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Holly Knowlton came of age during the height of the American feminist movement, but she was largely sheltered from its influences. She was born in France and moved often, thanks to her father, William Knowlton, a fearsome four-star general in World War II and Vietnam.
General Knowlton cut the perfect figure of military manliness: tall and broad-shouldered with a Don Draper haircut and piercing Army green eyes. He met his wife, Peggy, then a student at an all-girls private school in New York, as a West Point cadet. The two were married shortly after his graduation. She adopted the traditional trappings of a military spouse, serving as a gracious hostess and exercising deep loyalty and patience for his high-flying career.
Holly followed in her mother’s footsteps. She attended an all-girls prep school in Virginia, and, in 1970, presented in the International Debutante Ball, a bi-annual event at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City meant to connect promising young women with men in high society. Then, in the fall of 1973, while studying French at Dickinson College, Holly’s father coupled her with an outstanding West Point cadet.
General Knowlton was then Superintendent of the all-male, ultra-elite Army academy. Back in those days, the military cadet was in high romantic demand, with college girls flooding campus with love letters. These missives were handled by West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office, founded in 1931 to support the “social development” of aspiring young officers.
The office was composed mostly of military wives who served as den mothers and matchmakers, screening and busing in “femmes” or “drags”— “dragging” meant taking a woman on a date—for sock hops, “flirtation walks,” and other special occasions. These included overnight sojourns, though the prevalence of in flagrante delicto among these visiting girls is unclear. A hostess would not simply match cadets with girls, but also train them in etiquette, and, as part of a longstanding tradition, help plan their weddings at West Point’s grand, gothic chapel on graduation day.
When Holly visited campus in the fall of 1973 for a football game, General Knowlton tasked his assistant brigade adjutant with an order befitting a Cadet Hostess: find his daughter a date. While scouring the cadet rolls, the adjutant landed on David Petraeus, an impressive athlete and “Star Man,” meaning he had placed in the top 5 percent of his class academically. Young Petraeus also earnestly defended West Point’s ethos of discipline, much to the administration’s delight.
A few months after their first date, on graduation day, a local paper reported that Petraeus, then just 21, “got a diploma from the U.S. Military Academy—and the boss’ daughter as well.” The fledgling couple was already engaged and, a few weeks later, would be married at West Point’s chapel.
Little is known about their marriage other than the fact that Holly stood by her man through a lot. The life of a military spouse can be intensely grueling, marked by long separations via deployments and lots of relocation. In July 2012, Petraeus told Dickinson College’s alumni magazine that he and Holly had moved 27 times since being married. That November, it was revealed that Petraeus was having an affair with his biographer and a fellow West Pointer named Paula Broadwell.
Adultery is prohibited under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in large part because it’s believed to make a troop vulnerable to blackmail. Perhaps Petraeus’s infidelity was, in part, a rejection of a transactional romance organized by his first military mentor. The fallout from it illustrated that, despite deeply embarrassing the force, Petraeus’s gender and status insulated him from true accountability. “The guy is super-gifted, super-determined, super-committed,” one former aide said at the time. “He’s the closest thing most of us have ever met to a superman, but he’s still a man.” While Petraeus faced no formal military discipline for his personal misdeeds, Broadwell was both reprimanded and demoted. This year, the Petraeus’ celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary.
West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office still exists to this day, reinforcing traditional gender norms and tightly regulating intimacy. The U.S. military has long been worried that loyalty to anything other than the Pentagon might meddle with their mission. As such, federal service academies like West Point banned public displays of affection. Should cadets leave campus for a break or weekend away, they were made to swear upon their return that they had not gotten married. Up until 2023, every service academy also banned cadets from becoming parents.
Because sex at military school was so rare, it intensified sexual energy and elevated the act as a sacrosanct marker of one’s manliness. When, at the Naval Academy, the rare midshipmen managed to sneak a sexual encounter, he would proudly denote the accomplishment by hanging a Chiquita banana on his door. To many, sex became yet another highly regulated obstacle course, an exploit turned transactional, with some cadets grading girls on a scale from zero to three. Those girls considered least desirable were stamped as L.P., or “lemon pie.”
A traditional goal of a Cadet Hostess was to obscure these crude facets of military culture. In public, cadets resembled perfect gentlemen, able to handle a teacup, dance the foxtrot, and even talk about a wine’s natural tannins.
When a girl first arrived on campus, a Cadet Hostess would present her with a booklet entitled “A Lady’s Handbook to West Point” and offer a pep talk. A representative speech went: “A drag must know how to act properly. Your cadet is probably waiting for you in Grant Hall at the top of the hill beyond the Plain. Second of all, sensible shoes. You’ll be walking everywhere and those little white sandals just won’t do. You’ve got blisters already, don’t you? Third of all, no PDA. That’s Public Display of Affection—kissing, holding hands and the like. You’ll find a glossary of cadet slang in the back of the booklet. I suggest you read it.”
During and immediately after the two World Wars, West Point cadets would often be paired with a promising girl by graduation. Petraeus was one example, and archived newspaper clippings describe many others. One prototypical announcement from this era describes a Vassar sophomore named Nancy Morgan tying the knot with a West Point senior named Robert Hoffman. West Point cadets would proudly don their military dress to venture out to New York City on the weekends. This traditionally assured them free drinks, cheap meals, female attention, and even hotel discounts.
This treatment nurtured a powerful strain of military patriarchy, one dependent on a weak and largely subservient feminine construct in which women not only relied on, but were endlessly impressed by, male strength.These dynamics shifted drastically during Vietnam. While one girl from the time was quoted as saying that West Point cadets were “neater and stand up straighter” than most boys, others had far less favorable experiences. “They’re so starved for girls, that when they get you alone—watch out,” warned one Vassar student.
Many Vassar women became engaged in the anti-war movement, none more famously than Jane Fonda. In October 1969, two hundred Vassar students congregated at West Point’s gates where they handed out flowers to cadets and urged them to abandon their commissions. Some cadets snatched their flowers and ate them. Another sarcastically told a protestor that he couldn’t speak because he was on his way to “poison gas class.” A third, boyish-looking senior vented to The New York Times that the anti-war movement “makes you wonder why the hell you should go risk your neck for those kinds of people.” For his part, Superintendent Knowlton fiercely defended Vietnam, hanging an AK-47 captured from a dead Vietnamese enemy soldier on his office wall and sharing sunny stories from his time in Southeast Asia. Amid pressure from protesters, he dramatically bemoaned that his beloved academy had become a “stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.”
“Things were much different before [West Pointer and General William] Westmoreland left for Vietnam,” observed one cadet hostess named Mrs. Gray. “Those liberal peacenicks from Smith and Vassar changed it all, you know. Protest signs and flowers! Disrupting the Armed Forces Day parade in New York City! The nerve of those girls! But the Corps handled it like heroes. Not one cadet flinched. They marched straight down Forty-Second Street while the girls stuffed daisies in their guns. Imagine that! I bet your cadet would do the same tiling.”
As the war intensified, cadets abandoned their ornamental dresswear before heading to Gotham. “As soon as we left the gate we went to the closest public bathroom and changed out of our West Point uniform as fast as we could,” Robert Caslen, a 1975 graduate turned superintendent, told me. Cadets not only started donning civilian clothes out, but sometimes even wore wigs to cover up their high-and-tight haircuts. The first few times Caslen ventured to the city in uniform, he alleged, “people would laugh at me, yell at me, and I was spit at.” Similar resentments were stoked at the Naval Academy, where protestors sometimes threw eggs at midshipmen, or called them “warmongers.”
Many military men were deeply wounded by their reduced status in the eyes of women and civilian society. This deep sense of grievance is immortalized in West Point’s chapel, which traditionally offers each graduating class a personalized glass pane. When it came time for the class of 1966 to design their sheet, they landed on a depiction of St. Valeria, who was tortured and beheaded by her own people. Other offended cadets around this time insisted that their domestic treatment was so bad that they envied their comrades who had perished on the battlefield.
When, in 1976, the first women arrived at West Point as cadets, they faced a battery of gendered attacks that at once sexualized them and stripped them of their femininity. During a summer survival camp in 1979, one female cadet was forced to bite the head off a chicken, a ritual that Superintendent Knowlton’s successor, Andrew Goodpaster, insisted applied to both sexes. Not long after, though, a male cadet announced in mixed company that he would shoot in the back any woman he served with should she prove ineffective in combat. Many women were ceaselessly bullied throughout their four years, and some were raped.
The military has long thrived by concocting a specific conception of manliness, then facilitating a training ground to prove these traits. This scheme was plainly reflected in service academy applications, which long judged prospective cadets against a series of metrics known collectively as the “Whole Man” score. Before the introduction of women, military school was viewed as the purest test of masculine bona fides. Those who failed were labeled with derogatory feminine terms like “pussy,” “lady,” or “fairy.” Now, one school commandant worried, “if women can make it, can it really be tough?”
Cathy Long, one of West Point’s first female cadets, routinely witnessed this masculine panic on campus. Before her arrival, she asserted, military school was a place “where a little man could go and feel like a big man.” She dealt directly with many of these guys, including one stunted upperclassman who screamed guttural insults in her face daily. Once, she looked deep in his eyes and realized that, under his bluster, was real worry. “We took away his masculinity,” she said.
Petraeus’s mistress, Paula Broadwell, endured her own gendered mistreatment in the military. During their affair, Petraeus seemed irritated at the thought of Broadwell staking out her own success. After she told him that Republican finance types had approached her about a Senate run in North Carolina, Petraeus rejected the idea out of hand, according to Time: “What was her position, he asked, on abortion? Climate change? Gun control? Gay marriage? Tax cuts? Social Security vouchers? Her answers, he told her, would not fit either party, and she should not sell herself out.”
In an interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell four years after her affair was made public, Broadwell indicated that she had experienced her own gendered abuse as a West Point cadet. “I went to West Point undergraduate, sometimes I try to forget those days,” she said. “But also, I’m very proud of it. It’s shaped the person I am. It’s shaped me into a fighter.”
As I detail in my new book on military masculinity, women continue to endure gross mistreatment in military environments. West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office still exists, but it continues to perpetuate old school and largely surface-level ideas of romance rather than promoting equity and mutual respect in a relationship. Documents I obtained from the office detail recent offerings like “Dress to Impress Workshops” and “Ballroom Dance Lessons.” One sheet stresses the importance of “opening the door for ladies,” but only in a literal sense.