30 June 2016
The Washington Post reports that the U. S. Marine Corps is eliminating the word man from nineteen of its job titles. An infantryman will now be called an infantry marine, and what was once a field artillery man is now a field artillery marine. Some job titles are retaining the man, however. A marine can still be a rifleman. (How a rifleman differs from an infantry marine I don’t know. Perhaps someone with experience in the Corps can enlighten us.) But manpower officers and marksmanship instructors keep their existing titles.
The move is a result of combat arms positions becoming open to women and is in line with similar shifts in civilian nomenclature that happened decades ago, like policeman to police officer and fireman to firefighter. The changes are quite sensible and in a reasonable world would be uncontroversial. Even the retention of man in some job titles generally follows a logic: retained where it is part of a larger term with no clear gender-neutral replacement (e.g., marksmanship, unmanned) or in places where man is used to refer to staffing (e.g., manpower). Rifleman remains the anomaly. Perhaps it’s being retained for historical and cultural reasons—the identity of the rifleman is so central to the Corps’ vision of itself that it would be anathema to change the word. Or perhaps it was a bureaucratic sop thrown to those on the committee that resisted the changes.
The move is not without its detractors, though. The Post article includes the usual complaints about political correctness, but I haven’t seen any reasoned responses against the move. They all seem to be kneejerk reactions against change. And if anything, by replacing man with marine, the Corps is further strengthening its aura of being a breed apart. You’re not just a man, you’re a marine.
