Alice Stebbins Wells, First Policewoman in U.S., Sworn In
Alice Stebbins Wells was sworn in on this day by the city of Los Angeles as the first policewoman in the U.S.
She was assigned to the juvenile unit of the LAPD where her job was to look for delinquent girls or girls who appeared to be potential delinquents. The rank of policewoman was a newly created rank for the police department. As more cities hired police women in the years that followed, policewomen did not have full police powers. They did not carry weapons and did not have the power to arrest adults. On the day she was sworn in, Wells was given a key to the department’s call boxes (in the days before the two-way radio, that was the method by which officers contacted police headquarters), a copy of the short “rule book,” a first aid book, and the official “Policewoman’s Badge No. 1). She had to sew her own uniform, a full-length dress and a jacket.
The advent of women in policing was part of the pre-World War I Progressive Era reform movement (roughly the late 1890s to 1917). The juvenile court, probation, and parole were also criminal justice innovations during this period. The fact that Wells and other policewomen were not full police officers and were restricted to juvenile work reflected the sexist attitudes of the period which limited job opportunities for women and held that women were particularly suited for working with children.
The first women police officers were not assigned to regular police patrol until 1968, in Indianapolis. Women did not enter policing on a large-scale basis until after passage of the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
Wells spoke in many cities around the country on the subject of policewomen, and in 1915 helped to organize the International Policewomen’s Association. The organization today is the International Association of Women Police.
Learn more: Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, 2nd ed. (1998).
Read about the performance of the first women on police patrol: Susan Ehrlich Martin, Breaking and Entering: Police Women on Patrol (1980)
And More: Susan Ehrlich Martin, On the Move: The Status of Women in American Policing (1990)