50 Stories for 50 Years of Women at USNA — Post 20
I grew up at the Naval Academy.
Not as a midshipman. As a kid. My father was in the Navy, and on Sunday afternoons, the obstacle course at Hospital Point was a playground. The rope wall. The big wooden structures. My friends and I would swing, hang, and run through them for the pure fun of it.
I should have known better than to think that would translate.
Running an obstacle course for time, with your classmates watching, under a Plebe Summer sun, is not play. It is something else entirely.
The physical training requirements during Plebe Summer were serious and consistent. We worked in the early morning hours. PT testing was regular. The obstacles were real. And the question of what those standards should look like for women, whether they should match the men’s exactly, adjust for physiology, or land somewhere in between, was very much unsettled when we arrived.
Early studies of our pioneer co-ed classes later showed that women’s physical performance exceeded expectations. They would also show we were significantly more prone to stress-related injuries early on, a finding that pushed the Academy toward gradual conditioning rather than identical, abrupt workloads from day one. One of the conclusions from that research stopped me in my tracks when I read it years later: that women’s performance at the time was often a result of society’s conditioning rather than any substantial physiological difference between the sexes. Upbringing was the reason. What girls had been told they could and couldn’t do with their bodies before they ever arrived at Annapolis. The Department of Physical Education required the same number of PT hours for men and women, but allowed adjusted standards on the Physical Readiness Test. Whether those adjustments reflected actual physical limits or simply the limits we’d been handed, that question lingered.
Nobody explained any of that to us at the time. We just ran.
And then there was the wall.
Eight feet. You jumped, caught the top, hauled yourself over, and dropped to the other side. For many people, it was hard. For someone standing 5’3″ with arms that had to reach that ledge before anything else could happen, it was the super obstacle.
The Academy had a solution. Right next to the regulation wall, they installed a shorter one for women.
It got called the pink wall. Occasionally, in the stealth of night, by persons unknown, it actually got painted pink. Someone always found it. It was always repainted — not out of offense taken, but because regulations are regulations. That, too, felt like its own kind of statement.
Some of the men were not happy about it. Specifically, the men who would have been grateful for a few fewer inches of wall to clear. That part I understood.
I was not ashamed to use it. I want to say that plainly. I had competitive swimming behind me. I had upper-body strength that many of my female classmates envied. I still used the shorter wall. At 5’3″, I was a short midshipman, and that eight-foot ledge was not designed with my reach in mind.
But here is what the pink wall communicated, whether it meant to or not:
You are here. And you are different. And we will mark that difference in the wood and, occasionally, in paint, so no one forgets.
It was a signal. Every morning you ran past it, you received the signal.
Whether it protected us or diminished us probably depended on the day. Some days it felt like accommodations, someone acknowledging that a 5’3″ woman and a 6’2″ man are not the same body, and designing accordingly. The research would eventually back that up. Some days it felt like a fence.
We ran past it either way.
The standards have changed considerably since then. The adjustments that remain are calibrated differently than ours were, more carefully, with more data behind them. The question of what equal means when bodies are not identical is one the Navy has been working on for fifty years and is still working on.
What I remember most isn’t the wall itself. It’s the running past it. Every morning. The choice you made or didn’t make, because sometimes there was no time for choosing, about what it meant. You just kept running.
This is post 20 in a series of 50 stories marking 50 years of women at the United States Naval Academy. These are my stories from the class of 1981.