ABSTRACT
The rest of this chapter will seek to answer these questions and to demonstrate how the few women who entered the service fared, and what areas of work they undertook. In addition, the role of women police officers will be compared with that of police wives, to try and discover what divided them and what they had in common during what has been termed the ‘latency’ period of the feminist movement.1 Although an earlier generation had gained some success in promoting the acceptance of women within the police, by the 1930s the high tide of suffragist and feminist campaigns and activity had turned, leaving a modest body of achievement behind. The impetus and fervour behind earlier feminist campaigns and causes had waned, and left exposed the essentially unequal and subordinate position of women in all spheres of public life. Drawing on broader societal norms, women involved in the police service from the 1930s to the end of the war, whether in an official or unofficial capacity, were therefore expected to provide what was essentially an extension of the supportive and caring tasks
that they normally performed in the domestic sphere. As policemen’s wives, they were expected to uphold their husband’s professional standing and to adapt their behaviour accordingly and - in rural areas - to help him in a number of unpaid tasks by manning the telephone, conveying messages and running police errands. As women police officers wpcs were, until the integration of the sexes in the 1970s, largely organized as a separate, specialist branch that focused on work relating to women and children. It was on this basis - and on this basis only - that wpcs found acceptance in the service, and their usefulness as police officers was regarded as strictly limited to such work. In this way, the main bastion of police masculinity remained unsullied and unbreached until several decades after the Second World War.
