| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Women in the Barracks: The VMI Case and Equal Rights. By Philippa Strum. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. x, 417 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1164-9.)

Philippa Strum's study is a richly detailed and contextualized chronicle of the struggle to admit women to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) during the 1990s. Strum's book is a sweeping legal history that reminds readers of the importance of the federal judiciary as arbiters and mediators of the meanings of the U.S. Constitution, especially during eras of cultural change. Strum exhaustively catalogs the trajectory of the VMI case from its initiation by the Justice Department in 1989, through its first appearance in the Federal District Court in Roanoke in 1991 and its appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court in 1992, and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court's order to VMI to admit women in 1996. Strum's study also offers a compelling example of the influence of the modern feminist movement on that legal history. Focusing on women lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project (WRP) and using Ruth Bader Ginsburg's career as a road map, Strum contends that those litigators for social change have been critical to the federal courts' willingness increasingly to heighten the scrutiny of gender as a category of discrimination and that the extent of their influence was exemplified by the VMI cases.

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