ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways in which the overlapping concepts of class, gender, age, race and space shaped professional strategies towards violence from 1918 to 1939. It examines how notions of separate spheres influenced the work of women police and surgeons. The Women Police Volunteers, set up in 1914 by Margaret Damer Dawson, Mary Allen and Nina Boyle of the Women's Freedom League (WFL), aimed to provide a body of female officials to question women and child victims, attend to their welfare and escort them in court. Throughout the 1930s, women's groups in Oldham lobbied the Watch Committee for additional women police officers to work with Woman police constable (WPC) Clara Walkden, who had been appointed in 1921. Women police and doctors increasingly shifted their attention to children as the main objects of concern, failing to acknowledge the presence and needs of adult women victims.
