In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel

Nancy Mace didn't arrive at the Citadel as a stranger to military life. Growing up in a military family, she understood discipline, sacrifice, and the weight of tradition. But nothing quite prepared her for what waited on the other side of those imposing gates. The Citadel, El Cid, as it's known, was built in 1842. For more than a century and a half, it forged a particular kind of Southern man. When the courts ruled that women could no longer be excluded from the Corps of Cadets, Nancy Mace became one of the first to test what that ruling actually meant in practice. What she found was that overturning a legal ruling and changing a culture are two very different things. She wasn't merely challenging the Citadel's long tradition, she was challenging the city that surrounded it, the identity it embodied, and the fierce resistance of those determined to preserve it. Written with her co-author Mary Jane Ross, this is the true account of one young woman's fight to earn her place in the long gray line, a story of grit, resilience, and the stubborn refusal to quit when the institution itself seems determined to make you do exactly that.