Many like Geraldyn Cobb met or exceeded the physical and psychological thresholds set by NASA, but suddenly, partway through the training, the rules changed. Randolph Lovelace was tasked with evaluating female pilots for suitability as astronauts. Space Program’s infancy, men and women rushed to be the first astronauts. The credit for these achievements belongs to the female activists of the 1960s and those whose work they built on, who cracked open doors younger women like me could step through. Rarely have minority groups had so substantial an impact on dominant cultures. Over the past 45 years, the strength and success of the lighter, kinder tone brought by women to policing have been incorporated into the traditionally male-dominated culture of policing. Emotional intelligence, communication skills and critical thinking began to be valued as desirable policing skills. Height requirements were replaced by fitness tests grounded in the physical demands of police work. The success of women in policing led to a reassessment of what qualities were best suited to the policing profession. Assaulting a police officer was no longer acceptable. It was not considered macho to fight with a woman, especially if a man lost a fight to a woman. Crown Councils (district attorneys in the US) did not like to clog up the court system with officer assault or resisting arrest charges, preferring to leave that to “street justice.” The introduction of female police officers turned that situation on its head. It was macho to fight a Mountie, win or lose. It seemed to be a no-lose scenario for offenders. Historically, fighting was part of the job of male police officers. The introduction of women as Mounties allowed the RCMP to draw upon a more diverse field of male and female applicants that was more reflective of Canadian society. The acceptance of women became a catalyst for modernization. Historically the RCMP expected recruits to adapt to the RCMP, not the other way around. This was a paradigm cultural shift in the RCMP’s approach to recruitment. The height and marriage restrictions were the first to change. The task of recruiting women caused the RCMP to alter its recruiting standards of the day in anticipation that female recruits would be older, shorter and possibly married. The RCMP needed women with the right stuff to join, but most women of the Baby Boom generation had never considered policing as an option. Unlike Canadian men, women were not waiting in a large applicant pool hoping to be recruited into the RCMP ranks. There was no policing model apparent for the RCMP to emulate when it was directed to recruit, train and employ women with no career restrictions based on gender. ![]() These pioneering police officers were contained by glass ceilings and organizational barriers that denied them the ability to move both laterally and vertically through the organization. However, rarely, if ever, were these early pioneers afforded the same powers, status, training, uniform and equipment as men. These female officers had no uniforms or guns and their authority was limited to children and women.īy the early 1970s, police departments in Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago and Michigan, to name a few, were experimenting with limited numbers of females on patrol. In 1912, Vancouver became the first city in Canada to bend to pressure from women’s activist groups and hire three female police officers to deal with juveniles in conflict with the law, women as victims of violence and members of the sex trade. Inequality for the first women in policing Canadian feminist activists in the 1960s deserve credit for building on a 50-year-old foundation started by a previous generation. This generated positive press for an organization that was simply acting on a government mandate to open its ranks to women. ![]() Time magazine featured a graduating female troop on its famous cover. When the RCMP opened its ranks to women, the world was watching. The RCMP, one of the most recognized police forces in the world, is held in such high esteem that it is considered a symbol of Canada. At the time, this was a controversial, high-profile move that rocked conventional understanding of the qualities required to be a police officer and fundamentally changed the policing profession. ![]() How LAPD's first female SWAT officer broke the glass ceilingįemale Mounties rocked policing conventionsĢ019 also marks the 45th anniversary of the swearing-in of the first female Mounties of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
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