50 Stories for 50 Years of Women at USNA — Post 23 There is a particular feeling that comes before impending chaos in Bancroft Hall. Not a sound, exactly. More like a change in frequency. A rumble, then something electric in the air. If Bancroft were a forest, you would see it in the animals first – the way they stop, ears up, and begin fleeing before the fire is seen. Before the smoke. Like…
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She Served
Published May 23, 2026
50 Posts for 50 Years · Post 21 · Memorial Day 2026 On our induction day in the summer of 1977, the speaker on the podium delivered the standard warning to the assembled plebes: “Look to your left.“ Look to your right. One of you will not be here at your commissioning. For the roughly 90 women who entered that day, scattered among a class of 1,000, the math proved almost exactly right. About a third…
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Published April 20, 2026
One Woman’s Lived History from the Second Wave 50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 16 I’m interrupting the distant past for a glimpse of the more immediate past, the 50th Anniversary of Service Women at the Academies, and specifically the USNA Women’s celebration in Annapolis. More than 800 women and men, spanning five decades, gathered to mark this milestone. What unfolded over four days was the result of more than a year of effort,…
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Published March 9, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 10 If you read my last post, you might remember that my regular glasses were resting somewhere at the bottom of Santee Basin on the Severn River. That left me with one option: the prescription sunglasses my mother had dropped off so I could see. Now, wearing sunglasses in uniform may not sound like a big deal. But at the Naval Academy in 1977, it absolutely was. I…
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Published March 2, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 09 There are times in your life when you don’t want any attention. You want to keep your head down, your nose clean, and your name out of the public eye. Plebe Summer at the United States Naval Academy was one of those times. Attention meant correction. Correction meant public scrutiny. Public scrutiny meant some calibrated blend of humiliation and demerits. The safest strategy was invisibility. If I…
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Published February 23, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 08 One woman’s lived history in the second wave at the Naval Academy One of the strangest reflections for me now, as a mother and after decades of working with teens and college students, is remembering that, in those early years at the Naval Academy, plebe doors had to remain open at all times.All times.Even at night.Some of my women classmates remember being issued nightgowns. I only remember…
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