Policing women in urban Scotland c. 1890-1950

In this chapter, located in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland, Louise Jackson and Rian Sutton examine the attitudes and approaches of police officers in relation to the policing of women as well as women’s experiences of policing. The policing of women was undertaken by men (with rare exceptions), and policing was a profoundly gendered occupation. The ways in which the policing of women was thought about and managed at a formal level are tracked through the rhetoric of police instruction manuals and the Chief Constable’s Annual Reports and Parliamentary Committees of Enquiry, and through the structuring of police roles across time. Using criminal justice statistics to build a profile of women’s offending in this period, Jackson and Sutton then focus on cases of drunkenness and breach of the peace, demonstrating the heterogeneity of women as a category: age, life-cycle, disability and socio-economic status (amongst other factors) profoundly shaped experiences and interactions. Finally, police attitudes towards female offenders are compared and contrasted with the counter-narratives presented by women themselves through analysis of the news press and life writing.