‘It’s a woman’s work.’ With these words, a 1939 leaflet encouraged women to join the Metropolitan Women Police, which at this point had existed for twenty years. While one of the photos in the brochure shows female officers learning self-defence, other pictures emphasize more gender-conformist tasks: a photo of a female officer comforting a child is captioned ‘Her first job’.1 Louise A. Jackson’s 2006 book on the history of female police officers in the UK has commented on their ambivalent position between welfare work and policing.2 Jackson has shown that the decision to recruit female police officers in the early twentieth century was influenced by the contemporary idea that victims of sexual assault should give their statements to women. According to her, the difference female police officers made was ‘structural rather than ideological’, as they operated on the basis of prejudices towards complainants of sexual violence that were similar to those of their male counterparts.3 Instead of discussing the practices of policewomen, however, my blog post focuses on the debates about the nature of their employment, as well as that of female doctors, and asks what these reveal about contemporary understandings of sexual violence and victimhood.

Fig. 1: Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE, 4NVA/4/06/11
An Everyday History of Sexual Violence
My PhD thesis focuses on the question of how the public and legal perception of sexual violence against adults changed in English and West German cities between the 1920s and 1960s. The 1973 reform of the Criminal Code in the Federal Republic of Germany for the first time defined it as a crime against sexual self-determination instead of public morality. This put greater emphasis on the rights of the individual and problematized the violence of the act rather than its sexual connotation. I aim to understand this change by comparing German and English rape cases from the same period, taking into consideration that Germany and England have different legal systems and that Germany’s political system underwent several major shifts at this time (Weimar Republic, National Socialism, Federal Republic/GDR), while England’s did not. The GHIL scholarship allowed me to visit several archives and libraries in London (the National Archives, the Women’s Library at the LSE, the British Library), Birmingham (Birmingham Archives and Collections), and Manchester (Greater Manchester Public Record Office, the Labour History Archive and Study Centre) to study court records from quarter sessions and assizes, police statistics, as well as documents from the first and second wave of the English women’s movement concerned with sexual violence.

Feminist Essentialization?
The Report of the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Young Persons recommended in 1925 ‘that in indecent offences properly trained women shall take the statements of girls; but where that is not possible that a woman shall be present while the policeman is taking the statement’ and ‘that where a medical examination of a girl is necessary it should, whenever possible, be carried out by a woman doctor’.4 This position can be seen as an essentialization of women as better listeners.5 As early as the First World War, feminist organizations like the abolitionist Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) had criticized the fact that the courts were staffed entirely by men at that point. They established the Police Court Rota to support women and children through the presence of another woman, especially when speaking about experiences of sexual violence.6 When the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 allowed women to take up formal roles in court, organizations such as AMSH and the more conservative National Vigilance Association (NVA) continued to campaign for female police officers. As Jackson notes, conservative perspectives mixed with feminist ones in the argument for policewomen.7
Transnational Alliances
Feminist organizations were transnationally connected in this endeavour. The NVA records contain comparative overviews of the role of female police officers in several European countries. Germany served as an example, especially Hamburg, which alongside Baden, Saxony, and Prussia had started to employ female police officers early on. A report written by Ms Erkens, Chief Inspector of the Hamburg Weibliche Kriminalpolizei (Female Criminal Investigation Department), and submitted in 1928 to the League of Nations’ Traffic in Women and Children Committee by Gertrud Bäumer, a feminist politician in the German Democratic Party, describes the duties of women police in various German states.8 They included the supervision of ‘sexually endangered’ women and minors, and involvement in the criminal police in cases concerning women and children. Erkens also mentions ‘supervision in places of amusement and recreation’. This points to the importance of regulating urban entertainment spaces in order to regulate sexuality in the city—a connection which lies at the heart of my PhD thesis. I place the history of sexual violence in the urban context, hypothesizing that the change in public perceptions of sexual violence began in urban centres: new recreation spaces and more encounters between the genders led to contemporary discussions about the difference between consenting and violent practices. This produced ample source material which can be used to study contemporary conceptions of sexual violence.
Contrary Views on Policewomen
Not everyone supported female police officers dealing with sexual crimes, as shown by this 1931 interview with James A. Wilson, the Chief Constable of Cardiff, in the Empire News.9 Cardiff had not so far employed any policewomen. The interviewer sought to find out ‘whether [Wilson] is a woman-hater’ but realized ‘it is his great respect for women which makes it his last wish to see them as uniformed police officers’. Wilson stated that he saw women as well suited for welfare work, yet he was opposed to women police officers dealing with cases of sexual violence, as he disliked ‘the thought of women having to seek their livelihood by coming into contact with the foulest side of human nature’. He also claimed that he had ‘never known of a case where a woman has suffered any indignity owing to the manner in which the policeman has carried out his duty’, and even argued that women would be ‘more frank’ in dialogue with a man than with a woman—as opposed to the general view that women would feel more comfortable talking to other women. Wilson suspected that women might ‘glibly tell untruths to a woman’, drawing on the contemporary view that most rape allegations were false. He also argued that Cardiff’s status as a harbour city meant a greater influx of criminals from overseas working as seamen, invoking xenophobic imaginations of the ‘other’ as a sexual predator from whom women needed to be especially protected.
The Role of Age
The debate around the gender of the doctors who examined victims of sexual offences ran along similar lines. A member of the Rotary Club wrote to the Chief Officer of the Children’s Department of the Metropolitan Police in 1931 that being examined by a man ‘in the mind of the Children constitutes a repetition of the offence’, while the opposing view, expressed in the internal minutes of the Metropolitan Police in 1932, was: ‘There is not a rag of evidence to show that any child has ever been disturbed because the medical examination was conducted by a man.’10 The use of ‘girl’, ‘woman’, and ‘child’ shows the importance of the category of ‘age’ in differentiating victims of sexual violence. Originally, female doctors were only meant to examine young girls and children of both sexes, yet one Metropolitan Police Chief Inspector wrote to his superintendent in 1933: ‘Some unmarried females even under the age of 21 are quite young, and are purposely kept childish by their parents’. He thus argued that the category of ‘girl’ should be extended to include ‘any unmarried female under the age of 21’.11 He pointed to their immaturity, perhaps innocence, as a reason to employ female doctors to examine them. With a similar goal, but using the opposite line of argument, a superintendent noted in 1933 that the presence of female doctors was especially important for older girls, who were ‘neither modest nor inexperienced’.12 This view was rare in so far as children who were thought to be victims of sexual violence were often shown ‘unquestioned sympathy’ because of their presumed innocence, while adolescent girls and adult women experienced more ambivalent and critical responses.13 The superintendent in question referred to his four years of experience of working on sex cases as a member of the Birmingham Police Force, thereby reinforcing the credibility of his view: in the interwar period, those who were considered experts on sexual violence were members of charities or feminist organizations which frequently intervened in the debates, as well as experienced police officers.

Fig. 3: The National Archives at Kew. Photo by Lisa Hellriegel
Identity and Policing: An Unfinished Debate
The debate about female police surgeons was briefly reignited in the late 1960s: as female doctors were often not accredited as ‘Divisional Surgeons’, it was debated whether they should not perform medical examinations in every case of sexual violence, but only upon special request. Female Commander S. Beeke called this ‘the most retrograde step’.14 The question of gender was brought up again when a change was proposed to the relevant section of the General Orders for the Police: the new version was supposed to state that only members of the same sex should conduct the examinations—which meant male doctors for offences against boys. Beeke noted: ‘The reasons which make the examination of girls by women doctors desirable do not apply in reverse—since boys are seldom assaulted by women.’15 By hinting at the abuse of boys by men, Beeke was voicing concerns over a potential retraumatization of male victims through examination by a man. At the same time, this reinforced the notion that only men could commit sexual violence against women and children. That the Metropolitan Police knew of the (much rarer) possibility of female perpetrators can be shown in a report on a proposed revision of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in 1917, in which an officer advised against describing perpetrators as ‘male’ in the law: ‘Cases are known to occur in which women have led younger women and girls into immoral practices for the gratification of sexual desires.’16
In 1981, a member of the Birmingham Rape Crisis Research Centre noted ‘that there was not a woman police surgeon in England, and that raped women are often further distressed by being examined by a man’.17 The debate over who should handle rape complaints in policing therefore did not end in the interwar period but extends right through to the present day.
Feature Image: Graphic illustration of a female British police officer’s bowler hat depicting the rank of PCSO. Illustration by Aliw136. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.
- The Women’s Library at LSE (hereafter TWL), 4NVA/4/06/11, Leaflet: ‘It’s a Woman’s Work’, 112 WP, The Metropolitan Women Police. A Career for Women (June 1939). [↩]
- Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). [↩]
- Louise Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006). P.171 [↩]
- Report of the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Young Persons, presented to Parliament by Command of his Majesty (London, 1925), 84. [↩]
- Jackson, Women Police, 24–5. [↩]
- Laura Lammasniemi, ‘Police Court Rota: Women’s Archiving and Access to Legal Life in Early Twentieth-Century England’, Women’s History Review, 33/1 (2023), 7–24. [↩]
- Jackson, Women Police, 19. [↩]
- TWL, 4NVA/4/06/05, Dr Gertrud Bäumer to the League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children Committee, 15 Mar. 1928. [↩]
- TWL, 4NVA/4/06/01, Elsie Hollis, ‘The Woman and the Savage: Straight Talk with Chief Constable of Cardiff’, Empire News, 31 Mar. 1931. [↩]
- The National Archives (hereafter TNA), MEPO 2/7145, Minute 4, 11 Jan. 1932. [↩]
- TNA, MEPO 2/7145, Mr S. G. Shaw to the Chief Officer, Children’s Department, 17 Nov. 1931. [↩]
- TNA, MEPO 2/7145, Superintendent WB, 29 Sept. 1933. [↩]
- Jackson, Women Police, 171. [↩]
- TNA, MEPO 2/10401, Minute 53, 25 Sept. 1969. [↩]
- TNA, MEPO 2/10401, Minute 57, 3 Oct. 1969. [↩]
- TNA, MEPO 2/2470, Central Officer’s Special Report, Subject: Criminal Law Amendment Act, 25 Feb. 1917. [↩]
- The Wolfson Centre, Birmingham, MS 1579/2/5/1/3, Meeting Minutes, 6 Oct. 1981. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lisa Hellriegel (June 26, 2025). ‘Woman’s Work’? What Debates about Policewomen in the Inter-War Period Tell Us about Contemporary Understandings of Sexual Violence. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved July 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/147qf