Citadel’s First Female Officer Won’t Be Re-Upping

The Citadel’s first female officer and coach is resigning next month to pursue a medical career.

Assistant Commandant Bonnie Jo Houchen was hired in 1997 to help assimilate women into the corps of cadets, but she said she questions whether the school’s leadership is moving forward quickly enough in that effort.

It’s been five years since Shannon Faulkner became the school’s first female cadet.

“My energy and enthusiasm have waned, and you need that energy to come at the monster every day,” Houchen said. However, she said she understands how money and resources have hindered the state-supported military school.

The Citadel’s greatest challenge still remains changing attitudes at the formerly all-male school, rather than driving them underground, she said.

“There will be things going on that you won’t be able to see or hear,” she said. “It’s going to be [a challenge] finding a way to keep a finger on that pulse.”

Houchen, who counseled the female cadets at the school, understood their challenge well; in 1976, she was in the first coed class at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

She will be replaced by another female officer, Hedy Pinkerton, an Air Force colonel who joined the service in 1971 and has been an admissions director at the Air Force Academy for the past two years.

Houchen was “tremendous in our initial efforts to assimilate women into the corps and with Pinkerton, we won’t miss a beat,” said Emory Mace, the school’s Commandant of Cadets.

In the five years since Faulkner’s lawsuit, two female cadets--Nancy Mace and Petra Lovetinska--have graduated from the Citadel, and 100 women are expected among the corps this fall.

“Things are tremendously better than my first year here,” Houchen said. “Again, though, it will take a long time for old attitudes and behaviors to die.”

The Citadel, which dropped its all-male admissions policy in 1996, has women’s teams in volleyball and track and field, and plans others. It has a temporary waiver of gender-equity requirements with the Southern Conference and the NCAA.