The origins of the Polizia Femminile, 1948–1961

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT Women entered police forces through women-only special corps in many democratic states in the early twentieth century. In Italy this reform occurred after World War II, first under the occupying Allied military government in Trieste and, after 1959, on a national basis. Women served separately from men from 1961 until 1983. This article examines the debate triggered by the campaign of the so-called Merlin Law from 1948–1958, a law which deregulated prostitution, closed state-run brothels, and abolished the vice squad in favour of a women’s squad dedicated particularly to working with prostitutes and juveniles. This complex and shifting debate regarding the constitution of what would become the Polizia femminile (P.F.) is reconstructed through sources documenting the legislative campaigns by Italy’s first generation of women members of parliament, the scramble in the Ministry of the Interior and the upper administration of the police to control and define the terms of women’s entry, and media reactions. Ultimately P.F. officers did secure professional status with uniforms, service weapons, and power to arrest; yet they were enjoined to use these powers to surveille and discipline the sexuality of other women. Women police are thus a historical window into understanding the complicated bargain women made to achieve new professional opportunities while enforcing normative gender roles. Yet the very work of policing often subverted those same roles of gender and sexual respectability, making women police officers a crucial site for conflict over who could enforce, challenge, or subvert the claim to social control in post-war Italian society.