Women in Policing

Although the foundations of today’s police service were laid with the introduction of Peel’s ‘New Police’ in 1829, it was not until after the end of the First World War that the first women were officially recognised as police officers. These early years of women in policing are revealing not only for the strength of feeling characterised by ‘the grudging admission of a limited number of female officers’,1 but also because they demonstrate the origin of the sexual division of labour which has in a large part persisted at least up until the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act. It was during these first years of the women police that their caring, nurturing and feminine role as ‘moral guardians’ to children and to fellow members of the weaker sex was established. Acceptance of even this restricted contribution to policing initially met with hostility and resentment, not least from the Police Federation who were ‘jealous of the introduction of women into a traditionally male occupation’.2 Indeed, the more recent debate which surrounded the inclusion of the police service within the Sex Discrimination Act was reminiscent of this earlier struggle to establish a role for women in policing.