The Bitter Bargain of Women’s Police Squads

Women entered policing in Italy in 1961 by joining a Women’s Police corps with separate entry standards and service assignments, only integrating into the general police force in 1981. As in other countries that created segregated women’s police bureaus, their special tasks were focused on women and children, with a special emphasis on repressing prostitution and homosexuality. Women police are thus a historical window into understanding the complicated bargain women made to achieve new professional opportunities while enforcing normative gender roles and the sexual citizenship of the “straight state.” Yet the very work of policing often subverted those same roles of gender and sexual respectability within police forces, making women police officers a crucial site for conflict over who could enforce, challenge, or subvert the claim to social control. This paper focuses on two methodological questions: how do women’s police squads inform the history of the policing of sexuality, and how does a queer historical lens change the history of gender segregation and integration in policing?