Women Marines must always be the smallest group of women in the military service.
In accordance with the Commandant’s desire, they must also be the most attractive and
useful women in the four lines services. Within a [small] group of…enlisted women,
there is room for none by the truly elite. (quoted in ibid.:181)
The Marine Corp decided to raise already-high enlistment standards for women, to make sure the
Marines’ standards were as high as or higher than the standards for the other women’s programs,
and like the other services at the time, attractiveness and femininity were part of the definition of
“quality” for women. However, the Commandant also decided to increase the number of women
by 70 percent, which would bring the number of women up to 2,750, or one percent of the
Corps’ total strength, to assign women to additional bases, and to open new job categories to
women to improve enlistment and retention (ibid.:188). As the number of troops deployed to
Vietnam increased, the Marine Corps wanted, as in earlier conflicts, to replace male Marines in
non-combat positions with women, to release the men for combat duty. During the war, 36
Women Marines were sent to Vietnam.
In the 1970s, all of the services except for the Marines began the gender integration of
officer training. In 1976, the Commandant, Gen. Louis H. Wilson, decided to examine the
requirement that women be trained separately, in a shorter course. The next year, the Marines
allowed twenty-two female second lieutenants into the 21-week basic course, as part of an all-
female platoon within Charlie Company. They were soon referred to as “Charlie’s Angels.” The
next Commandant reversed course and partially re-segregated the training, because the women’s
successful completion of the course had led to charges that the training had “gone soft.” The
Marines continued to train enlisted male and female recruits separately, while the other services
began coeducational training. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert H. Barrow, according to
Jeanne Holm, said more than once of the separate training that “while he wanted his men to be
men, he wanted his women marines to remain women” (ibid.: 272-273).
In 1981, as the DOD undertook a study of accession and retention policies in relation to
women, the Marine Corps initiated its own studies of its requirements for female personnel.
There were 6,700 women in the Corps at the time, making up less than four percent of the
service. As a result of these studies, completed in 1984 and 1987, the number of enlisted
positions open to women doubled, from 5,000 to 12,000, and the number of officer positions
increased from 655 to almost one thousand. With the opening of new positions to women, in
1984, the Corp decided to incorporate defensive training that included weapons training into the
women’s recruit indoctrination program. By that time, all of the other services had already
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Convention