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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | 'Not Welfare or Uplift Work': White Women, Masculinity and Policing in South Africa |
| Author: | Shear, Keith |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | Gender and History |
| Volume: | 8 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Period: | November |
| Pages: | 393-415 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | gender relations police white women Historical/Biographical Law, Legal Issues, and Human Rights Labor and Employment |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1996.tb00064.x |
| Abstract: | This essay argues that the development of a masculine police institutional identity in South Africa was mediated by the white woman's campaign to enroll in the police. The exclusion of white women from the police was continually protested by white women's organizations from 1915 to 1972, when white women were at last admitted. It was in the years before 1920, however, that these organizations posed their most significant challenge. The campaign for women police began in Cape Town in worried response to the 'khaki fever' occasioned by the passage of large numbers of troops through the city. Alarmed by police reports of increases in prostitution and in 'contraventions of the morality laws generally', the Cape Women's Christian Temperance Union, which had long pioneered reformist causes, called for policewomen. The ensuing debate, featuring competing visions of the State's role in shaping and maintaining the social order, compelled government officials to articulate their own assumptions about policing in a colonial context. The author demonstrates that the labelling and consequent suppression of the campaigners' position as 'feminine' gendered officials' contrasting vision of punitive racial policing as 'masculine'. Notes, ref., sum.(p. v). |
