VMI’s male cadets were berating her. The 1997 Hell Week photo went viral.

The photo of Megan Smith, one of Virginia Military Institute’s first female freshmen, captured the school’s struggle to accept women into its ranks 25 years ago

By Ian Shapira
August 18, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT



The image of freshman Megan Smith being shouted at by male cadets came to symbolize VMI's struggle to integrate women into its ranks. (Nancy Andrews/The Washington Post)

Megan Smith was lost. ... It was Aug. 20, 1997, a landmark week at the Virginia Military Institute. After a fierce battle that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college had finally admitted women. ... Smith was one of them. Inside the school’s Gothic Revival barracks, the 17-year-old from Colorado was trying to survive Hell Week and VMI’s “rat line” — the intense boot camp-style training for freshmen, known on the Lexington campus as “rats.”

But when Smith hustled the wrong way along an open porch overlooking the barracks courtyard, she was suddenly surrounded. Four beefy male upperclassmen in gray tunic-style uniforms and crisp white pants got in her face. The 5-foot-4, 120-pound freshman — one of 30 women at a school that had admitted only men for nearly 158 years — looked straight ahead as the cadets berated her. One man’s mouth was fully open in a scream. A second upperclassman was so irate that a thick furrow puffed up over his eyebrows. A third man’s vein bulged from his ear to the top of his buzz-cut. ... Why, they demanded, are you not with members of your company, F-Troop? What are you doing with Golf, an all-male company? ... The exchange lasted maybe a minute. But Nancy Andrews, then a Washington Post staff photographer, caught the moment in an image seen around the world that symbolized VMI’s struggle to accept women into its ranks.

Twenty-five years later, the woman in the photo — who now goes by her married name, Megan Portavoce — thinks many people misinterpret what was happening to her. ... “When people look at that photo, they say I looked liked a plucked chicken and that I was scared. But I didn’t feel scared,” said Portavoce, 42, a European patent attorney who lives in southern France, near the city of Marseille. “I think the photo is often taken out of context. It’s used as proof of harassment towards women. But it was equal opportunity harassment that day.”

The male freshmen were being verbally abused, too, she said. “Everyone gets yelled at. They just find something to needle you with, to get under your skin. It’s part of the system of testing everyone.” ... But she acknowledged that the test for women didn’t end after Hell Week or their time as freshman rats. She and her female classmates encountered resistance and misogyny all four years on campus.

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Megan Smith stands with a group of male cadets during graduation rehearsal in 2001. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)

Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Video editing by Amber Ferguson. Design by J.C. Reed.

By Ian Shapira
Ian Shapira is a features writer on the local enterprise team. Twitter https://twitter.com/ianshapira