September 12, 1910 - Alice Stebbins Wells is appointed as the first policewoman in the United States

Alice Stebbins Wells was 37 years old when she was
appointed to the LAPD, and served for 30 years before retiring.

On this day, 103 years ago, one woman took a stand that led her entire gender one step closer to equality. On September 12, 1910, Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells was recruited by the Los Angeles Police department, becoming our nation's very first police woman.

The fact that this groundbreaking event had taken place does not imply that the idea of women police was a socially acceptable concept. It took nearly one year after Wells petitioned her local government in 1909 to create an ordinance allowing women to be hired as officers within the cities’ police department. Just as the slaves' first freedoms were limited and frowned upon during the 1800s, so was this twentieth century attempt at gender equality undeniably hindered by the closed-minded public. Wells constantly struggled to gain the acceptance of her fellow Americans, and was often rudely reminded of their disapproval publicly, even having once been once accused of “misusing her husband's badge”. After this particular incident, Alice Wells was presented a “Policewoman Badge Number 1”, to avoid future false accusations.[1]

Wells, along with the several other women who would become officers soon after her, were not allowed to occupy any job within the force that may be deemed “high risk”, and were therefore, more often than not assigned clerical office work. Alice Wells' main duties consisted mostly of cases involving women and children, centering her patrols around places like arcades, picture shows, and skating rinks.[2]

Not surprisingly, Alice Wells' appointment to the Los Angeles Police Department gained widespread publicity. She traveled, advertising her cause to various cities in hopes of encouraging them to adopt similar ordinances for female involvement within their police departments. By the end of 1915, women were employed within at least twenty five different police departments, including San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago.[3]

After serving her department for nearly thirty years, Alice Wells did not live to see the sort of equality between police men and women that we see today. In her day, women were still treated as inferior officers, often receiving significantly lower salaries and were required a much higher level education than their fellow male officers.[3] Since then, our country has passed several laws to assist in dissolving certain acts of discrimination against women in the workplace. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 ruled that all employers are required to provide “equal pay for equal work” regardless of gender.[4] The 1972 amendment to the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964, initiated the Equal Opportunity Act, prohibiting employment discrimination because of race, religion, or gender.[5] This is not to say that sexism and discrimination within the field are nonexistent, just less predominant than in the past.

There has been a steady incline in percentages of women employed as police over the last several decades. In the 1970s, less than 1% of all police were women; that number rose to 9% in the 1990s, and today women make up approximately 17% of our nation’s police officers. In comparison to the 1990s percentage, 9% of all supervisory and command positions now belong to women.[6] Though these percentages may seem slightly low to some, it should be considered a great achievement for our nation to have come so far in just 100 years, all thanks to one woman’s stand for equal opportunity.

-Brittany W. and Sarah O.

1 “LAPD had the Nation’s First Police Woman,” Los Angeles Almanac, accessed September 2, 2013, www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr73b.htm
2 “LAPD had the Nation's First Police woman,” The Los Angeles Police Department, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.lapdonline.org/history_of_the_lapd/content _basic_view/833
3 “Adam Eisenberg: LAPD hired nation's first policewoman,” Los Angeles Daily News, accessed September 2, 2013, www.dailynews.com/opinion/20100910/adam-eisenberg-lapd-hired-nations-first-policewoman
4 “The Equal Pay Act of 1963,” US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/epa.cfm
5 “Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accessed September 2, 2013, http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevi i.cfm
6 “Police Woman Statistics,” Police-OfficerPages.com, accessed September 2, 2013,
http://www.police-officer-pages.com/policewomanstatistics.html#axzz2eWjRS4p1