NEWS ANALYSIS : Faulkner Hailed for Blazing a Lonely Trail to Citadel : Military: She won by gaining entry into school, advocates say. They dismiss her departure as irrelevant.

It was perhaps inevitable that the saga at The Citadel would end this way, with the young woman who shattered more than a century and a half of tradition feeling shattered herself, facing reporters in the gray afternoon to wipe away rain and tears and dreams, not only her own but those of so many others who had been rooting for her.

And so it was that 20-year-old Shannon Faulkner took her place beside Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) and other trailblazers much older than herself who had been held up as symbols by the women’s movement, with the movement eventually left to explain why they could not finish what they had begun.

In the wake of Faulkner’s announcement Friday that she was leaving the all-male military academy in South Carolina less than one week after becoming its first female cadet, women’s rights advocates are struggling to make the counter-intuitive seem true, to persuade America that what looks like a failure is in fact a triumph.

It must be remembered, they argue, that Faulkner won in federal court. After 2 1/2 years of legal wrangling, with the Supreme Court refusing The Citadel’s request to block her entry, she crashed through the gender barrier the way James Meredith crashed through the racial barrier at the University of Mississippi three decades ago. She got in. Whether she chose to stick it out is her business.

“I don’t see it as a defeat,” declared attorney Gloria Allred. “I think we need to distinguish the winning of the legal right and the exercising of the legal right.”

Said Alison Dundes Renteln, acting director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC: “The correct interpretation is that she has won the battle. She made her point by winning the lawsuit. She is now rejecting them the way they wanted to reject her.”

Faulkner’s departure, these women maintain, is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant that Norma McCorvey, all these years after winning the right to have an abortion as Jane Roe, has decided that terminating a pregnancy after the first trimester should not be permitted. The movement is a continuum. A precedent has been established. Others will pick up where Faulkner left off.

She is, after all, just a symbol--an ordinary woman caught in the spotlight’s glare, whose personal tragedy may become dwarfed by what she stood for. Famous cases have a way of doing that. Who knows today what happened to the black schoolgirl in Brown vs. Board of Education? Who knows what happened to reverse-discrimination plaintiff Allan Bakke?

“It’s just one woman challenging one school,” Renteln said. “It seems to me that in the history books, this will be referred to as a victory.”

An Unwelcome Cadet

The image of victory, however, did not belong to Faulkner on Friday.

As she fought back tears to explain that after 2 1/2 years of stress, “everything came crashing in on me at once,” the picture that stuck was that of the male cadets, cavorting in navy blue T-shirts, their fists raised above their heads in jubilant celebration that what was theirs alone since 1842 would be theirs again.

“It’s unfortunate for her,” a high-ranking cadet told a wire service reporter. “But it keeps this place the way we always wanted it.”

To these men, there was something more at stake than keeping Faulkner out. At stake was the principle of single-sex education supported by taxpayer dollars. The controversy, they said, was not about Faulkner in particular. It was about women in general.

“Some of the media has called us beasts and animals,” David Abrams, a June graduate of The Citadel, said last week. “But that’s not it. We just want single-sex education. We just don’t want to open our doors to women.”

There is another enduring image of Faulkner’s brief, unhappy time as a Citadel cadet. It is not the image of her departure but rather her arrival. She is standing, back against the wall, in white shorts and tennis shoes, the famed Citadel courtyard’s red-and-gray checkerboard tile spread out before her. Her hands are clasped behind her back and two cadets in white uniforms are eyeing her from a distance. She is alone.

In this photograph, feminists see a young woman, not much older than a girl, cut off and isolated among 2,000 male cadets, facing insurmountable odds without any support. She received dozens of death threats, while disparaging bumper stickers and T-shirts cropped up in Charleston, S.C. “Shave the Whale,” some said, referring to Faulkner’s weight and the tradition of shaving the heads of Citadel freshmen, from which Faulkner was exempted.

“She was so solitary,” said Kathy Garmezy, executive director of the Hollywood Policy Center, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group. “Can you imagine what hate must have been seeping through these pores, directed at her? I can only imagine.”

And so the way it all unraveled for Faulkner--her bout with exhaustion after drills in 102-degree heat and her departure amid fears about her health--did not not come as a terrible shock to Garmezy. It was an ending she could have scripted. “On some level, it didn’t surprise me. It did surprise me that it happened so quickly. It’s the sort of thing I thought might happen six months from now.”

Faulkner herself faulted the absence of women. “I really hope that next year a whole group of women will be going in,” she said Friday. “Because maybe it would have been different if the other women would have been with me.” On Saturday, she told CNN: “I could feel that I was alone.”

Taking the Heat

Faulkner’s male detractors, of course, see something quite different in the photograph. They see a woman, overweight and out of shape, heading into a “hell week” of “yes, sirs” and “no, sirs” and pushups and sit-ups--a grueling trial meant to separate, as the cliche goes, the men from the boys. They see a woman who couldn’t take the heat, both figuratively and literally. They see a woman who withdrew because she wasn’t quite tough enough in the same way that Schroeder’s critics said she wasn’t tough enough when, in 1987, she tearfully dropped her bid for the presidency.

Indeed, one of the strategies The Citadel used in an attempt to block Faulkner’s admission was to question her ability to meet the physical fitness requirements, noting that she is 20 pounds over Army weight standards for her height. When she fell ill Monday, school spokesman Terry Leedom made reference to her fitness and the “rugged” days of August in South Carolina.

“That’s the reason why we insist people be in top physical condition,” he told the local paper. “In her case, the judge said she had to be admitted regardless of her physical condition. That’s one reason why we had concerns all along.”

This is the spin the Faulkner case is getting on the talk-radio circuit, and it is the spin women’s rights advocates are trying to counter. No one, they note, is pointing fingers at the 30 male cadets who also dropped out of The Citadel last week. And none of them had to endure “hell week” under quite the same circumstances as Faulkner.

“What was being asked of her physically was different, because mentally she was under a different set of pressures,” said USC law professor Judith Resnik, an expert on gender bias. “The spin on this is that she couldn’t take it. But what is the ‘it’ to take? Her ‘it’ is a different ‘it.’ ”

The Battle Continues

If there is one thing to be learned from the polarized reaction to the Faulkner case, it is that in 1995 in America, 75 years after women won the right to vote, pockets of antagonism toward women remain.

“The women’s movement promised so much and delivered a great deal,” said Kathleen Reardon, author of “They Don’t Get It, Do They?” a new book about women in the workplace. “But the actual living of it is difficult on a day-to-day basis.” Of Faulkner, Reardon said: “She stood for something. And as they say, the tall tree catches the wind.”

Meanwhile, the battle over integration at The Citadel will continue. The school is one of only two public, all-male military colleges in the nation; the other is Virginia Military Institute. Both are being sued for allegedly discriminating against women, and both are proposing alternative programs as a way to keep women out.

Although Faulkner was permitted to enter The Citadel under a federal court order, the school is appealing. Because the Justice Department is a plaintiff, the case will go on without her. Lawyers for both sides have asked the Supreme Court to rule in the fall; the court is also being asked to consider the VMI case.

In television and newspaper interviews Saturday, Faulkner said she had no regrets. “Whether I succeed in The Citadel or not . . . the law was on my side and I had the right to go too.”

At the same time, she seemed relieved her ordeal was over. “I found out the world isn’t what I thought it was,” she told Newsday. “I’m glad I found out. It’s hardened me emotionally. . . . I’ve had to go through so much, and I’m not even 21. Some days I feel like I’m 38. Some days I feel like I’m 48.”

Her future, she said, is uncertain. “I never thought anything like this would happen. I was expecting to get my degree in Citadel. I will find another college to go to. I don’t know whether it will be this semester. I’ve got a lot of searching to do.”

Veterans of the fight for women’s rights have read this story before. Faulkner, they say, carried a terrible burden--the burden of being first. They are looking to the high court to seal her victory in the law books forever, and to other women to finish what she began.

“She’s gone most of the race,” Allred said. “Now someone else will cross the finish line.”