Women in Policing

Women Enter Police Departments

The first confirmed appointment of a woman as a regular member of a police department was in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1903. Within a decade, there were women officers, called female assistants, assigned in 19 German cities. Each worked with women and juvenile victims and criminals, setting the tone for the work policewomen would do around the world for at least 80 years and defining the role that many still perform. In 1911, Denmark appointed a uniformed woman constable to Aalborg, a large provincial town. Women joined the police in Great Britain in 1915 after a long battle involving suffragists and those concerned with combating vice. As in many countries, World War I concerns over the morality of young women during a time of tension and changing social mores speeded up the introduction of women into policing. In Canada, similar to the United States, women joined a number of city police departments first as matrons, beginning in 1912, including Halifax, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Between 1913 and 1917, many of these cities also hired policewomen with powers of arrest. The first two women joined the South Australia police in 1915, followed 2 years later by women in Australia's Victoria.

In these countries, as in the United States and Great Britain, women were hired to provide social welfare to women and children. The impetus was the upheaval of World War I and feminist concerns about the status of women generally and issues surrounding prostitution and immorality. Although this paralleled development in the United States, a consistent difference between it and other nations was the resistance of U.S. policewomen to wearing uniforms, which resulted in American policewomen working in [Page 1382]plainclothes until the 1970s. Policewomen elsewhere usually worked in military-style uniforms somewhat similar to their male colleagues.

Poland had a particularly active group of police-women beginning in 1925, when they received training at the police college in Warsaw. Led by a female Army lieutenant, who was given the title of Chief Commandant of the Women Police, the officers worked closely with groups fighting to suppress trafficking in women and children. Despite their advanced educations (most had a secondary school education and two were university graduates) and their training in subjects identical to male recruits, the first 23 women met resistance from male officers. In Europe, France and Spain were the slowest to add women to their police forces. Spain appointed 15 women to its Vigilance Department, primarily to work at the Barcelona Exhibition, in 1929. This was similar to the United States, where cities often appointed policewomen when large exhibitions were planned that would draw unattached men and local women. In Spain, more than 1,000 applicants sought the positions; preference was given to those between the ages of 30 and 40 years, but three of those selected were eliminated because they were unwilling to wear uniforms. France appointed its first woman in 1930; she worked in uniform in a seaside resort in Brittany.

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