BRIAN CABELL, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Twenty-year-old Shannon Faulkner has battled the Citadel in the courts for two and a half years. Now it appears she has won. She will be the first woman cadet.</s>SHANNON FAULKNER, FIRST FEMALE CITADEL CADET: I am qualified to be in the corps, and I am going to be in the corps, and I will graduate as a member of the corps. And women -- other women will follow me.</s>CABELL (on camera): It seems to me this was one of the last great feminist battles of the 20th century. You had a teenage girl taking on an all-male institution. After 153 years of being all male, the Citadel was being forced to accept a woman as one of its cadets. They did it very reluctantly. The college didn't want it. The administration didn't want it. The people of South Carolina, more or less, didn't want her. And certainly the cadets, they were adamantly opposed to her as well. And yet she took them on.</s>BOBBIE BATTISTA, CNN ANCHOR (on camera): New cadets were sworn in at the Citadel today, but the most controversial one was missing. Shannon Faulkner, the first woman admitted to the military academy was in the infirmary while classmates marched to the ceremony.</s>CABELL: She was at the infirmary for about five days. And frankly, a lot of us thought she would reemerge after a couple of days and take up where she had left off. Finally, after about five days in the infirmary, she simply dropped out. She did hold a press conference later on saying it was not the physical rigors that had forced her to drop out, but the mental stress.
CNN 20: Shannon Faulkner Enters Citadel