[A]s for prospective dangers in the enterprise, I didn’t take them into account. When I undertake to do a thing, I just start doing it. The man or woman who is deterred from doing a thing which he or she would like to do never gets anywhere.
—Katherine “Klondike Kate” Ryan
NWMP Matron and Constable Special
1922
*
Throughout much of its history, the identity of the RCMP has rested on the image of the heroic Mountie as a virile and manly representation of Canada. But women have been involved in the policing activities of the RCMP since its beginnings. By the turn of the twentieth century, they occupied paid positions as matrons and gold inspectors for the NWMP, a little-known contribution that has long been omitted from the historical record. Matrons and gold inspectors were later replaced by Mountie wives, who played a significant role in the work of the RCMP until the final decades of the twentieth century. The force’s reliance on the unpaid and unacknowledged work of women was a practice that not only marginalized their contributions but allowed the RCMP to maintain its iconic image. But it also reinforced the idea that policing was a solely masculine occupation, an argument that justified the delay in hiring women as police officers for decades.
Historical accounts of women in law enforcement in Canada are scarce. Researchers generally recognize Rose Fortune (1774–1884) as the first woman to assume a policing role in Canada. Fortune was a freed African American slave living in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She was a savvy entrepreneur who initially established a business transporting luggage for ship passengers from the port to local rooming houses in her wheelbarrow. Her transportation business eventually evolved into one of Annapolis Royal’s first cartage companies, a business that remained in her family for over one hundred years. Fortune was also a self-appointed police officer in the port of Annapolis Royal. Her quasi-police duties included maintaining the peace, monitoring the town’s youth, establishing and enforcing curfews, even “spanking local mischief-makers.”[46] The community’s acknowledgement and acceptance of her voluntary police service situate her as Canada’s first policewoman.
Apart from Fortune’s accomplishments, little is known about women in policing in Canada until the end of the nineteenth century and the appearance of the police matron. The history of police matrons is complicated by the variety of roles they were hired to perform and the titles they were given, which varied among police departments.[47] In the United States, for example, most matrons worked in jails but some also had powers of arrest, patrolled city streets, and aided male detectives in cases involving women and children. In Chicago, Illinois, Mary Owens was assigned the rank of “policeman” in 1893,[48] an unusual move for a police department in those years. Although Owens was a matron, her title and pay matched those of a policeman.[49] Others were trained social workers who had police powers and made court appearances. For example, in 1905, social worker Lola Baldwin was placed in charge of a force of social workers granted full police powers by the city of Portland, Oregon. They were charged with protecting the women of Portland from an influx of lumbermen, miners, and labourers attracted to the city following the Lewis and Clark Exposition.[50] In Canada, matrons served in similar capacities. They worked with incarcerated women and children and sometimes served as moral regulators, policing public spaces thought to be morally dangerous to women.[51] Toronto was the first Canadian city to officially hire a woman as a matron in 1887, followed by Vancouver in 1912.[52] Their social service was not considered to be real police work because they dealt mainly with women and children.
The appearance of the policewoman at the turn of the twentieth century further complicated the history of women in law enforcement, since the work they performed often replicated the work of matrons. Policewomen at that time were primarily concerned with the moral protection and sexual regulation of working-class women and children. The first policewoman in New York City, Mary E. Hamilton, in her early book on the subject, listed her duties as social work, crime prevention, and protective services for women and children.[53] Similarly in Britain, women employed as policewomen during World War I were chiefly concerned with public morality and controlling the behaviour of working-class women, particularly in garrison towns coping with an influx of soldiers.[54] British policewomen patrolled public spaces and houses of prostitution, lectured teenagers smoking in the streets, separated “couples thought to be embracing too closely,” and monitored a variety of public behaviours considered to be immoral.[55]
In Canada, the goals of the moral reform movement were particularly instrumental in women’s entrance into law enforcement. Middle-class reformers, including reform groups such as the Montreal Local Council of Women, lobbied local and federal governments and police departments for the appointment of policewomen to help tackle issues such as temperance, eradicating prostitution, compulsory education, and “the desire to rescue delinquents.”[56] Like those performed by matrons, the duties of policewomen were viewed as an extension of the private sphere of middle-class women’s lives and were not considered to be real police work.
By the end of World War I, several Canadian cities had employed policewomen. Most had powers of arrest, identified themselves as police officers, and carried badges, although none had a uniform or carried a firearm.[57] The Vancouver Police Department holds the distinction of hiring the first policewomen in Canada on July 8, 1912. News reports from the period announced that Mrs. Lurancy Harris and Miss Minnie Millar were the “first of their sex to act as constables in Canada,” an occasion that made for sensational headlines in newspapers across North America.[58] Harris and Millar were given full powers of arrest when they were sworn in, an indication that their work consisted of more than matron duties. They patrolled city streets, parks, and dance halls in addition to escorting women and child prisoners, investigating neglected or delinquent children, and enforcing the law regarding compulsory venereal disease treatment.[59] A few weeks after she was hired, Millar made history as the first Canadian policewoman to make an arrest. She arrested William Borden for “making himself ‘objectionable’ to women at a public beach” on August 5, 1912.[60] By 1925, Vancouver had three “women police and one matron,” distinct functions indicating that an expansion of women’s policing roles was taking place in the city.[61]
Similarly, in Ottawa in 1913, Florence Campbell was hired as a policewoman with full powers of arrest in response to pressure from local women’s groups. Her duties included matron work, court responsibilities, and investigating child abuse and neglect.[62] The police department in Toronto followed suit, hiring two women in 1913 to serve as constables with full powers of arrest. By 1918, however, Toronto policewomen were relegated to office duties related to “marital infelicity” and were focused on mending “bad marriages” rather than patrol work.[63] It was an ominous trend. Between 1920 and 1945, the number of policewomen on patrol in Canada declined. The decline was attributed to the introduction of a crime control model of policing, a rise in the use of physical force, high unemployment rates amongst men following World War I, and resistance by male police officers to the idea of women police.
Many Canadian departments continued to employ a small number of policewomen during the 1950s and 1960s. Several also began to dress them in uniforms for the first time during this period. However, their work was increasingly limited despite attempts by the women to be recognized as law enforcement officers. In Ottawa, the city hired twenty-six meter maids who formed a separate Women’s Auxiliary Division within the police department. “Their request to be called ‘policewomen’ was denied as they were not considered equal to their male constable counterparts,” despite the same training, powers of arrest, and recruitment standards (excepting height and weight) as men. The women were not issued handcuffs or firearms and were automatically dismissed if they married or became pregnant.[64] Despite advances in some jurisdictions, the occupation of policing continued to limit the roles women played.
Although women’s role in policing was expanding in Canadian municipal police departments during the first decades of the twentieth century, the NWMP resisted the engagement of women in any policing capacity. In the final years of the nineteenth century, women’s groups began to lobby the federal government to pressure the police force to hire women. Politically powerful groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) focused not only on temperance but on a wide range of social issues related to women and morality.[65] In 1896, the Edmonton chapter of the WCTU wrote to the minister of justice requesting that female prisoners be “placed under the charge of women gaolers instead of men gaolers” in the North-West Territories, the area policed by the NWMP.[66]
The minister was receptive to the idea and directed the NWMP comptroller to write a full report on the conditions in which women prisoners were held while under arrest. The comptroller resisted the idea of hiring matrons, citing the provision of separate cells and conveniences for women as extremely difficult in isolated outposts. He also worried that such special considerations would be expensive since it was “most difficult to secure female assistance in the Territories at what, elsewhere, would appear to be reasonable rates.”[67] Despite the comptroller’s objections, an order-in-council was issued by the federal government on February 1, 1897, directing the NWMP to hire women gaolers. The order was later amended on April 9, 1898, to include women escorts for female prisoners. Matrons were to be paid up to two dollars a day, plus rations, and women escorting female prisoners were to receive the same rate of pay in addition to railway fare and accommodation expenses.[68]
While official documents regarding the work of NWMP matrons are rare, popular histories are fruitful sources of information regarding their employment with the police force. In 1896, the NWMP served as a symbol of the authority of the Canadian state during a time when the boundary between the Yukon and Alaska was in dispute.[69] The NWMP was involved in more than establishing Canadian sovereignty in the region, however. The police force also enforced laws concerning sexual morality in the communities of Dawson City and Whitehorse during the Yukon gold rush. For Yukon’s social elite, the potential of the morally corrupt prostitute to spread disease amongst male miners was linked to ideas about the preservation of the white race and female sexual purity. Accordingly, the NWMP surgeon was charged with examining prostitutes in Dawson City twice a month, incarcerating infected women, and treating them for venereal diseases. The NWMP also ensured that prostitutes remained confined to their own communities and were excluded from all public buildings where they might come into contact with respectable middle-class women and children.[70] It was within this context that the NWMP in Dawson City hired several women to serve as police matrons. A matron by the name of Selina Howard held the position between 1901 and 1904, and a Mrs. Warnes was hired as matron in the fall of 1915.[71] There is no evidence to indicate the numbers of matrons the NWMP employed. We do know that by 1904 the federal government had determined that matrons would not be taken on as part of the police force but were to serve in a social-service capacity.[72]
Although little is known about most NWMP matrons, the exception is Katherine “Klondike Kate” Ryan. The RCMP does not have a service record for Ryan in its archives in Ottawa, since many NWMP personnel files dating between 1904 and 1920 were destroyed by fire.[73] But information about Ryan’s life and work can be gleaned from print media reports from the period and from popular histories. Kate Ryan was credited as the first white woman to enter the Klondike in 1898, mushing “on foot a distance of six hundred miles.”[74] When she arrived in Whitehorse in 1900, Ryan established a reputable restaurant business and invested in local mines.[75] Although Ryan’s adventures on the Stikine Trail were legendary during the gold rush, they were later overshadowed by her domestic abilities, such as cooking for the men of the NWMP, nursing, and performing “deeds of mercy” for injured and starving miners that earned her a reputation as the “miner’s friend.”[76]
In February 1900, Parliament passed a law authorizing the NWMP to hire a “Woman Special” to assist in the care of female prisoners. Five days later, Ryan was hired as Whitehorse’s first matron. In 1903, Ryan was assigned the rank of constable special and her duties, in addition to those of a matron, included searching female passengers on trains and steamers who were attempting to smuggle gold dust or nuggets out of the territory to avoid paying taxes.[77] Ryan was credited with being “able to examine her own sex with a thoroughness that delicacy prevented the men of the Northwest Mounted Police from performing.”[78] She was not issued a firearm or a uniform but wore an armband on her sleeve to give her a professional appearance while performing her law enforcement duties.[79] When Ryan left the Yukon in 1919, she recommended to the NWMP’s commanding officers that the position of female gold inspector be abolished, making her somewhat complicit in the demise of future law enforcement roles for women in the police force.[80]
Ryan was so esteemed by the RCMP that when she died in Vancouver in 1932 the police force provided an honour guard for her funeral, a rare privilege that few women have been accorded.[81] Ryan’s example illustrates that women occasionally blurred the social boundaries between masculinity and femininity with great success during the early years of women in policing. Despite Ryan’s accomplishments, the position of NWMP matron was short-lived and she quietly disappeared from historical narratives after the gold rush ended.
As early as 1897, in a memorandum informing his commanding officers of the order-in-council regarding matrons, Commissioner Lawrence Herchmer (1886–1900) stated that matrons would be “if possible, the wife of a member of the Force,” an injunction that was later reiterated by an assistant commissioner in a second circular on the subject dated April 25, 1898.[82] The idea that wives of NWMP officers should perform matron and escort duties would become routine as the twentieth century wore on. The expanded role of Mountie wives not only contributed to the disappearance of the matron but negated the necessity of hiring women in any official capacity, allowing the masculine image of the police force to continue its dominance.
By the 1880s, the force’s romantic image was so attractive that young men from across the Empire applied to join. Capitalizing on this development, the NWMP reduced the daily rate of pay for new recruits from seventy-five cents to forty cents based on the expectation that young men would continue to respond to the promise of adventure.[83] These wages are noteworthy given that matrons were being paid up to two dollars a day plus rations and expenses in 1898. New recruits were also required to sign on for five years, during which time they could not marry or ask for furlough. The prevailing theory was that unmarried men made better police officers since the federal government considered the cost of transporting, feeding, and housing hundreds of wives and children in primitive conditions on the western prairie to be prohibitive.[84]
In contrast to the lower ranks, commanding officers were permitted to marry, and their wives served as examples of respectable English middle-class womanhood in remote outposts. During Victoria’s reign, middle-class women were expected to serve and protect “family and civilization from the very society created by men, who, in turn, expected the women to be gentle, graceful, dainty, and nurturing.”[85] Many women who married the NWMP’s commanding officers adhered to their womanly roles by becoming actively engaged as representatives of the Empire in colonial settlements. One notable example was Mary Drever, who married Commissioner James Macleod (1876–1880) in 1876, the “first white woman in Fort Macleod and the first married woman of a NWMP officer.”[86] Mary played an important role in the history of the NWMP primarily for her correspondence with James. Between them, they wrote over 250 letters spanning twenty years (1874–1894), offering us a glimpse into settler life, the daily workings of the NWMP, Victorian marriage, and the politics behind establishing a police presence on the prairies.[87]
Mary and James were inseparable and when they were together they were often considered to be a “single unit,” so much so that Mary’s life was sometimes placed in danger.[88] Family legend has it that Mary was also “permitted to wear the red coat of the mounties” during her travels on horseback with James.[89] Once at Fort Macleod following her marriage, Mary ensured that she was seen in public. Every morning before breakfast, Mary would join her husband on horseback to inspect his men on the parade square,[90] an activity that was meant to remind the men of middle-class standards of propriety. Although her confinement to the private realm would have been considered an outward sign of her monogamy, Mary’s presence during troop inspections suggests that the social boundaries between men and women were sometimes blurred for the sake of the Empire.
Though she occupied a subordinate role in society and marriage with no power or rights as a citizen, Mary’s public activities were linked to the political objectives of the NWMP. In September 1877, Mary, along with the wives of two other NWMP officers, travelled with the commissioner and 108 of his men to participate in ceremonies to mark the signing of Treaty 7 with the Blackfoot Confederacy.[91] During the signing, Mary entertained the white women who were present with a formal tea party where all the “niceties of a Toronto drawing room” were observed.[92] The women’s tea party was a significant feature of the gathering. Temperance was an important part of the NWMP’s mandate to put an end to the illegal whiskey trade and eliminate alcohol consumption amongst Aboriginal people. The ritual of a formal tea party also communicated to the Blackfoot that a viable and civilized settler society was being established. The women acted as witnesses to the agreement, and their names and signatures appear on the copy of Treaty 7 that was later distributed to the signatories.[93] Although the presence of the women at the signing is overlooked in most accounts, their roles as witnesses to this historic document indicate the status and position they held in settler society.
Another nineteenth-century Mountie wife bears mentioning for the important historical role she played in documenting NWMP history. Geraldine Moodie was the granddaughter of the famous Canadian author Susanna Moodie. She was also the wife of NWMP inspector John Douglas Moodie, a distant cousin. Following their marriage, Moodie and her Mountie husband “embarked on a thirty-two year adventure” that took them to many NWMP posts in western Canada, the Hudson Bay area, and the eastern Arctic.[94] Moodie was a talented photographer who left an extensive photographic record of early settler and NWMP life. She was the first woman to operate a photographic studio in western Canada, opening her business in Saskatchewan in July 1895. Specializing in portraiture, Moodie captured many NWMP officers and members of Aboriginal communities on film. She was also a savvy businesswoman who copyrighted her images and marketed photographs of the NWMP as Christmas cards.[95] However, like most Mountie wives, Moodie has been relegated to the margins of RCMP history and her contributions have been obscured by the dominant image of the heroic rider of the plains.
The solitary Mountie hero may have been the masculine ideal in romanticized narratives about the police force, but the reality was that most young men who joined the police force were interested in marrying. Many purchased their release from their RCMP contract to get married. Those who could not afford to purchase their release deserted before their contract expired.[96] Lengthy waiting periods were interminable to a young couple in love, and secret weddings were not unusual. In December 1904, Walter Munday married without the knowledge or permission of his commanding officers. By the time his marriage was discovered, he had been promoted to corporal, a rank that was permitted to marry at the time. As punishment for violating the force’s marriage regulations, however, the couple was required to accept an isolated posting at Cumberland House in the North-West Territories.[97]
Marriage regulations were occasionally relaxed throughout the twentieth century, particularly during periods of low recruitment. Jean Loates recalled that Mounties had to wait twelve years to marry when she first met her Mountie husband in 1932.[98] That year, the RCMP experienced a 74 percent increase in engagement numbers when it took over provincial policing functions in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. By 1936, however, discharges outnumbered engagements, and marriage waiting periods were reduced to six years.[99] When RCMP officers were eligible to marry, they were required to meet a number of strict criteria known as “The Big Rule.” Dorothy Standish Paull remembered that by the time she married Constable Tom Paull in December 1937, RCMP officers “had to have six years of service and a certain amount of [financial] security” before submitting an application to marry.[100] In the 1950s, constables were required to remain single for their first five years of service, be twenty-four years old, and have two thousand dollars in the bank before permission to marry was granted.[101] As late as 1973, when the RCMP was considering hiring married men as well as women, recruits were “required to remain single for two years after their basic training” even though the police force hired married men as special constables or as volunteers for its auxiliary force at the time.[102]
For its part, the RCMP persisted in viewing single male police officers as more economically viable than married men. Dave Moore recalled receiving a transfer from British Columbia to northern Alberta as a single man in the 1950s. He was able to pack all of his belongings in his force-issued trunk, purchase a bus ticket, transport his trunk on the bus, and arrive at his new posting, all for $5.75. Moore speculated, “Now if I was married, it would probably [cost] around $5,000.00. You could move a [single] person like that and it didn’t cost anything.”[103] Bill Jones was transferred seven times in nine years as a single man in the 1960s, not an unusual circumstance for many unmarried Mounties.[104]
A violation of RCMP marriage regulations sometimes resulted in immediate dismissal. In 1945, Brad Bradley married his wife, June, in Saskatoon without permission. He was immediately dismissed and fined fifty dollars. In 1946, he reapplied to the RCMP and was granted acceptance on one condition: that he perform guard duty on Parliament Hill for the time he should have waited before marrying, and on a single man’s pay. It was not until 1950 that Bradley, who by then had a daughter, received a married man’s salary.[105] Bradley’s punishment had more than economic ramifications for his family: it was also a shaming tactic that called into question his masculinity when his wife was forced to enter the workforce to earn extra money.
Mounties were still willing to take a chance on marrying without permission, despite threats of dismissal. Dave Moore recalled that while he was stationed in northern British Columbia in the 1950s, one member he worked with got a nurse pregnant. The couple travelled to Ketchikan, Alaska, and got married. “She was an officer in the Canadian navy officer’s mess and she knew the [RCMP] inspector … She thought that if she could talk to him about it, maybe they could get permission,” said Moore. As soon as the officer found out that they were married, her husband was fired. In another instance, a number of RCMP officers from Alberta were secretly married in Montana. When the RCMP found out about the marriages, all six men were fired. According to Moore, the best man at one of the weddings was also charged with “being a party to an illegal offense. Well, he got a warning out of it. He got sent up to the Arctic. To hide him.”[106]
Moore had difficulty meeting the RCMP’s regulations for his own marriage. Although he had the required five years of service, he did not have the necessary funds in the bank to demonstrate he could support a wife. But Moore had a “very friendly bank manager who lent me $1,200.00 for one day. I needed that piece of paper.” The following day, after Moore’s commanding officer made his enquiries, the bank manager quietly retrieved the money from Moore’s account.[107] Moore’s experience illustrates how many men informally resisted the marriage regulations imposed on them, sometimes with a little help from members of the community.
The RCMP could not prevent its men from marrying indefinitely and commanding officers found other ways to exercise their authority over the personal lives of members. Prospective wives and their families were subject to intense scrutiny by the police force. Jean Loates recalled the paperwork her fiancé had to submit along with his application to marry her in 1936. Jean’s age, family background, and religion were all documented, and inquiries into her character, reputation, and genealogy were made. Jean’s father was outraged that an organization with such an “irreproachable reputation for justice and fair play” would subject one of its members and his future wife “to such sadistic indifference” when permission to marry arrived just three days before the planned wedding date.[108] Granting permission to marry at the last possible minute appears to have been a trend in the RCMP during the Depression years. In 1937, Dorothy and Tom Paull were “plenty concerned” as their wedding day drew near and they still had not received permission to marry from headquarters in Ottawa. They, too, received permission to marry just three days before their wedding date.[109]
In 1959, Constable Mel Cheavins was denied his application to marry his fiancée, Betty, because she was a telephone operator. His commanding officer determined that members of the police force would be better off looking for a nurse or teacher as a spouse because they had a “higher standard of education.”[110] The officer’s assessment of Betty represented a double standard, given that men applying to the police force at that time were only required to possess a grade eleven education. Betty and Mel did eventually marry in 1960, but not before a second rejection by the RCMP when the police force discovered Betty’s grandparents had emigrated from Romania, then a communist country. During the Cold War, applying to marry a woman whose relatives were potential communists was sufficient grounds for rejection.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the occupation of policing professionalized and moved away from social relief and law enforcement activities to crime-fighting strategies. As a result, the number of police officers marrying increased. Technological advances, crime detection laboratories, professional training, managerial efficiency, the arrival of the police car, and changes in promotion, pay, and benefits convinced some men to view employment with the RCMP as a long-term career, one that would support a wife and family. As more and more Mounties married, women began to make numerous contributions to the work of the RCMP, work that was not officially acknowledged by the police force.
Memoirs and biographical material published by the “unpaid Mountie” or the “second man,” as Mountie wives were known, have filled a significant gap in the history of women and the RCMP. The writing and publishing activities of the unpaid Mountie not only contested their absence from the historical record, but destabilized conventional representations of the Mountie hero as a solitary and self-sufficient historical figure. These largely anecdotal accounts began to be published in the first decades of the twentieth century. They reveal that Mountie wives were a source of cheap, reserve labour for the RCMP.
The first role many Mountie wives were expected to fill, with or without pay, was that of matron. Doris Hester recalled performing matron duty in the 1930s for her husband, Leo, who was in charge of transferring a number of “gypsy women, including one with a very young infant” from Fort Macleod to Lethbridge, Alberta. Doris was relieved of her charges and her duties at the Lethbridge barracks, all without pay.[111] Lee Christensen acted as matron for a female prisoner sentenced to six months in jail for attempting to murder her husband with an axe. Since the jail in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, could not accommodate a female prisoner for a month, the woman was held at the detachment guard house until a vacancy became available. Christensen was required to supervise the prisoner on a daily basis and ensure that she was gainfully employed around the detachment.[112]
Because Mountie wives worked in spaces attached to their home, their contributions to the policing activities of their husbands were simply viewed as an extension of the domestic sphere. Their detachment duties included cleaning the cells and offices, which were usually attached to the living quarters. They also fed prisoners. Since many isolated locations did not have restaurants or hotels, wives were expected to provide visiting RCMP officers, government officials, or court personnel with accommodations and meals.[113] Some wives answered the police radio and took messages when their husbands were out on patrol. In the 1950s, Eunice Campbell remembered that the police radio was directly beside the kitchen in the detachment in Strasbourg, Saskatchewan. Since the radio was only capable of receiving messages, which were broadcast at 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., Eunice was expected to be on hand during those times to record messages when her husband was absent. She was paid one cent an item, a paltry sum she never bothered to collect.[114]
When she arrived at her husband’s first posting in Torquay, Saskatchewan, in the 1960s, Betty Cheavins was surprised to learn that her living room also served as the courthouse and that one of the bedrooms was to serve as the judge’s chambers when the circuit judge was in town. She was also expected to act as radio operator during stakeouts and roadblocks, relaying messages between her husband on the road and officers in a nearby detachment when his police car was out of their radio range.[115] In the 1970s, Florence Wilson was once pressed into service as a stenographer for an inquest into a drowning death in Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan, since she was the only person in the community who had “some experience with shorthand.”[116]
Many wives recounted their difficulty coping with living in primitive conditions without privacy and basic household or sanitation conveniences. RCMP officer Claude Tidd and his wife, Mary, lived in a log cabin in the Yukon in the 1920s and carried their bathtub inside once a week to bathe.[117] In 1953, the detachment at Strasbourg, Saskatchewan, just forty-five minutes north of Regina, might as well have been located in the middle of the previous century. The living quarters were attached to the fire station, and a door in the living room opened directly into the fire hall. The second floor housed the Masonic Lodge. Eunice Campbell recalled that the house had a coal and wood stove and a wooden toilet with a ten-gallon pail they referred to as the “honey bucket,” which had to be transported through the kitchen to be disposed of out the back door.[118] The living quarters of RCMP families were routinely inspected by commanding officers, who checked for cleanliness and order. Home inspections ensured that the cleanliness of living quarters and detachment offices adequately reflected the values the police force wished to convey to the communities it policed. It was an “unwritten law” that senior officers ensured that the Mountie’s wife “could suitably meet social demands that his potentially higher rank would create.”[119] Wives were expected to respond with deference toward senior officers during these inspections, suggesting that they were subject to the same hierarchical organizational structure as their husbands. Sadie Conrad recalled that, in hindsight, preparing for some commanding officer to “come in with his white gloves to check on my housekeeping” was an invasion of privacy and highly manipulative.[120] But Conrad did not speak out against the practice, knowing that the officer’s written report would become part of her husband’s service record. She was aware that her domestic performance was linked to her husband’s career advancement.
Occasionally, being a Mountie wife had its career advantages. Gail Nelson was appointed a justice of the peace in 1968 by the provincial government of British Columbia. Her appointment meant that her husband would no longer have to travel a return distance of three hundred miles to obtain a search warrant or a summons, but could simply apply to his wife.[121] Wives in larger urban centres sometimes kept their jobs after marrying. Elizabeth Atkinson began work as a public servant for the RCMP in 1952 in a city detachment where she met and married her Mountie husband. While she continued to work for the RCMP in a paid administrative role as a secretary, she occasionally accompanied her husband on surveillance stakeouts in the evenings. She recalled being his “cover” in the car with him while he conducted his surveillance activities.[122] Elizabeth enjoyed her voluntary work as a surveillance operative, a role that would later become a full-time position for women in the RCMP in 1973.
Some Mountie wives with careers outside of the police force resisted the expectations placed upon them by the RCMP. In the 1970s, Mary Fairbanks worked as a nurse in several of her husband’s postings, but with every move she lost seniority. Finally, when her husband was posted to an isolated one-man detachment without a hospital, Mary’s career came to a halt. Although she had small children to look after by this time, she refused to clean cells or answer the radio and telephone at the detachment unless she was paid for the work. She also insisted that the police radio be moved from their bedroom into the living area. Fairbanks engaged in a politics of refusal when she attempted to assert the value of her labour over assumptions about her role as a wife. She is certain that her refusal to meet expectations as a Mountie wife was recorded on her husband’s personnel record. It was possibly a contributing factor that the force withheld promotion from her husband as a disciplinary measure since he never achieved a rank higher than corporal.
Other wives crossed the boundary between the private and the public spheres, making the reality of women’s involvement in police work more fluid than official accounts and policies would suggest. Patrice Smallwood remembered “getting a talk” from the section sergeant on her arrival at her husband’s new posting in the Arctic. He cautioned her “not to get involved in the running of the detachment” or to appear as though she was in charge.[123] Even though she wanted nothing to do with detachment work, Smallwood commented that she was drawn in automatically as far as the community was concerned.[124]
This became obvious one day when her husband was away on patrol with the constable. When the telephone rang with the report of a fight taking place in town in front of the Hudson’s Bay store, Smallwood replied that all of the police officers were away and that there was no one to attend the scene. After the third telephone call, Smallwood realized that people in the community expected her to do something about the situation. So she walked into town, where she approached a large gathering of people in front of the store. Smallwood recalled,
As I got nearer they all stopped and waited for me to get there … I mean I really was shaking in my boots and I thought, “What am I going to do?” You could tell who had been scrapping because there was two guys and they were a little bloodied up. So I looked around and somebody standing near the first fellow I said, “You take him home!” Somebody standing next to the other fellow I said, “You take him home!” and they did … Maybe it was coming from me rather than maybe [my husband] or somebody who they may have wanted to scrap with … That’s when I realized that the force did have power and reputation.[125]
As a Mountie wife, Smallwood symbolized civic authority despite a lack of police powers or training. She may not have possessed any official authority, but in the minds of the members of her community, her informal power as a Mountie wife was recognized.
*
Smallwood’s venture from the domestic to the public sphere as the “second man” during a community emergency blurred the boundaries between ideas of masculinity and femininity in much the same way the work of Klondike Kate Ryan had decades earlier. When asked if she thought that her work as an unpaid Mountie laid the groundwork for the eventual inclusion of women in the RCMP, Smallwood replied, “I never felt that we did police work. We [wives provided] a lot of support systems for the force, there’s no question. But on the whole, I don’t feel I did police work as such. I never thought that we were a prerequisite for women members.”[126] There is little doubt that the unpaid work of Mountie wives, and their general willingness to be subjected to RCMP policies despite the fact that they were not employees, greatly benefited the police force. As the RCMP prepared to swear in its first female constables in 1974, the work of the first matrons, female constable specials, and the unpaid Mountie was suddenly consigned to the margins of history as speculation about who would be the “first” woman in the RCMP began in earnest.