Women's Police Service

The Women's Police Service (WPS) was a national voluntary organisation in the United Kingdom.

History

Formation

It was originally established as the Women Police Volunteers (WPV) in 1914 by Nina Boyle and Margaret Damer Dawson, who had met when Damer Dawson was working for the Criminal Law Amendment Committee in 1914.[1] Before the First World War, campaigners for women's rights proposed that there should be female as well as male police officers, but the outbreak of war prevented any progress.[2] Both Boyle and Damer Dawson observed the trouble faced in London by Belgian and French refugees in London after the initial German advance, particularly the danger of their being recruited for prostitution on arrival at railway stations[2][1] They were also concerned about existing prostitutes loitering near railway stations used by the increasing number of servicemen passing through the capital.

The pair gained the approval of Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to train women, who were then patrol in London on a voluntary basis with the role of offering advice and support to women and children to help prevent sexual harassment and abuse.[2] [3] Nina Boyle led the organisation with Dawson as assistant.[4] The volunteer women were allowed to officially patrol the streets of London and to assist women in need, with men of the Metropolitan Police and other forces asked to assist them. Boyle herself was one of the first women to appear in a police uniform.[5]

Women's Police Service

Boyle's background was in the Women's Freedom League (WFL) and so for her the WPV was an opportunity for women to assist in catching criminals and to challenge male control of the practice of the law, particularly in relation to sexual issues - in other words an instrument to help and support women rather than to control their activities. However, Damer Dawson was more concerned with policing public morality, particularly that of working-class women - one of her pre-war campaigns had been against animal vivisection. The government agreed and from its foundation onwards the WPV's role was delimited to enforcing the Defence of the Realm Act and public decency and supervising female workers such as munitionettes.[4] While this side of their work was generally approved, Boyle was to become alarmed that her organisation and other similar initiatives were being used to support anti-female propaganda and to curtail women's civil liberties.[6] She also deplored the adoption of Regulation 40D, an anti-prostitution amendment to the 1914 Defense of the Realm Act, that in many people's view revived some of the objectionable features of the nineteenth-century Contagious Diseases Acts.[7] She described Regulation 40D, which punished women for their sexual relations with members of the armed services, as 'besmirching' the good name of women.[8]

Damer Dawson in her WPS uniform, c.1917

In February 1915 Boyle and Damer Dawson fell out over the use of the WPV to enforce a curfew on women of so-called 'loose character' near a service base in Grantham, which proved unacceptable to Boyle and her beliefs.[9] Boyle also denounced the use of the Defence of the Realm Act by the authorities in Cardiff to impose a curfew on what were described as 'women of a certain class' between the hours of 7 pm and 8 am.[10] In contrast, Damer Dawson took a more pragmatic line, with the support of most of the WPV's members.[2] Boyle asked for Dawson's resignation, but instead Dawson convened a meeting of 50 policewomen, all but two of which agreed to follow Dawson's lead.[4] Dawson changed the name of WPV to the Women Police Service, took on Mary Sophia Allen as her second-in-command and ended all links with the WFL.[11]

Dawson (left) and Allen in their WPS uniforms.

While an organisation known as the WPV continued to patrol on its own terms in Brighton and part of London until 1916, Dawson's new service enjoyed much greater success, carrying out contract work for the Ministry of Munitions and the Royal Irish Constabulary.[12][13] In August 1915 in Grantham, Edith Smith of the WPS was appointed the first woman police constable in England with full power of arrest.[14] The WPS's benevolent service also founded a babies' home in Kent, which after Dawson's death was renamed the "Damer Dawson Memorial Home for Babies".[4] As the first uniformed women's police service, both the WPS and the WPV made progress in gaining acceptance of women's role in police work.

Post-war

As the first uniformed women's police services, the WPV and the WPS helped accustom the government and the British public to women exercising policing functions. However, it was the members of a third organization - the Voluntary Women Patrols of the National Union of Women Workers - who would be drawn upon to form Britain's first official women's police force, the Metropolitan Police Women Patrols, in 1918.[15][16][17]

Damer Dawson requested to have the WPS's volunteers made into official Met police officers, but the Commissioner refused as he felt that it would cause friction because the women were too well educated.[2][1] Instead the WPS was renamed the Women's Auxiliary Service in 1920 and continued even after the introduction of women into police forces such as the Metropolitan Police in 1919.[18] Allen represented the WAS on a visit to the British Army of the Rhine in 1923 to advise on the use of women police.[19] She also assigned it strike-breaking duties during the 1926 General Strike.

Decline

When the Lord President of the Council Viscount Halifax set up the Women's Voluntary Services for Civil Defence in 1938, the WAS accepted a government invitation to be represented on the body's Advisory Council - Allen fulfilled this role until January 1940, when she stopped attending its meetings. It is unclear when WAS ceased to exist but it seems that this had occurred in a de facto sense by 1940 - when asked in the House of Commons on 12 June that year if the government would close down WAS, Osbert Peake, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, stated "It is extremely doubtful whether this so-called organisation has any corporate existence at the present time".[20] From the 1940s onwards the phrase 'Women's Auxiliary Services' was used as a catch-all term for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Auxiliary Territorial Service, Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Land Army, nurses and other women in the armed services, rather than for Allen's organisation.

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References
  1. Margarget Damar Dawson, Spartacus-Education, retrieved 19 July 2014
  2. Kramarae, Cheris (2000). Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Women. Routledge. ISBN 1135963150. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
  3. Margaret Jackson, The real facts of life: feminism and the politics of sexuality, c 1840-1940; Taylor & Francis, 1994 p. 51
  4. Boyd, Nina (2013). From Suffragette to Fascist the Many Lives of Mary Sophia Allen. Stroud: The History Press. p. contents. ISBN 0752492780. Retrieved 20 July 2014.
  5. Elizabeth Crawford, Nina Boyle in The Women's Suffrage Movement: a reference guide, 1866-1928; UCL Press, 1999 p. 75
  6. Joan Lock, The British policewoman: her story; R Hale, 1979 p. 23
  7. "VENEREAL DISEASE (House of Commons debate, 16 April 1918, Hansard, volume 105)".
  8. Susan R. Grayzel, Women's identities at war: gender, motherhood, and politics in Britain and France during the First World War; UNC Press, 1999 p. 130
  9. Cheris Kramarae, Dale Spender (eds.), Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Identity politics to publishing; Routledge, 2000 p. 1192
  10. Jalna Hanmer, Jill Radford, Elizabeth Anne Stanko (eds.), Women, policing, and male violence: international perspectives; Routledge, 1989 p. 31
  11. "Joan Lock, The British Policewoman (London: Robert Hale, 2015), chapter 7".
  12. "The Women's Police Service During the First World War" (PDF).
  13. "Hat, Women's Police Service". Imperial War Museums.
  14. Kelly, Kay (27 November 2012). "First police women in UK". Grantham People. Archived from the original on 23 February 2014. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
  15. "History of Met Women". MetWPA.org.uk.
  16. "Timeline of women police officers in the United Kingdom".
  17. Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby. A History of British Policing from the C18th to the Present (2010, Quercus), page 157
  18. "Women in the Police Service, 1914-1918". Imperial War Museums.
  19. "OVERSEAS: Europe (Code 0(V)): Visit of Commandant Mary Allen (Women's Auxiliary Service) to the British Army of the Rhine in connection with use of Policewomen (National Archives, WO 32/3562)".
  20. "WOMEN'S AUXILIARY SERVICE - House of Commons debate, 12 June 1940, volume 361 cc1254-5".

Bibliography
  • Mary S. Allen, The Pioneer Policewoman, Chatto & Windus. London, 1925
  • R.M. Douglas, Feminist Freikorps: The British Voluntary Women police, 1914-1940. Praeger Publishers, Westport. 1999
  • Louise A. Jackson, Women Police. Gender, Welfare, and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century, Manchester University Press, 2006
  • Phillipa Levine, '"Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should": Women Police in World War I.', The Journal of Modern History 1994; 66(1):34-78
  • Joan Lock, The British Policewoman. Her Story (Robert Hale, 1979).
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