Page 38 - Garda Journal Summer 2019

Woman in Law
Enforcement
Susie Poore investigates the first female policewoman with arrest powers.
On the 12th of September 1910, the first female policewoman with arrest powers was appointed in the United States. Since then, women in law enforcement have never looked back.
Alice Stebbins Wells was born on the 13th of June 1873 in Manhattan, Kansas and would be the woman to embrace this remarkable title. During her younger years, she attended the Hartford Seminary and studied criminology and theology. Wells also served as a social welfare worker and student pastor throughout the Northeast. She did not immediately go into police
work, instead acting as a pastor in Perry, Oklahoma from 1903 to 1906. It was when her background in social work would take her and her husband to Los Angeles that she began her campaign for including female officers on the police force. Since 1890, cities across California had only ever employed women as “workers” or “matrons.” These women cared for female prisoners in City and County prisons, but that was where their service stopped. Wells believed women would be a valuable addition since they could provide better assistance to other women and children who fell victim to crime.
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FEATURE | Alice Stebbins