"In 1802 Thomas Jefferson signed the legislation that established the United States Military Academy. It had taken nearly twenty years since General George Washington first suggested the country needed a military academy. Once established the classes were all men, and for over 150 years it was a bastion of maleness. The only women were outside the gate at Ladycliff College, a Catholic all-girls school in Highland falls. Finally, in the mid-1950s, the academy added the first women to the staff, and it took another eleven years before the first woman was added to the faculty. Still the Corps was all male. In 1964 President Johnson signed legislation increasing the size of the Corps of Cadets from 2,529 to 4,417. In order to accommodate this increase, it became necessary to expand the academy facilities. This would have been the perfect time to start the transition to women as members of the Corps. The expanding facilities would have easily included bathrooms, locker rooms, and other requirements for women, but even though there may have been rumblings for adding women, they were very quiet rumblings that never saw the light of day. Around 1970 those rumblings began to get louder and louder, and the possibility of women coming to the academy bbegan moving from the back pages of the news to the front and in some of the more liberal papers these articles were "above the fold." The issue was getting bigger, and the shouts were getting louder, but they were always argued against and stifled by the appropriate Army and academy leadership. The only women coming to the academy were girlfriends coming up for the weekend. The women's liberation movement was well under way at this point. More women were finding leadership jobs in business and industry; they were running schools and being elected to state and national legislatures. All male organizations and institutions were under a full-scale assault... especially the nation's service academies."