I have two daughters, 7 and 10 years old. I want them to have every opportunity to develop their educational potential to the fullest, so that they will be able to (among other things) compete against men for good jobs. And I am concerned that their opportunities will be diminished-not enlarged-by one of the feminist movement’s current crusades.

Feminist groups and their allies in the Justice Department are urging the courts to force the nation’s two remaining bastions of all-male, boot-camp-style, state-supported military education-Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and The Citadel, in South Carolina-to admit women. These cases, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, seem likely to produce a major Supreme Court ruling. And if recent precedents are any guide, the feminists may well win.

I’m afraid that my daughters will be among the losers.

The immediate effect of such a decision, of course, would be to create opportunities for the tiny handful of young women who want the attend VMI and The Citadel. These institutions argue, on the other hand, that coeducation would impair the educational and social development of a considerably larger number of young men: those who thrive on the kind of harsh regimen of physical and psychological adversity that VMI and The Citadel now offer, which might have to be watered down to accommodate coeducation.

Of more concern to me is the probable secondary effect of a precedent barring all male education at VMI and The Citadel: It would raise higher the already daunting legal barriers to experimentation with any form of public single-sex education.

Such a precedent might also, in the long run, cloud the legality even of private single-sex colleges, which now enroll 64,000 women and 11,400 men across the nation. Virtually all receive some federal financial benefits, and are thus governed by civil-rights statutes that may eventually be construed to mirror the requirements that the Constitution is deemed to impose on public institutions.

The creation of any such new obstacles to single-sex education would be most unfortunate. A growing body of research suggests that many girls (…

I have two daughters, 7 and 10 years old. I want them to have every opportunity to develop their educational potential to the fullest, so that they will be able to (among other things) compete against men for good jobs. And I am concerned that their opportunities will be diminished-not enlarged-by one of the feminist movement’s current crusades.

Feminist groups and their allies in the Justice Department are urging the courts to force the nation’s two remaining bastions of all-male, boot-camp-style, state-supported military education-Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and The Citadel, in South Carolina-to admit women. These cases, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, seem likely to produce a major Supreme Court ruling. And if recent precedents are any guide, the feminists may well win.

I’m afraid that my daughters will be among the losers.

The immediate effect of such a decision, of course, would be to create opportunities for the tiny handful of young women who want the attend VMI and The Citadel. These institutions argue, on the other hand, that coeducation would impair the educational and social development of a considerably larger number of young men: those who thrive on the kind of harsh regimen of physical and psychological adversity that VMI and The Citadel now offer, which might have to be watered down to accommodate coeducation.

Of more concern to me is the probable secondary effect of a precedent barring all male education at VMI and The Citadel: It would raise higher the already daunting legal barriers to experimentation with any form of public single-sex education.

Such a precedent might also, in the long run, cloud the legality even of private single-sex colleges, which now enroll 64,000 women and 11,400 men across the nation. Virtually all receive some federal financial benefits, and are thus governed by civil-rights statutes that may eventually be construed to mirror the requirements that the Constitution is deemed to impose on public institutions.

The creation of any such new obstacles to single-sex education would be most unfortunate. A growing body of research suggests that many girls (and, perhaps, boys too) do better in single-sex schools and in single-sex classes within coed schools. Studies also suggest that women at all-female colleges take more math and science courses than those at coed colleges, do better in standardized tests, graduate school admissions and numbers of doctorates earned, and excel in various measures of professional success.

Indeed, the virtues of all-female classes and colleges are vigorously touted by some of the same feminists who argue for stamping out the last remaining vestiges of state-supported all-male education. These feminists have helped spur a growing demand to experiment with all-girl classes in public schools.

Very little such experimentation has taken place, however. The reason is fear of lawsuits, brought "by lawyers bent on enforcing legal equality," in the words of Susan Estrich, a prominent feminist law professor at the University of Southern California. Schools that try holding all female classes, she notes in an article in the May 22, 1994, issue of The New York Times Magazine, "could be stripped of Federal support and even enjoined under the Constitution by Federal court order, because they are ‘discriminating.’. . . That’s the price of committing to formal equality instead of committing to real opportunity."

And that’s why, in the interest of preserving my daughters’ freedom to choose all-girl math classes or all-woman colleges, I am rooting for VMI and The Citadel in the pending cases, and against the National Women’s Law Center, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, the American Association of University Women, and the National Organization for Women. (They and 23 other groups filed a joint amicus brief in the VMI case, in which the 4th Circuit heard arguments on Sept. 28.)

It is with some ambivalence that I side with VMI and The Citadel, which has been portrayed in articles by feminists like Susan Faludi as a weird incubator of misogyny and male chauvinism. I find myself in the company of some people with whom I would prefer not to be associated, like those at The Citadel who have crudely pilloried Shannon Faulkner, the brave young woman suing for full admission there.

The Larger Question

I nonetheless doubt that the benefits to Faulkner and a few other women of a decision admitting them to The Citadel and VMI would outweigh whatever the costs might be to the educational development of the men at these institutions.

But the larger question is how other institutions would be affected by a ruling against VMI and The Citadel. Such a ruling would, almost inevitably, set a precedent leading to either (1) a heavy presumption that all single-sex public education is unconstitutional, unless the challenged program can sustain a heavy burden of proof that it provides very substantial benefits that cannot otherwise be attained, or (2) a double standard outlawing all-male public education while allowing the all-female variety.

In their amicus brief, the feminist groups stress the Supreme Court’s recent holding in J.E.B. v. Alabama, 114 S. Ct. 1419 (1994) (which barred sex-based peremptory challenges in jury trials) that " ‘gender-based classifications require an exceedingly persuasive justification in order to survive constitutional scrutiny.’ " Such a constitutional presumption of invalidity would be difficult for any single-sex institution to surmount.

So-Called Stereotypes

Among the arguments for all-maleness that the feminist groups find insufficient are such "stereotypes"-a word that many feminists now use (when it suits them) to tar even empirically valid generalizations about male-female differences-as VMI’s claims that (on average) women have a harder time with rigorous physical training, are less aggressive and competitive than men, have lower self-esteem, and are more likely to thrive in a cooperative atmosphere than in VMI’s punishing environment.

Variants of these same "stereotypes" ironically appear in feminist arguments in favor of all-female classes and colleges. Estrich, for example, suggests (quite reasonably) that because teachers call on girls less often than on boys, girls become less assertive and their "self-esteem suffers.”

Stereotypes aside, the feminist groups’ brief dismisses as "irrelevant" all "evidence of pedagogical justifications" for Virginia’s expedient of offering women a ROTC-type program at Mary Baldwin…