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Angela Alsobrooks Wins Maryland Senate Seat 

American women kicked off 2024 with two milestones that flipped the script on the way society keeps judging, classifying and relating to us.

The first happened in Annapolis, Md., where Vice Adm. Yvette Davids — a mother of twin boys with an Audrey Hepburn vibe — became the first woman to lead the 178-year-old U.S. Naval Academy.

Then, Air Force 2nd Lt. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2024/01/15/madison-marsh-2024-miss-america-winner/" target=_blank>Madison Marsh</a> became the newest Miss America, the first active-duty military officer to win the pageant.

Photo by Houston McCullough/Miss America

Beauty can have brains and brawn; brains and brawn can be beautiful.

I wish we didn’t have to be so chuffed by these events, but here we are, smiling.

It took the Miss America pageant 97 years to ditch the swimsuit competition, which happened in 2018, when former Miss America Gretchen Carlson took lead of the board.

“We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance,” Carlson said, according to a book written by my colleague Amy Argetsinger, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/There-She-Was-History-America/dp/1982123397/ref=sr_1_1?crid=YGZ98R4RS52E&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YsgeMTvB5hQUp65HwDHnOsM_jd6RU_VEx8c-t8mIBoFHh3AhV_-qwnnLLJwhEq2hJpcZ5hPhY_04C0NXJH-cF3DEr8MxixKwVS3FIWCUxxF2iv8RmOZOBWMVwwjbOkNn7JHznXXMK0cij57mXOFdr0LHWugjzOYs7zhoMdw6Uz_zBcLuM2xk2WKQ7mC_iCwjyszltax9gjsTqCrcdqmn-eX87lSU-3Kjytx19sgoem4.e4Q4rNVPdh9Wra8Xm06u-1zGbS3S_9Yh4E7JKHm9Yks&dib_tag=se&keywords=There+She+Was%3A+The+Secret+History+of+Miss+America+Pageant&qid=1705354939&sprefix=there+she+was+the+secret+history+of+miss+america+pageant%2Caps%2C95&sr=8-1" target=_blank>There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America</a>.”

Marsh’s crown matters more when it comes to her job in the Air Force. She busts the myth that women who do the jobs that used to be held only by men have to look and act like them.

It’s important at the Naval Academy, where some graduates watched Davids show compassion, a vivacious personality and maternal pride as her kids cheered her on in a room full of military brass.

“It was surreal,” said Sharon Hanley Disher, 65, one of the first women to graduate from the academy in 1980. She was at the ceremony promoting Davids, who called out the class of pioneers twice during her speech in Annapolis.

She couldn’t stop thinking about her first evening at the academy, back in 1976.

“Miss Hanley, I don’t like women in my school,” an upperclassman told her, she recalled, pointing his finger in her face. “I don’t want women in my school. It will be my mission to make sure you’re long gone before I graduate.”

She graduated. And Davids, who graduated in 1989, thanked her and others for helping pave the way.

“In the lasting words of Navy legend Admiral Grace Hopper, who in 1985 spoke to my Plebe Class, ‘A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for,’” Davids said in her <a href="https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/3643662/vadm-davids-confirmed-as-superintendent-at-naval-academy/" target=_blank>welcome address</a> on Thursday.

She will face doubt and challenges to her leadership, the early graduates said. But besides proving that she can lead, she will be confronted with the opportunity to address women’s experience as minorities in a school where they are just 28 percent of the student population.

“I couldn’t be happier with this,” said Elizabeth Rowe, who was also in the class of 1980 with Hanley Disher. “The Naval Academy still has a long way to go. That’s unfortunate, but her presence provides an opportunity.”

Davids will take command of an academy that has been struggling — and in some ways excelling — to become an institution that looks more like America.

“The Superintendent is indeed more than just a president of a college — they are a leader, a mentor, a role model for everyone stationed here,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said at a private ceremony on Thursday, according to the Navy.

Rowe, who was celebrated as a pioneer in her small, Maryland farm town when she went off to the academy, said she was stunned by the hatred she faced when she got there.

“While I knew it was first class and it was all male, I didn’t have any perspective,” she said.

“The reaction we got — a sort of resentment, hatred, otherness, all of that — was unexpected. I spent four years just trying to get through it,” she said.

The hazing and harassment — dead rats being left in mailboxes, the constant put-downs — were largely unaddressed by leaders,<b> </b>she said.

This would continue for decades. Rowe said she talks to current students who still face some of what she endured.

Hanley Disher, who married a fellow graduate and again made history when all three of their children graduated from the academy, said she was thrilled to see her daughter have more, congressionally mandated opportunities available to her.

But she was heartbroken when she heard that some of the old-school misogyny was still there.

“This one guy told my daughter a joke,” she recounted.

“He said: ‘What did the ugliest girl in the world say to the second-ugliest girl in the world? What company are you in?’” Hanley Disher said.

Her daughter, Alison Disher Orr, 36, became a company commander.

“It’s about time,” Orr said in the background as I talked to Hanley Disher on the phone about the new superintendent. And Orr wanted to make sure I gave Hanley Disher credit for helping break that glass ceiling.

Hanley Disher noted that it took women “70 years to get the vote and almost 50 years for this.”

Liz Rowe

Some of the women from the class of 1980 have never returned to the academy to celebrate milestones, as women took command in the Navy and rose in the ranks at the academy. They told Hanley Disher — when she reached out to them for reunions or events — that they <i>can’t</i>.

But people change, places change, she tells them.

During their 35th reunion, one of the men who was a primo harasser of women apologized to her, she said. He told her that he has been living with guilt over the things he said and did and wanted to apologize to all of them.

“So I took him by the arm and said, ‘Let’s go,’” Hanley Disher said. She accompanied him on his apology tour. “Then we cried about it at the bar.”

University of Southern California

Petula is a columnist for The Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.

Petula Dvorak

2024 ushered in two firsts for military women. We’re all cheering. 

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