back of a plane, and a young woman transfixed by a tornado is changed into a crew member on
the space shuttle. These ads follow the pattern of mainly presenting men as Air Force personnel
but including a single woman, a woman in this case who is doing something exciting that is
connected to highly-advanced technology, but that isn’t as clearly associated with the core of
what the Air Force does as the activities in some of the other ads. In this recent period, women
are recurring presence in Air Force recruiting materials, but a minor one.
MARINES
During the recruiting crisis of the late 1990s, the Marine Corps, which was able to meet
its recruiting goals, was held up as model for the other services to follow. Marine recruiting
materials downplay benefits and underscore challenge, elitism, and masculinity, and some
commentators believed that the other services should emulate the Marines, and in particular their
appeals to a masculine warrior spirit (Bonat, 1999; Keene, 1999; Smart, 2000; Strother, 1999).
The Marine Corps is the smallest service, and it had the fewest ads, by far, in my sample. In part
that may be because they need fewer recruits than the other services, though they need a
proportionally large number for their size
. It may also be attributable to the Corps’ skill at
forging a distinct public image and its ability to obtain positive media coverage. The Marine
Corps is the service most closely associated with masculinity, from its connection to combat
(reflected in the saying “every Marine a rifleman”) to the well-known slogan, “we’re looking for
a few good men,” which has continued in common usage even though the Corps officially retired
it in 1976. Of all the services, the Marines also have the fewest women, only about six percent
of the force. Because of its small size and its focus on combat, the Marine Corps avoided some
of the controversies and pressures over women’s participation that the other services faced. The
Corps has not only tried to keep tight limits on the number of positions women can fill, it has
sought to preserve the masculinizing function of the men’s training and protect the femininity of
women recruits by training male and female recruits separately, the only service to do so. The
connection to masculinity and the small number of women are reflected in Marine recruiting
advertisements, in an almost complete absence of women.
During the War of 1812, Lucy Brewer served as a Marine on the USS Constitution for
three years as George Baker, and the Marine Corps has acknowledged her as the “first girl
9
The Marines have a smaller leadership structure than the other services. This means that fewer members can stay
in the service and be promoted, so turnover is purposefully high and relatively large numbers of recruits are needed
each year (Freedburg, 1999).
32
Convention