“I was handling the chainsaw and shooting guns just as much as my brothers,” she says. Growing up in the mining town of Asbestos, Que., Carignan never viewed activities as gender-specific. “Knowing the States, knowing the Marines,” says Carignan, “they’re in for a rough 20 years.” Women were banned from certain combat roles in Canada until 1989, and in the United States until January 2016, when the Marine Corps finally dropped its prohibition. “Yes, it’s the military, but it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be accepted because I’m a woman.” She trained as a combat engineer-a frontline job involving clearing minefields and demolishing and erecting structures. “I knew there were a lot of guys there,” she says. She enlisted in 1986, seven years after RMC began admitting women. She just proved to a whole generation that you don’t need to do that.”Ĭarignan belongs to the earliest generation of female combat officers. It was like they were fighting to not be feminine. you would see the female soldiers, and sometimes it was like they were a bit burly. “She can wear a dress or a bulletproof vest,” says Maisonneuve’s wife, Barbara, a director of the college’s fundraising foundation. Recruitment of women to the RMC in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu jumped from 10 to 25 per cent between 20, during the two years Carignan met with girls and their mothers at open houses and appeared in the Quebec media. “I call it ‘the Jennie effect,’ ” says retired lieutenant-general Michel Maisonneuve, academic director of the Royal Military College. Carignan is changing that statistic by increasing recruitment of women to combat roles, and she’s doing it her way, as a stereotype-defying mother of four. In the Canadian Army, women comprise just 2.4 per cent of regular force combat arms trades, compared to 14.8 per cent of the overall Army. Carignan is the first woman in Canada-and so far as the Forces can determine, the first in the world-to rise to her rank from the combat arms trades. Although there are other Canadian female generals, up to now they have risen from non-combatant disciplines such as intelligence, medicine, combat support or administration. In June, 2016, Carignan, then 47, was promoted to the rank of brigadier-general (a one-star general), earning the title of chief of staff of Army operations. She chose the military for its sense of purpose, but she never lost her grace. “I find it very elegant, very graceful,” she says of her current preference: flamenco. “The only other career I seriously contemplated was dancing,” she says, having studied ballet, lyrical and jazz since she was eight years old. Jennie Carignan hadn’t become a combat officer-if she hadn’t served in the Middle East, Bosnia and Afghanistan, and if she wasn’t promoted to the highest rank ever achieved by a Canadian woman from the combat arms trades-she would have been a dancer. Jennie Carignan at the Canadian Armed Forces College in Toronto.
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