The first female officers entered policing in the UK in 1915, during the First World War. The upheavals of wartime, especially the movement of large numbers of troops and refugees, were putting vulnerable women and naive recruits at risk. Pressures to introduce policewomen as agents of control into this situation came from outside the police and government. An international alliance promoting the cause of females in law enforcement had flourished for several decades. Its origins lay in various nineteenthcentury moral reform societies that had campaigned for such causes as the employment of prison matrons in the USA and of women as Poor Law guardians in Britain. By the early 1900s, women had already become police officers in several US states and in a number of German cities. A group of well connected women, who had been associated with firstwave feminism and the suffrage movement, pressed for volunteer policewomen to patrol British cities and garrison towns. When they achieved this, the pioneers funded and provided training for these first policewomen.