The first point to consider is the real nature of police duty; and an obvious initial disability of women for such work must be faced.

I. The Disability of Women

‘Right lives by law and law subsists by power’-such is the legend under one of the frescoes in the main hall of Old Bailey. Modern government, though based upon consent, must command the means of coercion. It would cease otherwise to be government. In this country, being the people that we are, we can ordinarily depend for coercion upon the mere muscle of stalwart men, and at the most upon the wooden truncheon.

Failure to provide the muscular arm would instantly depreciate the credit of law. For this reason a recruiting officer will not pass a candidate for the police, be he ever so well-groomed and well-read, unless he has the physical strength to uphold the fabric of government. Let the stripped candidate turn his back, extend his arms straight from the shoulders and then above his head. The ripple of muscle will be seen as he moves. If good muscle is not there, out goes the candidate. Sheer strength is essential. Advocates of the employment of women may naturally argue that the law is poorly enforced if it is enforced by mere fisticuffs, and that moral suasion in this enlightened age is infinitely better. There is not a doubt of it; the police well know the value of tact. At the same time, once the moral suasion has been entered on, there can be no halting or turning back if it does not succeed. Compromise is not possible; the will of the community must be flatly imposed upon the individual, whether he likes it or not. It is a situation to which an old saying of Nelson rather aptly applies: ‘To negotiate with effect, force should be at hand and in a situation to act.’ If the moral suasion of the police fails, as at times it must, force must be available, and must be used. A constable does not satisfy the legal requirements regarding his post unless he is ‘fit and able’ to apply that physical force.

The police constable thus represents the physical power of the law, and women do not represent the physical power of the species. The radical disability on the part of ordinary women to act as constables is therefore obvious; a disability which no argument, so far, has in any way discounted. It may be, as held by the Departmental Committee of 1920, that the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act has removed any legal disability; but no Act of Parliament can confer physical strength. The Committee of 1920 really put the thing in the nutshell: ‘We do not think,’ it said, ‘that policewomen should be required to perform duties which necessarily involve the exercise of physical force and consequent exposure to physical danger.’ Everyone would no doubt agree. But if women are thus admitted to be unit for the fundamental duty of constables, why insist on calling them constables? The position produced is a false one, being mere make-believe. To speak thus is not to contend that women should form no part of the police service, but only to indicate that, if the facts are looked fairly in the face, a need to redefine that status of policewomen will be at one apparent.

II. The Effect of Mechanisation

Clearly the problem of women’s share in the police department is not self-contained, but must be viewed in relation to the more general aspects of women’s activities. The wider view helps to elucidate the immediate past, and is essential in estimating the future.

Miss Rose Macaulay focused a whole fund of truth and humour into a scrap of casual conversation when she loosed the tongue of ‘Mrs. Arthur’ on the subject of journalism: ‘Ed has to do it too,’ said his mother. ‘He mayn’t describe a street incident without saying women were in it, and if they weren’t in it he has to say they looked on. Haven’t you, Ed?’ It cannot be denied that just this impulse was in part responsible for the advent of the post-war policewomen. Women had to figure throughout the whole picture, the police included. In difference to the general doctrine of parity, they were subsequently also attested as constables in order to put them on a footing with men, the crucial point being thus ignored that the advance of mechanization, which has put women on terms with men in so many other fields, has not done so in the case of police work.

The broad fact of the moment in the world at large is that the male genius has recoiled upon itself; men have proved themselves too clever by half. Male genius has reduced most processes that were coarse and arduous to a matter of machinery, controlled by the pressing of a button; and woman at that point has seen her opportunity. Once the button has been provided, woman has been prompt to point out that she can press it just as well as a man can. A woman aviator of late flew alone over continents. Obviously the whole thing was a dazzling triumph of male genius. This world of ours, once all matted over with forest and full of savage monsters, has been explored and mapped out by generations of tough male creatures, myriads of whom were sacrificed in the process. The seas were explored and charted by whipcord males of the type who could furl sails, stiff with ice and gone mad in a hurricane, on black nights off the Horn, aloft there on the footropes of a swinging yardarm. And God knows how many of them perished! Then travel, primitive at first with its camel caravans and wind ships, was gradually mechanized by steam, electricity, petrol. But holocausts of male victims had been levied in every field before the dainty aeroplane had been devised, with everything in a nutshell. The problem of transit has, indeed, been solved; a woman already can travel alone; next it will be a child, or a robot.

As in travel, so in warfare. Lady Rhondda was reported a year or so back to have said that in the next war women will be conscripted. It may be. Battleaxes, calling from iron muscle, are not now used; male genius has mechanized all that. We do these things delicately now by the toughing of triggers, or by electrically loaded machines that kill at a dozen miles; and there are no doubts many parts that women could play. Even today, however, in fields where mechanization is not complete, women as a whole do not simply follow in the wake of men, though individuals may do so. When the Rye lifeboat was lost, with its complete crew of nineteen men (who left behind them a small hamlet populated by widows and children), the Lifeboat Institution was asked whether a new boat would be installed. The answer was unequivocal: ‘We could not get a crew. The men have gone.’

III. Reciprocal Service

The Committee of 1924 recorded that some witnesses, ‘especially those who advocate the employment of women on terms equal in all respects to those of men,’ considered it necessary that the women should become constables. The fact, as already shown, is that terms are not equal: women are not recruited by the same standards as men, nor for the same duties. The general question of female employment is much influenced at the moment by women’s recent proposition of sex equality-a claim not based upon super-cultivation of women’s hereditary sphere, but upon suffrage and a general emulation of the work hitherto discharged by men. Considering the radical disparity of the sexes, the proposition of equality is likely to be about as useful as an attempt to prove precise equality between locomotive and its permanent way, or between a house and garden. Obviously each sex is supplementary to the other; they are built to co-operate. The heavy burden of child-bearing falls exclusively upon the woman, and it is a burden in regard to which man cannot help her. But man, differently built, offsets the burden by shouldering tasks not fit for woman, and the physical enforcement of the law is probably one of them.

A relevant point is the extreme suddenness of the present phase of women’s activities, and the precipitancy of recent sex legislation. The village conclave of primeval man was the first social institution from which the complex institutions of modern life have sprung, and its lineal descendent in England is our House of Commons. Ten years ago women had no direct voice in the electing chamber; today their voice preponderates over that of men. A complete reversal in ten years, after a history of ten thousand, may be well enough; but it takes one’s breath away just a little. For the establishment of permanent social reform the ‘inevitability of gradualness’ is a recognized principle; it is also a commonplace to say that true evolution does not proceed per saltum. A ‘jump’ so sudden as this must certainly mean extreme instability in the future. As regards female employment, the chances are that the phase of the moment will not last; the mimetic impulse will exhaust itself, and women, with their new intellectual activity, will begin blazing their own new trails in wholly original directions. The modern ideas of equality, interchangeability, and composition are quite likely to subside as rapidly as they have arisen. Disparity, partnership, and cooperation are the old root ideas which are pretty sure to remain.

In the meantime, women’s entry into the ‘world’s work’ is a fact; and, from the point of view of the community, everything depends upon how the new accession of strength is to be applied. If women are content to work on men’s lines, their advent is not of much consequence except to themselves, the accession representing merely so many additional units. If, on the other hand, women enter as women and remain distinctive and original, then the accession represents a totally new factor, likely to prove a quite unprecedented value. It may gratify the individual woman to take on a job which a man can do; it is likely to help the State a great deal more when she takes on a job that a man cannot do.

In that light the problem presents itself in regard to the police. Even if women were much fitter than they are for men’s duties, the police service would gain no benefit by recruiting them unless the supply of men had run dry. But if, on the other hand, the police service can get women who really are women, and will bring the independent outlook and shrewd counsel which a sensible wife brings to her husband, then, indeed, the service may benefit exceedingly.

IV. The Present Problem in the Police

It seems clear that (1) a proportion of women will be available to help man in fields which had hitherto been exclusively his; that (2) the police service will undoubtedly be richer if it can really absorb women, acquiring with them the separate standpoint and solid wisdom of their sex; but that (3) if women are to be usefully absorbed into the police service, they must be taken on as women, and not, so to speak, as imitation men.

At present the only regular door of entry to the police is as a constable, and for the full duties of a constable women, as already indicated, are not fit candidates. Auxiliary duties, such as attendance on female prisoners and (sometimes) the taking of statements, are things that patently belong to women. But more than that is wanted; a sure footing in the general organization must be obtained. For the logical admission of women two alternatives only are open: the first is to cease calling them constables, and the second is to redefine the qualifications of constables. The latter is probably the better alternative. It is here that the real difficulty lies. The difficulty is, in fact, part and parcel of a very wide police problem, a problem which involves the whole machinery of police organization.

There can be little doubt that the organization of modern police (a very young institution) is in an elementary and undeveloped condition as of yet. Much, were this the time and place, might be said on that head; for immediate purposes it is enough to notice that at present the police constable, as a basic unit, appears to be deemed the only possible one. In London it is the rule, outside the Mounted Branch, the Public Carriage Branch, and Thames Division, for all uniform constables to be general practitioners in police work. Male constables are not, as a rule, highly educated; it is not expected that brains will be their strongest suit. Generally speaking, countrymen make the best constables-men take from the tail of the plough. The task of turning such material into fit agents for the enforcement of the whole complicated law of England is a stringent one. No one, indeed, is more conscious of this than an official who has been in turn recruiting officer and staff officer. It is a chastening thought-when looking over the shoulder of some candidate whose physique and type are eminently good, and watching his crabbed calligraphy-to visualize in fancy the volumes of the public general statutes and the vasty aggregations of statutory orders and regulations! This man is the man who has to enforce them. It is a chastening task, also, to seek and resolve portions of that complex mass into terms which young constables can absorb and administer.

From that problem, it is probably true, there will never be any effective escape; but it is probably not less true that the exclusive reign of the ‘general practitioner’ will not last forever. While the police constable will remain the backbone of the service, he may before long be partially relieved by specialists, some of whom even may not be given his omnibus training. Objection to the creation of a body of traffic constables (trained ad hoc, without being put through the whole course) is partly based on the ground that a traffic constable might at any time be called on to perform any duty belonging to an ordinary constable, and he must not be found wanting. There is no reason why he should be found wanting: the special constable, much used already as an emergency substitute, has been able to play his limited role with real success. This prejudice is a survival of that impulse towards superficial uniformity which led, some thirty years ago, to the swearing-in of skilled engineers and carpenters to be responsible for the mechanical work upon the police launches in the Thames Division. That phase has passed; a reverse process has already begun of substituting clerks, mechanics, motor drivers, and other workers for the police employed otherwise than on the true duties of officers of the peace. The process thus begun may well eventuate in a system of suiting the agent to the task. Traffic constables, women constables, and others may be as clearly differentiated from police constables as park constables and railway constables already are. Their attestation would be of a separate and different order. Working upon those lines, the difficulty of admitting women on a sound and logical basis would disappear and the present system of make-believe would be terminated.

It remains to discover the duties upon which women can exercise their own distinctive abilities. The question still perplexes even the most sympathetic observers; the perplexity was obvious throughout the Report of the Departmental Committee of 1924, and the Royal Commission has not finally resolved it, the subject being largely (it was found) beyond its terms of reference. The straight answer to the question is that the problem will not be adequately solved until it is solved by women, and by women alone. Men with long experience will be at hand to advise and co-ordinate; but the impulses must come from women only. And women cannot effectively work out their ideas from an armchair, but only from the streets, the police courts, the public houses, the gutters, the slums. It would not be a case of employing ‘teachers, nurses and women of university training’ merely to carry out specified duties; the women would be expected, while carrying out duties already specified (and no more), to be bringing their minds constructively to bear, all the time, on the problem as a whole. The plan would certainly have its troubles; but then, after all, police work is mostly trouble. It may be necessary to employ women almost unproductively fro some long period, but, if full results are to accrue, it must be done. There must be no haste in this matter, save haste to make an effective start.

Advocates of the employment of women in the police have been apt to put themselves in the wrong, on existing standards, by confounding welfare work and police work. The point has been much discussed. Welfare work, immensely important as it is, is not at present regarded as police work. Non the less, the instinct that reaches out in that direction may be a sound one. Under Blackstone’s definition of the ‘public police and economy’ welfare work might, of course, easily be included; and the question may indeed become a living issue before long. The ‘deterrent’ effect of women in uniform is stressed by the Royal Commission, and an extension of their activities may well help bring nearer the day when ‘the individuals of the State, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood and good manners, and to be decent, industrious and inoffensive in their respective stations’-that being the true result of police regulation as envisaged by Blackstone.

The prime need of the moment is to obtain women of adequate mental caliber, and to have them out and about, assessing police problems from every angle at first hand. ‘The vinegary spinster and blighted middle-aged fanatic,’ to whom Sir Nevil Macready alluded, are perhaps figures of fiction rather than a factor of serious danger in this or any other field of women’s work today. ‘Broad-minded, kindly, sensible’ women would be obtained. But women with the devotion, and the vision, of pioneers are at this stage needed; lesser women can follow when the paths have been made straight for them. To begin with lesser women will merely mean that the old mimetic lines will be followed. Recruitment of women for this purpose should not, for obvious reasons, follow the lines of male recruitment. Women should be recruited without any regard to their fitness for a ‘rough-and-tumble’; they should often be taken as finely bred and intellectual as may be, subject only to their possessing a physique adequate to withstand the exposure to weather. The duty of the woman constable, faced with some male (or female) bully bent on mischief, would be to retire undamaged, just as a frigate was duty-bound to fly from a four-decker. The simile is old-world, but it cannot be rendered in modern terms, because mechanization has supervened and the weaker now has torpedoes. In case, in the connexion, it should be contended that women could similarly overcome their physical handicap by resort to jiu-jitsu, the idea must be scotched at one. Violence begets violence. Jiu-jitsu practiced by women, though triumphant at the moment, would lead to female skulls being cracked from behind by male bullies in ambush. Punch made a joke of it when the woman candidate, on being questioned, said that she would call a ‘policeman.’ That, in fact, would be her literal duty.

It is already known in the police service that, apart from what they may be able separately to accomplish, women can at times usefully co-operate with male colleagues in matters of inquiry and observation. The Criminal Investigation Department also forms an important field. The practice of recruitment of men for the Criminal Investigation Department in the Metropolitan Police is to draw them from the vast field of selection offered by a force of 20,000 men, thus obtaining the men who, under police conditions, have shown sufficient aptitude. The plan answers admirable, and is probably better than a system of direct recruitment from unproved material outside the force. A similar (if smaller) field of selection among women is wanted, women who can be watched and assessed under police conditions before being absorbed for work of criminal investigation. This is already done in a small way. Although, on the one hand, the field of work open to women in the police is likely, for reasons already stated, to be a very limited one, that field, on the other hand, offers singular opportunities to the protagonists of women’s work. Its problems are the primitive and enduring ones of ordinary humanity; and women do not start subject to the prodigious juniority which is theirs in the long-descended and expert sciences; they can ‘start fair,’ so to speak.

The all-important point is that women should be the architects of their own house, that they should be, within the strict limitations imposed by realities, the arbiters of their own activities. In police work it will be no case of easy platform triumphs; it will be a matter of solid and inconspicuous work at foundations, right out of sight. Educated women of the type who are ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause, and to work without notice or name, are not lacking in this country. Here is their opportunity.

If thus, in place of the rough-and-ready affiliation of women to men’s constitutions which is taking place elsewhere, the police service can absorb and employ its women’s own lines, the result should be pre-eminent.

V. Conclusion

To sum it up, the general position is this:

At the present time the public asks for women police, and the police service must react adequately to the demand. On survey of the situation it seems that certain difficulties exist.

The first difficulty is that constables represent the physical strength of the law, and physical strength is not the forte or métier of women. Women not possesses of the physical strength are not really placed on a footing with men by mere attestation; they are simply placed on a footing that is false. To deal in make-believe is no help to anyone-it serves only to damage a good case. The whole idea of parity is in this connexion a false one, and should be jettisoned at once. Women police are a branch recruited by different standards and for different problems from men, and their real value only accrues when they act instinctively as women. They should therefore stand on a sound and separate footing of their own, and not falsely on an imitation footing for which they are not qualified. This difficulty is easily obviated, if there is courage to face the fact.

The second difficulty is that, after ten years’ experience of women police, it cannot be clearly seen (welfare work apart) how women are to be employed, on the uniform side, otherwise than in the ancillary offices which were already being assigned to women of the war-namely, in effect as matrons, assistants, and so forth. The scope of these duties has been extended, but not really changed.

After all, however, it is not to be expected that the problem of women’s future can be solved by men, however experienced, or even by intellectual women who have not had close touch with normal police work at first hand. A women’s service, to be really adequate, must be designed as well as conducted by women. In order, therefore, that the public demand shall be met and the problem shall be adequately solved, the time has arrived when thoughtful and zealous women should have the opportunity of assessing the position at first hand over a considerable period, and of building up a true women’s service in the same way as men have built up their own services. In this connexion it is only to be expected that, among other things, the much-discussed question of the border-line between police and welfare work will be once more revived. In any event, the problem of women’s employment in the police should, as a result, be brought very definitely nearer an eventual solution.