In the name of protection: the policing of women in the First World War

Abstract

This chapter takes the example of the aspirations and practices of the largely feminist women police and patrols of the First World War as an illustration of precisely such problems. Despite the policewomen’s engagement in certain forms of positive protection and in questioning the law’s unequal treatment of men and women, we still need to understand the reasons for their more oppressive actions. The revoking of Defence of the Realm Act 40d may well have been a feminist victory, but one can hardly be so unequivocal about policewomen’s policing of other women. The slippage between befriending, warning, restraining and rescuing was, in practice, to have certain disturbing consequences for the actions of both the women police and women patrols. While women police and patrols thought of themselves as protecting women sexually and morally, they were viewed by the authorities as an ideal means of protecting men: men’s physical protection from venereal disease through the ‘protection’/control of women.