The screaming wouldn’t stop. The physical rigor grew worse. Products of The Citadel are used to both, but this was bad. Dark thunderclouds shook the sky. Back strain set in. The screaming continued.
But Nancy Mace is not one to give up. She entered the military college of South Carolina with the world watching and plenty of cadets determined to run her off. Her father, a Citadel man who would return as its commandant, tried to talk her out of the school where morning starts in the dark and ends after hours of punishing mental and physical stress.
Surely she can deal with a squalling baby.
“It’s tougher than knob year,” she laughed, comparing The Citadel’s notoriously grueling first year with the challenge of quieting the teething and colicky Ellison, 3 months.
With fall semester under way, more than 120 women are down in Charleston following in Mace’s historic bootprints. Ten years ago, she became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel. A new scholarship fund for military school-bound women has just been founded in honor of Mace, who graduated in three years, and 2000 Citadel graduate Petra Lovetinska.
“She has written her name in lights in the history of The Citadel,” author and 1967 graduate Pat Conroy said of Mace, who stopped by his recent talk at the Carter Center. “I’m as proud of her as I can possibly be.”
A Charleston native, Mace now lives in metro Atlanta. The mother of two (son Miles is 2) works part-time designing Web sites and advising clients in crisis communications.
“The Citadel really prepared me for that one,” she said.
She wrote a memoir in 2001 , but generally keeps quiet about her role in the school's timeline. That's partly a security concern. Threats started pouring in the summer before she started, there was a bomb scare at her graduation, and angry e-mails or phone calls have cropped up after public appearances. But Mace's reticence is mostly about modesty. Her goal was to join the Long Gray Line, not stand apart from it.
In a city of flashy sports, business and music figures, media-savvy chefs and flamboyant reality television stars, she is rare, indeed. Her name will be written in history books, but she does not trade on that status.
“Sometimes people will stop me and say, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ ” said Mace, who calmed Ellison by swaddling her in cloth and propping her on one shoulder like a rifle. “I say, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”
Not seeking the spotlight
Mace, 31, found high school nearly as rough as The Citadel. Attention deficit disorder made concentrating difficult. Cruel gossip finally led her to leave. She earned her diploma through a community college, but didn’t have much of a plan. She was working as a secretary as Shannon Faulkner’s legal battle to enter The Citadel dominated news coverage. Faulkner, the school’s first woman, resigned after a week due to physical and mental stress.
“She opened the gate,” Mace said. As soon as The Citadel announced it would accept women, she applied.
“I thought The Citadel would be a good place for a kid like me,” she said. “I didn’t really think about the history. I was looking to go in quietly, do my thing. I wasn’t there for the fame and fortune or the media circus.”
But word soon got out. Answering the phone at work one day, a caller asked if she was the Nancy Mace. Then vicious hate mail started arriving. Cameras followed her from her parents’ driveway to campus on the day she reported, and the media hovered throughout her time there.
“It was chaotic,” she said.
And although the school had dropped its fight in court, many cadets vowed to keep theirs up on the battalions’ checkered floors.
“I was one of the many who was very excited and proud to get rid of those women,” said Scott Wizeman, a junior when Mace arrived. “I didn’t want her to do anything right. She was the only one of those knobs that called me ‘Sir.’ That really bugged me.”
Not only did she exhibit proper discipline, but as a lifelong athlete Mace excelled at the physical challenge.
“She passed the first [physical training] test that we gave — she passed the male standard,” Wizeman said. “That first week you’re physically, mentally exhausted. Nobody does well. But she passed. She just kept succeeding. God certainly worked on my heart and convinced me she deserved the shot that all the rest of those knobs did.”
Now a banker in Dallas, he attended a seminary after The Citadel and was a minister for a few years. Before his career change, he married Mace and her husband, Curtis Jackson.
In Atlanta, Mace is active with the Citadel alumni club and has served as its president. Current president Jack Liles graduated in 1985, and figured then that women would attend one day.
“It’s a state-supported college that discriminates against half the state? You didn’t have to be a lawyer to realize this was not going to stand up in court,” he said. “The Citadel is a conservative group of folks. You can search in the woods and find the old-school guys who are still upset about it.”
You can search the Web, too. The "Why We're Mad" page on the Citadel Men Foundation's Web site details a number of grievances, first among them the decision to allow women.
“I thought it was terrible,” said chairman Jon Rawl, a 1993 graduate, founder of Y’all Magazine and host of Citadel GrayLine, a weekly radio show that airs on 13 stations in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. “Citadel guys have accepted it. I don’t think they like it.”
Atlanta alumni club member Joel Thompson had a simple take on things. The Citadel’s time to admit women had come. “She’s a great example for many to follow,” he said of Mace.
Holly Maslowski, a Cincinnati native now living in Miami, is one who did. After graduating last year she founded the Mace-Lovetinska scholarship to help other young women do the same.
“Nancy Mace is a bit of a legend at The Citadel,” she said.
A Living Legacy
Conroy, who packed the Carter Center during his visit, supported Faulkner's battle to enter The Citadel and cheered Mace's success. During her time there, he was all but banned from campus, having been on the outs with his alma mater for decades after writing "The Lords of Discipline ," a fictionalized memoir based largely on The Citadel.
“If I had helped her, she probably would have been run out that night,” he said. Wrapping an arm around Mace he chuckled, “Can you believe the day has come when we can pose together without getting in trouble?”
His novel, with its harrowing passages about a nefarious secret society that tortures knobs to run them out, was the only reference Mace had before reporting to The Citadel. She’d heard her father’s stories growing up, but retired Army Brig. Gen. J. Emory Mace wouldn’t offer any tips after she enrolled.
“The wife and I were not pro females going there,” said Mace, a 1963 Citadel graduate, who terrorized knobs by tossing alligators in their rooms and would later fish his school ring out of a rice paddy rather than leave it in Vietnam. It took his daughter a week to work up the courage to tell him she had signed up. He told her to plan on walking home if she dropped out.
The second semester of Mace’s knob year, her father returned to The Citadel as commandant.
“I had a very intentional effort not to show her any favoritism,” he said. “I had an open-door policy. Any cadet could come see me about any problem, but she had to make an appointment.”
The tough guy melted when Mace graduated. He teared up as he handed her the diploma.
“She has set the standard for all females that follow her, in academics, discipline and leadership,” he said.
Today, The Citadel has graduated more than 200 women.
“Nancy is a role model for every female cadet who comes here,” said Samuel Hines Jr., dean and provost of the college at The Citadel. “You’re talking about someone who was enormously successful academically but also who thrived in the corps of cadets. We are very excited to be able to point to Nancy as an example of what opening up The Citadel to women can produce.”
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