It’s part of the Annapolis civic rhythm: More than a thousand teenagers from every corner of the country descending on the burg for a bittersweet annual affair known as Induction Day. This arrival of the newest class at the U. S. Naval Academy is a whirlwind, as kids have their locks shorn and trade colorful T-shirts and baseball caps for clean “white works” sailor uniforms and “Dixie cup” hats. Bands play, oaths are taken, and erstwhile civilian high schoolers turn into entry-level midshipmen called plebes.

Parents are on hand for most of the spectacle, swelling with pride. And rightly so, given that the Naval Academy’s acceptance rate is just north of 7 percent. But there’s apprehension in the air, too. Worry over what lies ahead. In the short term, the concern is Plebe Summer—the seven-week, boot-camp-esque baptism-of-fire into the world of naval discipline and a plebe’s bottom-rung place in the hierarchy. Sir, yes, sir! Ma’am, yes, ma’am!

Sharon Disher knows this all too well, and not just as an Annapolitan who’s gotten caught in the annual traffic jam of out-of-state plates. Forty years ago, her parents delivered her to “the Yard” (as the academy’s campus is called) as part of the Class of 1980—the first class to include women since the school’s founding in 1845.

On a broiling hot July day back in that bicentennial summer, her arm stinging from inoculations and her eyes welling with tears, Disher threw her Air Force-officer father her first salute. She hugged and kissed the whole clan who’d come out to see her off and joined a swelling stream of white works marching down to dinner at Bancroft Hall, the world’s largest dormitory, which dominates the Yard like a run-aground, beaux-arts battleship. Its looming metal door shut behind her.

“I was like, hang it up? Oh really? Just watch me,” recalls Sharon Disher.



For Disher, it was her first Navy chow—and her first taste of what life would be like over the next four years. “When I asked to be excused from the table, I did it the wrong way,” she says. “An upperclassman stood up, put his knuckles on the table and stared at me, saying, ‘I don’t like women at my school. I don’t want women at my school. It will be my mission to make sure you’re gone before I graduate. Is that clear?’

“I’m like, oh my gosh, welcome aboard.”

Ultimately, Disher persevered and became one of the first 55 women to graduate from the Naval Academy. And the country has since watched as many of the women from those early coed classes launched brilliant naval careers—becoming admirals, astronauts, and aircraft-carrier fighter pilots. Today, the “armored ceiling” appears broken. But it’s still too soon to say all is right between the sexes. Accusations of disturbing episodes at the academy have filled headlines these last few years. Sexual harassment and assault plague the military schools as they do civilian universities. Nonetheless, that plucky band of brave women who made history four decades ago certainly helped steer the ship in the right direction.

On this, the 40th anniversary of women being accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, the incoming class includes the largest number of female plebes ever enrolled. The 2020 class starts this fall with 331 women, including 19 daughters of academy alumni.

But, no, it wasn’t going to be smooth sailing for the ladies who had burst into this 131-year-old boys’ club. “Everything we did was wrong because we were girls,” Disher says of the days—the years—that followed her initial Navy meal. “Everything. We were fat. We were ugly. We didn’t belong there.”

Not every male classmate shared this view, but thanks to the power of peer pressure, such gender animosity was the norm. “The females had an incredibly tough time—much harder than I did,” says Severna Park resident Tim Kobosko, also a member of the Class of 1980. “I don’t think they got treated fairly. There was a lot of groupthink going on and it was unfortunate.”

Even the ladies’ room wasn’t safe. When the academic year began after Plebe Summer, Disher was assigned a new dorm room with a new women’s lavatory. A surprise, however, awaited the first time nature called and she closed the stall door behind her. “Somebody had taken a pencil and written on the back of the door: ‘Hang it up, bitch!’” Disher recalls.

But this toilet-stall graffiti energized more than it angered. “We never erased it,” Disher continues. “We never really talked about it, but we left it there on purpose. I was like, hang it up? Oh really? Just watch me.”

It was no coincidence that all this was going down in the 1970s. The U.S. Education Amendments of 1972 included Title IX, which ended sexual discrimination at any education program receiving federal aid. The service academies, including West Point and the Air Force Academy, were ripe plums for women seeking equality. In exchange for at least five years of military service as officers, the academies provide a free, first-rate education—and even small stipends.

Some big guns were opposed from the get-go, however. The giant general of the Vietnam War, William Westmoreland, said accepting women at the academies was “silly,” while George C. Scott, the actor who portrayed Patton, the giant general of Word War II, called the concept “tragic.” It’s perhaps fitting that the Naval Academy doors opened to women in 1976 when academy grad Jimmy Carter was elected to the White House. To be fair, however, it was President Gerald Ford, himself a former Navy man, who’d signed the enabling legislation a year earlier.

Barbara Morris Ives, raised in Langhorne, Pa., and now living in St. Mary’s County, was unaware that the Naval Academy was accepting applications from young women until a high school guidance counselor mentioned it to her. She had several uncles in the Navy and initially planned to go to another college through the Navy ROTC program, but was lured to Annapolis by the promise of a more direct route to becoming a Naval officer. She felt male animosity right away, and the intent of many upperclassmen to run the women out.

“Some guys swore the only reason we were there was to get a ‘Mrs. Degree,’” Ives says. “Like we’d put up with so much junk just to get married.”