Contemporary Southern Identity: Community through Controversy

1 Uniforms, Walls, and Doors: Social Mystery and Gender Integration at the Virginia Military Institute

18 1 Uniforms, Walls, and Doors: Social Mystery and Gender Integration at the Virginia Military Institute If ever a Southern institution embodied the region’s fixation with order, it is the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). The institute’s highly regimented system of discipline, based on a strict system of classes and rules, has since its inception in 1839 served to instill a sense of order in its cadets. VMI’s particular set of traditions, rituals, and rules—its system of social mystery—has served both to identify those within VMI and to set apart or divide VMI from those outside it. Within VMI, cadets wear the same uniform worn by generations of cadets before them; they go through the same harsh “Rat Line” of discipline during their first year; they participate in the same time-honored traditions, such as the New Market Ceremony each May; and they swear to uphold the same gentleman ’s code that prohibits lying, cheating, and stealing. And while a strict class system on one level divides VMI cadets according to year entered, it also identifies cadets with one another, as those in their first year know that the upperclassmen providing discipline to the Rat Line at one time were the Rats being disciplined . As a result, all cadets identify with one another as Brother Rats. But just as VMI’s system of social mystery identifies those within it with one another, it also divides them from all those who remain outside of the system. Until 1968, VMI did not admit African Americans. In 1989, women still remained outside of VMI’s system of social mystery, not permitted even to apply for admission. After a long series of court cases begun that year, the question of whether women could be admitted to VMI reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. The debate that ensued, both in the Court itself and in the court of public opinion, revolved around whether VMI should remain divided from half of its state’s population—women—by not affording them the opportunity to pursue an education there. That VMI still remained closed to women near the end of the twentieth century reflected its identity as a Southern institution. Southern conservative Richard Weaver argues that the order of division between the sexes should be maintained: Gender Integration at the Virginia Military Institute 19 Distinctions of many kinds will have to be restored, and I would mention especially one whose loss has added immeasurably to the malaise of our civilization—the fruitful distinction between the sexes, with the recognition of respective spheres of influence. The re-establishment of woman as the cohesive force of the family, the end of the era of “long-haired men and shorthaired women,” should bring a renewal of well-being to the whole of society. On this point Southerners of the old school were adamant, and even today, with our power of discrimination at its lowest point in history, there arises a feeling that the roles of the sexes must again be made explicit.1 If women entered VMI as well as its South Carolina sister school, the Citadel (also the subject of a gender integration debate in the mid-1990s), Weaver and his ideological progeny foresaw the further deterioration of the division of the sexes into distinct “spheres of influence.” If women as well as men could be VMI cadets—short hair and all—the South’s traditional order of division would be imperiled. But from the perspective of those lobbying for women’s admission to these schools, women’s entrance would further the ascendance of identification as the ruling order in the South and the rest of the nation. The central issue in this case was whether it was better to keep people divided by limiting the pool of those eligible for admission into VMI or to open the possibility of a wider group of people who could identify with one another within VMI. Both sides valued VMI’s distinctive system of social mystery and the benefits to be had by entering it. But they found themselves divided over the question of whether that system of social mystery could continue to exist and remain valuable if women were allowed to put on the VMI uniform, enter its barracks, and attempt to survive the rigors of the Rat Line. Supporters of VMI’s all-male tradition believed that ending the single-sex educational opportunity the school offered would result eventually in the end of single-sex...