more irrelevant to Rebecca Bunch, Ann Bonney and Alice Crawford, three young members of the U.S. Military Academy's Class of '98. With their own hair cut to regulation length -- just above their collars -- they were totally immersed in "Beast Barracks," seven weeks of basic training required of every new West Point cadet. All summer, they had cleaned rifles and spit-shined boots. Now they and 1,057 classmates were about to march 13 miles from camp back to their campus above the Hudson.
The Citadel made it plain that it doesn't want Faulkner or any of her gender. Neither did West Point and the other national service academies when Congress forced them to accept women in 1976. West Point's first women -- 119 started and 62 graduated -- endured abuse and harassment for breaking the academy's 174-year- old male-only tradition. "Every day that I was there I was reminded in some way that I didn't belong," recalls Danna Maller, West Point '80. The first women, she says, usually did not report the hazing incidents (such as men sneaking into women's rooms to frighten them) or the verbal abuse (insults like "bitch" and "whore") because they didn't want to rock the boat. "We naively thought that if we did a good job, the opposition would go away. Over the next four years, it did diminish, but it remained a prevalent issue in our day-to-day lives."
Equals. The 135 women of West Point's newest class face a far friendlier four years. The academy has adjusted physical requirements to offset the physiological differences between men and women. For example, women must run as far as men but not as fast. In all other respects, male and female cadets must and do perform equally. "It warms my heart," says Maller, "that the women there today are more comfortable being women than we were." Women still hear the occasional insult. "Most definitely some men have a problem" with women, says a female member of the senior class, "but there's less than there's ever been." In fact, many upperclassmen are baffled at the Citadel's resistance to Shannon Faulkner. "If you look at the way we do things here -- women participate in the same sports and classes; their latrines and rooms are right next to ours -- you see things don't have to be that way," says John Brennan, a 21-year-old battalion commander from Mobile, Ala. "Shannon Faulkner should have come here."
But she didn't. And the commotion she touched off at the Citadel continues to stir conversation among one significant West Point group -- the faculty. "We discuss Shannon Faulkner a lot," reports Lt. Gen. Howard Graves, the superintendent of West Point, who stresses a "zero tolerance for abuse" policy. "A lot of our discussion about Shannon Faulkner is to ask ourselves how far we've come since '76." His answer: "We've come a long way."
