Long Haul to Acceptance

To Disher, this was another sign of changed times. "You have to talk about the problem to fix it," she said.

Meagan Varley was 10 when she decided to become a fighter pilot. She had seen the movie "Top Gun" and set her heart on flying. Her father, a teacher, suggested the Naval Academy, and in 1998 she found herself on the Annapolis campus as part of a class that was 16 percent female.

"You're aware that the things you do are going to be watched more closely and that you could be stereotyped more easily," she said. But as time went on, she found that her sex "kind of faded into the background."

Flight school followed graduation, and now, four years later, she is a fighter pilot, having flown F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18F Super Hornets, opportunities not open to the first female graduates. "They really broke the way for the rest of us," she said.

In the early years, women had fewer job choices because, under law, they could not serve on combatant ships or aircraft. Those who did not want women at the academy often complained that they were taking men's slots but could not do men's jobs.

That complaint grew louder in 1979, when Washingtonian magazine published an article, "Women Can't Fight," by James Webb, a much-heralded academy graduate and Marine war hero who is now the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia. He wrote then that the presence of women poisoned the academy's mission and that the academy's massive dormitory was "a horny woman's dream."

"The men went crazy; they loved it," recalled Disher, who wrote a book, "First Class," about women's experiences.

Webb has said recently that the article was published a long time ago and that as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration he tripled the number of jobs that were open to women and ordered a crackdown on sexual harassment.

An array of jobs opened to women in the early 1990s, and after that, said Georgia Sadler, a retired Navy captain and the academy's first female faculty member, women "didn't feel so much like second-class citizens."

As more women enter the academy -- 273 this year, up from 81 in 1976 -- they have come closer to achieving a "critical mass" that ceases to be seen as a minority, said Mady Wechsler Segal of the Center for Research on Military Organizations at the University of Maryland. She put the tipping point at 25 to 35 percent.

Meghan O'Mara, Class of 2002, was never sexually harassed, but she said she "certainly had people who said inappropriate things" to her.

O'Mara, 26 and honorably discharged from the Navy, said more openness is needed, recalling the time one of her friends reported a rape. Academy officials, she said, "were definitely trying to make her keep quiet about it. . . . I don't think the environment makes a lot of women feel they can come forward and there will be a fair response."