Bonnie Schmidt's 'The Greatest Man'

Bonnie Schmidt’s The Greatest Man-Catcher of All : The First Female Mounties, the Media, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (2011) gives her readers an insight of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) program during the 1970s. She highlights the struggles that women face to get enrolled into the police force. The RCMP in the 1970s was consisted of mostly male and the images that RCMP promoted was masculinized. Meaning, emphasis was placed on what an the valued and traits a male police officer should possess. However, the RCMP training program instilled values of manhood in the Canadian society. We can argue that the RCMP is responsible for communicating to society of the qualities it takes to be man —a man should have courage, strength, …show more content…
For example,if you take a look at the movie Charlie's Angels (1976) where three independent women makes it their duty to become private detectives. But if you take a closer look, they are under the guidance of a male character. So, this whole idea of them being independent is problematic. However, I don't know if the media assumed that this is how society viewed women in the police forced and that they were giving the public what they want or they felt that portraying women as equal counterparts might compromised their interest of generating profits and public appeal. But what we do know, the media in the 1970s created gendered and racialized representation of women. Not only women, but men as well. I think that men were feeling some sort of pressure as well because they had to live up to Canadian idea of what it means to be a man in the RCMP. As a result, it caused them to resent women joining the police force as they felt that their job was being threatened.These hegemonic ideals of women was spread in the media to maintain the Canadian society normative standards that men are the only ones that can be enforces. This did this to protect their jobs and ideas. But what we need to understand is that maybe the stories that the Journalists wrote wasn’t their actual views of what they thought about women joining the RCMP, but rather the perspective of wealthy owners media enterprises. Women were depicted as being too feminine to fit into their uniform as result they will be a distraction to the men police officers, result in the inability to perform their job tasks. This was used to blindside society into thinking that women were obsessed with their