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Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Term Paper: Women’s Right

In 1963, the New York Court of Appeals disrupted an entrenched male privilege in the New York Police Department (NYPD) when it cleared the way for policewoman Felicia Shpritzer and her peers to take the promotional examination for police sergeant. Nevertheless, although Shpritzer's case against the city removed a longstanding barrier to expanded roles for women, it did not argue that women were men's equals. Instead, the plaintiffs argued that supervisory duties were irrelevant to gender. Although their campaign succeeded in putting women in supervisory police roles and indicated a changed playing field favorable to women in the 1960s, the victory imbued greater ambiguity than David's slaying of Goliath. Policewomen advocates in the early 1960s continued to struggle with the liberating and debilitating potential of domestic ideals.
Women claimed that they were the ideal complements to male officers. Rather than embracing the democratic ideal of equal opportunity as Black men did in challenging their exclusion from police jobs, Black and White women pursuing expanded roles in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, more often than not, defined themselves as the alter ego of the patrolman. If the model male officer was physically imposing, combative, and heroic, they asserted, women officers be would nurturing, motherly, and protective. Similar to women making inroads into other areas of employment in this period, these women justified their new roles as a fulfillment of their feminine duties. World War II era concerns about social hygiene, morality, and female delinquency, as well as postwar concerns about delinquent boys and girls, provided women with a gendered wedge for working in the male space of New York's “mean streets.”
Policewomen advocates incrementally encroached upon the male domain of patrol work by illustrating the relevance of feminine skills such as prevention, sensitivity, communication, and child protection. By the beginning of the 1960s, the increasingly similar nature of policewomen's and policemen's duties, despite their quitedistinctly gendered justifications, led some women to question the validity of the separate job titles, “policewoman” and “patrolman.” The problem was that the femininity campaign for policewomen advocates, which had been so successful in expanding the duties of women's work in law enforcement, further entrenched the rhetorical boundaries between policewomen and patrolmen. Although individual women may have privately embraced radical equality in gender roles, few policewomen advocates before the mid-1960s eschewed the enabling languages of motherhood and domesticity.
Race further complicated the realization of women's equal treatment in the NYPD. Black women were doubly discriminated against, and soon discovered that they could not always enjoy the protection of domestic ideology. Instead they found themselves assigned to dangerous undercover work. Formulating strategies for access to privileged jobs held by men in the police department was not as simple as choosing between arguments about women's likeness to or difference from men. It required a sorting out of racialized conceptions of gender and gendered conceptions of race.

NYPD officials employed race and gender together to structure the way they policed the city. Women were neither able to patrol certain areas of the city nor were they eligible to advance to sergeant, lieutenant, or captain. However, they could make lateral moves to specialized detective units, which often involved more challenging, albeit dangerous, tasks. NYPD officials frequently encouraged Black women to pursue such jobs because they could purportedly infiltrate dangerous neighborhoods without being detected. Also, supervisors seemed to believe that Black women could handle themselves in violent situations, while White women could not. One woman reported, “you might be asked to do something White women wouldn't be asked to do. When a White sergeant was looking at me, he wasn't looking at his mother or his sister. He might send me in a hallway or roof but he would never send a White young lady.” Whether consciously or not, White male supervisors were more protective of White policewomen.
The exclusion of most White women from dangerous detective duties reveals much about what White NYPD officials, New York politicians, and other citizens believed was the proper place of “true ladies” in the 1950s. Women were to partake in preventative police work rather than crime fighting. In exploring the ideology that undergirded this assumption, it is important to lay out the historical duties and idealized roles of policewomen in this period to illustrate how they have shifted over time. Of particular import is how these roles changed during World War II and the immediate postwar era. Despite the confining rhetoric of 1950s domestic ideology, policewomen were able to manipulate that language to their advantage. Leaders of the policewomen's movement learned that they could incrementally expand the sphere of policewomen's duties by invoking a traditionally feminine ideal in which policewomen would be responsible for the domestic welfare of the streets.

“Sober, Respectable, Women!” Police Matrons At The Turn-Of-The-Century
Advocates for women's rights embraced essentialized arguments about women's natures to provide an opening for women in police work. In New York and other cities in the late nineteenth century, women's organizations such as the Women's Prison Association, the National League of Women Voters, the American Female Guardian Society, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union encouraged social reform that would allow women to serve as matrons to care for female prisoners detained in police precincts. Before the 1890s, male officers, their wives, or the maid of the police station searched female prisoners (Brown 3). Of particular concern to women's groups was the potential for sexual abuse of female detainees. To prevent such misuses of power, reformers asserted that women, as bastions of virtue, should have a hand in police work to ensure the public good and welfare (Melchionne iv).

Male prison workers, who feared that women workers would displace them, retaliated by portraying the prison as a place of degeneracy that was unfit for women workers. Agreeing with the premise of women's clubs that women were naturally virtuous and moral, but manipulating that cultural value to contest reform within the police station, the Men's Prison Association argued that “a decent sober woman could not search a female alcoholic because she would be contaminated and demoralized by her contact with such depraved creatures” (qtd in Cohn 43). In the 1880s, Commissioner Vorhis opposed the use of women as police matrons because he thought that the job was too physically demanding for them. Policewomen in the 1900s, hearing similar claims from male patrol officers, would note that such objections were based on a fear that women would displace men in a field that had hitherto been considered a masculine domain (Cohn 43). In response to such claims, women's groups promised to ensure that candidates for the job of matron would be “of good moral character” and that they would secure letters of recommendation from 20 “respectable” women before they were appointed (Melchionne 37). Most men and women agreed that women ought to be models of virtue and morality, but disputed the implications of that outlook for women's employment.
The impingement of police matrons upon the terrain of male police work was neither understood nor promoted by women's activists as a case of women performing men's jobs. Rather, they saw themselves redefining the nature of a small aspect of police work as feminine. From their point of view, moral norms dictated that it was appropriate for women to care for women prisoners. They did not wish to challenge the conventional wisdom that men and women were physically, intellectually, or emotionally different. Indeed, it was this very difference that justified the limited incorporation of women into the station as matrons. Women's roles in police work in the NYPD were relatively static until World War I. This would be the case for women aspiring to police work in the future. Individuals could stretch the boundaries of their duties under creative titles and gain access to more interesting and challenging tasks. One exceptional case was Isabella Goodwin, who worked under the tide of matron at the Mercer Street Station from 1895 to 1912. While serving as a matron, Goodwin made a number of shrewd observations about women prisoners, which led to a supervisor's suggestion that she try her hand at detective work. They quickly realized that a woman could go undetected while investigating criminal activities. So, Goodwin was assigned detective duties by her male supervisors. She gathered evidence against fortunetellers, investigated banking scams and extortion rackets, and exposed fake medical practitioners. When Commissioner Dougherty learned of her work, he appointed her to the position of Detective First Grade, formalizing her position and more than doubling her salary. While Goodwin was exceptional, it was common for police departments to use matrons in capacities other than guarding female prisoners (Segrave 11). It was obvious to police officials that some tasks were more suitable for women. However, like other police matrons and their advocates, Goodwin remained guarded about her femininity, noting that her success in police work was due to her women's intuition,“ and that it took a toll on her work at home, where “a woman's duty is first and foremost.” Reifying her domestic primacy assured Goodwin protection from potential critics of her “public” work as a police detective.
More public roles in police work became possible for increasing numbers of women due to the physical and social dislocations of men and women during World War I. The war created the conditions under which women could make new claims about their relevance to police work. Three significant and interrelated phenomena led to these conditions: the number of men fighting overseas, the vacancy left in traditional men's jobs, and the social stresses on families due to absent parents. The incorporation of women into industry compounded the difficulties of family organization created by the heavy recruitment of men into the armed forces. Of particular concern to some Americans during and immediately after the war was the perceived decline in public morals and waywardness of America's youth. Many citizens feared that the concentration of young men at the new military recruiting centers posed dangers to vulnerable young girls. Since most politicians already viewed women as the guardians of public virtue, it made sense to solicit their help in this morality crusade.

The NYPD defended its use of women as auxiliary police reserves by pointing to women's successful substitution for men in other industries and political and social spheres. It was also a matter of a labor shortage. The city had already organized a police reserve of male officers to replace the soldiers, but by May 1918, it was clear that they were still understaffed. In order to fill the vacancies Mayor John Hylan organized the Committee of Women on National Defense, which established a small unit of women as “protective officers.” Special Deputy Commissioner Rodman Wanamaker, head of the Police Reserves, constructed a tenuous defense of the newly hired women. He said, “New York women have the vote,” and therefore “they should have an active part in enforcing the laws.” Despite such treatments of women as potential equals, Wanamaker justified the department's inclusion of them by focusing on their responsibilities for problems relating to youth and sexuality. Furthermore, he made it clear that their service was to be both “temporary and voluntary.” Wanamaker divided the city into zones that included a number of precincts, and assigned policewomen to each zone to patrol and look after the welfare of young girls who might be found in the company of men in secluded place such as parks and beaches (Melchionne 95). Although Wanamaker granted women new crime-fighting responsibilities, he reserved for men the more critical work of “rough and violent lawbreakers.” As their title suggested, protective officers were assigned to do preventative rather than punitive work. Although vested with the power to do so, the more than 5,000 recruits made no arrests, contenting themselves to report to their superior officers only the most flagrant cases of disorder among soldiers. Fulfilling their duties as moral guardians, women protective officers scouted the streets, parks, camps, armories, recruiting stations, dance halls, motion-picture theaters, and amusement parks. Likewise, they conducted investigative work only in places where young girls might be exploited-furnished rooming houses, places of questionable employment, restaurants, and railroad terminals (Melchionne 58).


Reference:

Crocco, Margaret Smith. Social Studies, Nov2007, Vol. 98 Issue 6, p257-269, 13p, 1 map

Ronan, Marian. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Indiana University Press), Fall2007, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p149-169, 21p;

MacLean, Nancy. OAH Magazine of History, Oct2006, Vol. 20 Issue 5, p19-23, 5p;

Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. Social Identities, Sep2006, Vol. 12 Issue 5, p595-613, 19p

Lamont, Victoria. Canadian Review of American Studies, 2006, Vol. 36 Issue 1, p17-43, 27p, 1bw

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