Women's integration into the military academies afforded an almost unique opportunity to study social change. It was a tidy, well-defined natural experiment. The Air Force Academy was willing to permit the kind of external scrutiny that afforded an objective account of the facts of the first year of integration. For sixteen months the academy allowed the author to interview freely and repeatedly all persons concerned with planning and implementing women's admission. Working as a historian (with individuals and documents rather than with questionnaires), Stiehm tells the report of this first year as fully and as accurately as possible.
Judith Hicks Stiehmis Professor of Political Science at Florida International University where she served as Provost and Academic Vice President for four years. Her specialties include political theory, social change, the status of women, and civil-military relations. She has taught at San Francisco State, the University of Wisconsin, UCLA, and the University of Southern California where she served as Vice Provost. She has been a Visiting Professor at the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute and at the Strategic Studies Institute at Carlisle Barracks. In 2010-11 she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. She earned a BA in East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, an MA at Temple University in American History, and a PhD in Political Theory from Columbia University.
Her books includeNonviolent Power: Active and Passive Resistance(Heath, 1972),Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated Change at the U.S. Air Force Academy(California, 1981),Arms and the Enlisted Woman(Temple, 1989),It's Our Military Too!: Women and the US Military(Temple, 1996),U.S. Army War College: Military Education in a Democracy(Temple, 2002), andChampions for Peace: Women Winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace(Boulder: Rowman and Littlfield, 2006).