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First women at Air Force Academy honored

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — History shows that the first women to enter the Air Force Academy arrived in the summer of 1976.

And history is wrong.

Months earlier, in a little-known chapter of Air Force lore, a dozen pioneering women, already officers, endured the hardships the first female cadets would soon face and kicked open the doors for women at the service academy.

“It laid the groundwork for what women now do as a routine part of our Air Force mission,” said Lt. Gen. Terry Gabreski, one of the dozen second lieutenants recruited as “air training officers.”

More than half of these women were back at the academy Friday for a ceremony to dedicate a monument in their honor.

The dozen women were the academy’s guinea pigs, allowing the school to experiment in how it would deal with the 157 women in the incoming freshman class who had been granted acceptance following an executive order by President Gerald Ford that opened up the nation’s military academies to women.

They were also the first to face the ingrained sexism at the Air Force Academy.

“We took a lot of heat,” said Gabreski, who now serves as vice commander of Air Force Material Command.

The primary job of the air training officers was to serve as mentors for the first female cadets, helping them learn military skills and deal with the intense academic load placed on cadets. Academy leaders wanted them to fill the role normally played by upperclassmen for male cadets, who are part drill instructors and part father figures for the newcomers.

Retired Gen. James McCarthy, who was charged with overseeing the integration of women at the academy, said questions abounded among the services leaders about how things would work.

At the top of the list is how “a small number of women would fit into a masculine situation and how those women would retain their femininity,” McCarthy said at the ceremony.

Smaller questions, some almost comical, included how the uniform supply clerks would deal with issuing women’s undergarments. Daily sexism grated on the women.

“You didn’t want to come to work every day where people hated you, but we did anyway,” said Shirley Eadline, who was one of the dozen.

Eadline said she learned to see it in a different light.

“It wasn’t about us,” she said. “It wasn’t about them.

“It was about the Air Force.”

The air training officers met the Air Force Academy’s first class of 157 women when they arrived in 1976.

“These women gave us the opportunity to get it straight,” said retired Brig. Gen. Allison Hickey, who was one of that first group of female cadets. “They had a vested interest in our success.”

Four years at the academy took a heavy toll on the first class of women. Sixty of the pioneers — 38 percent of the women who entered — left before graduation.

But Hickey said the number of dropouts would have been higher without the air training officers.

“You took rather fragile young women and you made us as strong as metal,” Hickey told the air training officers at the ceremony.

Gabreski said the air training officers gained much from the experience, too.

“We learned how to lead change in an entrenched culture.”