Women Police

Mangai Natarajan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815399117
• eBook ISBN: 9781351142823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

The law of equal representation should enable men and women in policing to be equally valued and rewarded for the work they perform, but it has been repeatedly shown that due to the great deal of opposition to the entry of women into policing, women worldwide have been unable to fully integrate into this largely male profession. Gender stereotypes have impeded the progress of women in policing and have played an unfortunate role in discriminating and devaluing their work. However, women make a valuable contribution to policing and the recognition and nurturing of their skills presents an important challenge to police management. The introduction to the volume reviews the status of women officers worldwide and the integration progress made to date. The important twenty four articles chosen for inclusion in this book document the need for women officers and describe the many barriers they face in being fully assimilated into policing. This volume serves as a 'wake up call' for police management to find ways to attract and retain women in the police force.

Part I
The History of Women in Policing

[1]
Preventive Justice: The Campaign for Women Police, 1910-1940

Janis Appier

ABSTRACT. In the 1910s women police and their supporters constructed a female-gendered model of police work known as the crime prevention model. According to this model, crime prevention is the most important function of the police, and women are inherently better suited than men to be crime prevention officers. This model challenged male hegemony of the police. In the 1930s, a male-gendered model of police work, the crime control model, emerged and re-affirmed the superiority of "male" characteristics and values in police work. The crime control model still dominates American police departments today.

On April 7, 1922, Lieutenant Mina C. Van Winkle, Director of the Woman's Bureau, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington. D.C., went before the police trial board on the charge of insubordination. Two weeks before she had refused to comply with an order to release immediately two girls in her custody to two men purporting to be their fathers. The girls, one fourteen years old, the other fifteen, had run away from their homes in Brooklyn, New York a few days before. While stranded in a train station in Washington, D.C., the girls wired their fathers of their whereabouts. Before the fathers arrived to claim their daughters, police detectives picked up and interrogated the girls, then turned them over to Van Winkle's night assistant at the detention home. Shortly past dawn the next morning, the fathers arrived at police headquarters. The head of the Detective Bureau ordered the girls' release, so the night assistant telephoned Van Winkle at home to get her approval. Van Winkle refused to release the girls without first verifying the identities of the purported fathers. Although Van Winkle soon released the girls, the fathers were furious at the delay and complained vociferously. As a result, the chief of police charged Van Winkle with insubordination.¹

In her defense, Van Winkle asserted that the Detective Bureau should never have been involved in the case at all. She cited an order issued by the chief of police on February 25, 1922, effective March 1, whereby "All matters relating to cases of lost children and cases of females of whatever age . . . will be handled by the Woman's Bureau exclusively and not by the Detective Bureau, as heretofore."²

Present at Van Winkle's hearing before the police trial board were representatives of sixty-two organizations of women, drawn from all over the country. In the minds of many of these women, the issue at stake was not only Van Winkle's professional reputation. but also the principles underlying the entire movement for the employment of women police. These women feared that if Van Winkle were found guilty, the work of women police would be severely undermined.³ Their fear was well-founded because the movement for women police arose from a particular reading of female gender identity which had as a premise the idea that women were the necessary and natural protectors of women and children. The charge against Van Winkle threatened to subvert this idea. That is, if the police trial board ruled that Van Winkle had been insubordinate, then the position of women police everywhere might always be dependent on an individual policeman's whim rather than on the recognition of policewomen's gender-based authority over all cases involving women and children. Thus, at the heart of Van Winkle's trial for insubordination lay the contested territory of female gender identity.

During the past two decades, scholars have begun to explore the construction of gender identities. A close look at the movement for women police reveals how white middle-class women during the early twentieth century stretched the female gender role prescriptions of late Victorian culture to include specialized police work for women. Specifically, women reformers drew upon nineteenth-century notions of women's differences from men, such as women's moral superiority and greater capacity to nurture, to argue that women could perform certain police tasks better than men could. For example, they asserted that only policewomen should handle cases involving children because women inherently knew better than men how to comfort, guide, and question an erring or abused child. Similarly, they claimed that only female police officers should handle cases involving women because male police officers lacked sufficient understanding of women's problems and motivations. As one advocate of women police remarked in 1936. "Paradoxically, women have been admitted to that male domain, police work, primarily because they are women."⁴

Women reformers did not limit their case for women police to the straightforward argument that women knew better than men how to handle females and juveniles. Had they done so, they would have met less resistance. Instead, they also argued that the presence of women on the police force would make the police more responsive to the needs of women and children, infuse police work with values associated with women and social work (such as nurturance and morality), lift the overall intelligence level of police officers, and create a police system that would not only detect crime, but more importantly in their view, prevent it. In short, their case for women police constituted a searching critique of prevailing police practices and philosophy. It also provided the basis for a female-gendered model of police work known as the crime prevention model.

The crime prevention model had three major tenets: (1) police work developed to its highest form was social work; (2) crime prevention was the most important function of the police; and (3) women were inherently better than men at preventing crime. An analysis of the public discourse over the employment of women police provides insight into the development and fate of the crime prevention model. It also illustrates the ways women resisted, challenged, and modified dominant conventions underlying the male hegemony of law enforcement. Finally, it shows how ideas about gender helped shape the direction of police reform in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

Gender and the Origins of Police Reform

The campaign for women police roughly spanned the years between 1910 and 1940. It was one of many contemporaneous reform movements in which middle-class women used exalted definitions of womanhood and motherhood to claim new roles for themselves in the public sphere as policymakers, workers, and electors. Historians have recently used the term "maternalist" to describe the ideologies and reform agendas of these movements. As Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have explained, maternalist ideologies "extended to society as a whole the values of care, nurturance, and morality."⁵ Specifically, maternalists argued that the talents and attributes they associated with motherhood (compassion, selflessness, moral vision) were urgently needed in the public sector. This argument surfaced repeatedly in the movement for woman suffrage, as well as in women's organized efforts to create state welfare policies on behalf of women and children. Well-known examples of maternalist reforms in the United States include the campaigns for mothers' and widows' pensions and protective labor legislation.⁶

Like other maternalist movements, the campaign for women police evolved from other reforms undertaken by "organized womanhood" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among these reforms were the establishment of separate women's prisons and juvenile courts, the hiring of police matrons, and perhaps most important, the formation of private protective associations for women and children. In Los Angeles and Chicago, for example, the same women who spearheaded the establishment of juvenile courts also formed juvenile protective associations to work "upstream" from the court. The purpose of these associations was to investigate and eliminate the social conditions that allegedly led some working-class children and young women to become involved in crime, either as victims or as offenders. Other organizations, such as the Girls' Protective League and Traveler's Aid Society, offered material aid and advice to needy women and girls and were less concerned with removing the social causes of crime.⁷ Within a few years, members of some protective organizations felt hampered by their lack of official authority. As Louise de Koven Bowen, the president of the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, explained, "We need the police power which the city might vest in women trained for the work, giving them the authority to cope with certain dangerous situations which private organizations have tried in vain to deal."⁸

When de Koven Bowen spoke of "women trained in the work," she meant women trained in social work, not police work. Prior to the 1920s, formal police training scarcely existed; nearly all police administrators expected their male recruits to learn on the job. Even when police training for men became generally available during the 1920s and 1930s, advocates of women police still insisted that policewomen have training in social work. During the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, many policewomen came from graduate schools of social work and/or had several years of experience working in social work agencies. including Private protective associations.

The origins of the movement for women police in private protective associations meant that middle-class women became active in police reform through their concern for the rights and welfare of women and children, especially working-class women and children. In this respect, female police reformers differed significantly from their male counterparts. Middle-class men undertook police reform primarily because they wanted to take control of the police department away from urban political machines.⁹

Urban political machines were associations of loosely affiliated ward organizations that garnered most of their support from working-class immigrant communities. In return for their votes, immigrant men received important favors, such as jobs on city payrolls. By the late nineteenth century, machines had taken over the operation of most big-city police, fire, and sanitation departments, schools, courts, and civil service commissions. Under machine control, the police frequently allowed con artists, pickpockets, burglars, and other thieves to operate freely provided that the police and the machine received a share of the profits. Similar arrangements existed between the police, the machine, and the owners of illegal saloons, gambling casinos, and houses of prostitution. Moreover, in order to help ensure the continuation of machine rule, the police routinely harassed and assaulted voters whom they believed were hostile to the machine. By the early twentieth century, the police possessed a well-deserved reputation for corruption, sloth, and brutality.¹⁰

Crusades to sever the ties between the police and the machine began in the late 1880s and continued intermittently through the 1920s. Historians have identified the leaders of these crusades as nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN POLICING
• PART II IMPEDIMENTS TO FULL INTEGRATION
• PART III PERCEIVED PERFORMANCE AND ATTITUDES TO WOMEN POLICE
• PART IV THE CURRENT STATUS OF WOMEN POLICE WORLDWIDE
• PART V PROSPECTS FOR FULL INTEGRATION
• Name Index