Policewomen in L.A. Beat Long Odds to Gain Equal Status

Women police officers in the nation’s second largest city have come a long way in 75 years--from one untrained minister-turned-enforcer in 1910 to more than 500 skilled professionals today.

According to Detective Joan Wolf, a 17-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a member of the 60-year-old Los Angeles Women Police Officers Assn., the road to advancement was long and hilly.

“In 1925, when the LAWPOA was founded, women officers were required to be between 30 and 45 years old, have children, and they wanted them to have a college degree in sociology or nursing because they were basically assigned to juveniles,” Wolf said.

“The city, at that time, also wanted to treat policewomen as civil employees with no retirement plan, training or uniforms.

“This is part of the reason the LAWPOA was formed.”

The organization, founded by Marguerite Curley, began as a grass-roots effort to push for retirement protection and training.

The effort finally paid off, but not until 21 years later, when the first class of 19 women graduated from the police academy to become the first trained female officers in Los Angeles history.

In 1948, the pioneers became the first policewomen to officially carry weapons and wear standard navy blue uniforms. Previously, women were required to wear “a nurse’s-type dress with a badge,” Wolf said.

Wolf attributed the women’s law enforcement movement in part to Alice Stebbins Wells, a Pentacostal minister from Oklahoma who became the Los Angeles Police Department’s first sworn female officer in 1910 and who was founder of two support organizations for policewomen.

Honored With Award

Wells died in 1958 after serving almost 30 years on the force; she was honored last week with the Connie Award, the organization’s highest honor.

“She was a pretty gutsy woman,” Wolf said. “One of the reasons she became a sworn officer is that she went around the city with a petition and asked powerful figures to recognize her as a sworn officer. She got 35 signatures.”

Wells’ work mostly involved “chaperoning” youth dance halls and theaters and “working with abandoned kids, runaway kids and that sort of thing,” Wolf said.

She never carried a gun.

Wells became the first president of the California Women Peace Officers Assn. and founded the International Assn. of Police Women.

In 1918, she introduced at UCLA an accredited class dealing with the work of policewomen and was “one of the first persons to have the theory that crime prevention was a duty of the police and just as important as punitive actions for crimes already committed,” Wolf said.

“That was a pretty radical change in police work . . . at least in those days,” she said.

Today, there area about 500 women in the Los Angeles Police Department’s nearly 7,000-member force.