The History of Women Policing

English: The History of Women Policing
Name
Institution
Women in Policing
After the war against inequality between men and women was started, women were allowed to transition from being house managers to taking other careers outside the home. However, even with the argument that equality was achieved, women could not assume the same careers as men. This is the reason women were more in careers involving caring functions such as nursing. In addition, men were more in management positions and technical careers compared to women who were considered less competent to take the same roles. Among the careers that women were not allowed to enroll in was the police force. As explained by Pruitt (2016), the thought of having women in the police force raised security and safety issues to themselves and their colleagues. Additionally, including women in the force was argued to change the nature of the organization.
Researching on how women joined and advanced in the police force is therefore an important topic. This is because it helps the challenges women have faced when joining some professions. For instance, entering the police force for women starts as carers and matrons. It also identifies some challenges women are facing to date in the force. This topic is therefore important in contemporary policing in explaining how difficult it was for women to enter the force and what support they need to be treated the same as their male colleagues.
The History of Women Policing
Since women were not allowed in the police force initially, they started as Police Matrons. These roles were played by female civilians who were appointed to supervise, search, and escort female prisoners in the courts or police stations. They were also obligated to prepare female bodies that were brought to police stations mortuaries for police surgeon examination. Even these roles were for women to have a taste of the police force and interact with police officers, it is unfortunate that most Matrons were police officers’ wives. Nonetheless, the Metropolitan Police had their first two Matrons in 1883 while the Manchester Police has several Matrons by 1890s (Williams, 2011).
Since matrons did not have arrest powers, police women in the early 1900s distinguished themselves from matrons because they had arrest powers. However, they were also different from male police officers since they were not perceived as crime fighters but rather as providers of protective and social services under auspices of police departments. An example was Lola Baldwin, one among the first policewomen. She was a social worker who was hired by recruited by the Portland Police Department. Her role was to patrol in plain clothes instead of police uniform and thus protect women. As a result, she was assigned to areas where promiscuous behavior and alcohol consumptions were thought to be high such as dance halls, movie theaters, pool rooms, entertainment areas, and train stations. Baldwin was followed by Alice Stebbins Wells who was appointed in 1910 to the Lose Angeles Police Department. In 1914, Wells founded the International Association of Policewomen to advocate for employment of policewomen (Pruitt, 2016).
The nature of policewomen was protected and reinforced by WCTU, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was a politically powerful organization aimed at expanding the role of women in civic and government affairs so as to combat corruption and violent crime. WCTU was later joined by the Progressive Era reformers to restructure policing and make it less linked to politics. In order to perform their roles effectively, early policewomen were usually religious, upper-middle class, college-educated, and native-born. They were mostly in social service careers in order to help in professional and social interaction (Segrave, 2014).
However, after WWII, a new type of policewomen force was born. The desire to be isolated from the wider police force changed with women who entered the force then demanding for full equality and integration; this was based on societal changes as well as laws that demanded for equal employment opportunities. As a result, Archbold and Schulz (2012) argue that women who joined the police force after WWII had earlier served in the military. In addition, many of them were middle class instead of upper class and very few had college degrees. With the women joining the military changing, their responsibilities changed as well. This way, they were more involved...