ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the history of the police as an organisation as it is about their work. The Police Review shows the ways in which readers of the journal saw the introduction of women into their traditionally male preserve of policing. The chapter shows that strategies and tactics used by the police and government to subordinate and segregate women so that they stayed within strict limits of society’s expectations of women’s roles - in the home or in back-room jobs and/or with women and children, the latter involving the supervision of female morals. It examines these tactics and strategies used to maintain the women who wished to undertake police work into segregated or subordinated roles. The widespread fear of naïve girls sinking into prostitution was said to need the services of mature, mainly middle-class women to help them lead a moral life and control their sexuality–part of the discourse of social purity.
