Research response - Cortney Shearer

Cortney Shearer

Mike Lohre

English 1109

18 November 2020

FMF Profile 

     A profile the stuck out to me was about Barbara Butler becoming a FMF corpsman. Butler seems to be motivated by proving people wrong. Specifically Proving men wrong. She was at a boot camp and was older then most off the people there already which is hard to keep up with. During Corps school they were asking for FMF volunteers. Nobody raised their hand so she did. This made some men mad and they said only men can do it. She fought back and said there wasn’t any rule saying a women couldn’t do it. This made her want to do it more because people were already saying she couldn’t do it. So she went and trained for it. All the other girl joined her which was more empowering. Butler told the girls “We’re not going to cry in front of them. And so we cried and hugged each other within the confines of our barracks.” (Butler 167).  I love this because they didn’t show their weakness they did that in private. They didn’t let their guard down and pushed back in a way. She ended up becoming apart of the FMF Corps and was they only girl in the group. This definitely pushed her to prove them wrong and point out when the men are wrong.

     In my research I found about 16 percent of the navy is female based which apparently is higher than normal. I couldn’t find anything specificity on the FMF Corpsman but we know it’s very little. The fact that it said 16% is a higher percent for any part of the military is sad. The military is mostly men. I wish more girls work like Barbara Butler and were more confident to prove people wrong. Looking at the graphs the male population is much greater in the military in all branches. One point was made and said“The Air Force, with 20.9 percent women, and the Marine Corps, with the highest and lowest female shares.” (Page 2). The fact that 20.9 percent of the Air Force is women and that’s the highest percent of women is sad.