I don’t know how many times I told people, “Look, I am totally going to publicly humiliate you here in front of all your friends. I’m going to kick your ass.” And they’d look at me and think, “Holy crap, she might be able to do it!”
—Shelly Evans
RCMP Officer
*
When the women of Troop 17 arrived at their first postings in March 1975, they did not know exactly what lay ahead. Issues surrounding their uniform, the media, and training were becoming distant memories as they assumed their policing duties. Most of the women were excited to begin their new careers. Allison Palmer remembered that she arrived so early at the detachment on her first day that she had to sit in her car listening to the radio until someone unlocked the door so she could check in for duty.[460] Not everyone shared Palmer’s enthusiasm.
It quickly became evident to the women of Troop 17 that some people were unwilling to accept them as police officers. Mountie wives were especially resistant to women in the RCMP. Wives’ unpaid work for the RCMP for decades prior to 1974 afforded them a unique place within the organization, and some viewed themselves as the feminine complement to the heroic Mountie. Others struggled with the idea of their husbands spending long hours working with young, single women whom they viewed as a threat to their marriages. Often, wives adopted a number of gendered attitudes about women in the force that mirrored the opinions expressed by their husbands. Mountie wives registered their opposition to women in the RCMP by using informal methods of exclusion that isolated and ostracized female members socially.
Members of the public were also struggling with changing definitions of masculinity and femininity in Canadian society. Many Canadians were unsure of how to approach a female police officer, especially in those communities policed by the RCMP that had never seen one before. Some people adopted a paternalistic approach to female Mounties, encouraging them for doing a good job or assisting them in their duties. Others relied on conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity to manipulate, harass, and intimidate the women to escape arrest or evade capture. Still others resorted to physical violence, and many female Mounties had to employ the use of force to make arrests.
By and large, however, in a society where policing was equated with masculinity, the presence of female police officers was an unknown variable that generated significant confusion over how to respond to female figures of authority. Combative males were torn between engaging a female police officer in a physical confrontation and risking being bested by her during an altercation on the one hand, and obeying the commands of a female officer on the other. When they did resist, it afforded the women of the RCMP the opportunity to challenge gender distinctions through the use of force. At the same time, it presented them with a chance to exercise their agency as police officers by introducing alternatives to violent confrontation.
For much of the twentieth century, the RCMP embodied a specific form of gender relations that celebrated the nuclear family in which the wages of a male breadwinner supported dependents, who were supervised by a wife who remained within the home. The nuclear family was a measure of normality during the postwar period, and Mountie wives were elemental in upholding this standard in the RCMP. In doing so, they occupied a position as the appropriately feminine counterpart to the masculine Mountie hero in their communities.[461] However, expectations surrounding wives’ detachment work were challenged in the 1960s and 1970s as more and more Mountie wives began to work outside the home. A growing number of women refused to perform policing-related services for the RCMP while holding down a job. But many Mountie wives remained in the home, conforming to more conventional understandings of their place within RCMP culture.
Wives had a number of reasons for resisting the presence of women in the police force. One of the most common reasons was because they feared that a female police officer would be unable to back up their husbands in a dangerous situation. This suggests that they shared their husbands’ perceptions about the physical limitations of female police officers. The overriding concern, however, had more to do with the threat of competition for the time and affection of their husbands. Rumours about female Mounties engaging in sexual relations with male members were circulating between detachments across the country even before Troop 17 left the training academy. Gossip had it that there was “hanky panky between some of the women recruits and the NCO instructors” at Depot, where female recruits were also “accused of having sex with their male counterparts in the residences, in police cruisers, even in the graveyard.”[462] The women of Troop 17 were cognizant of this gossip, as was the media who dutifully recorded it for Canadians.[463] The rumours seemed to confirm notions that any woman who wanted to work in a male-dominated organization was only there to engage in morally corrupt conduct with men.
It was a concern that worried the RCMP’s commanding officers. Given the amount of time that male and female Mounties were to spend together during the course of a shift, it became important to the RCMP to reassure Mountie wives that female police officers were not rivals. Accordingly, Commr. Maurice Nadon, in his speech to Troop 17 at their graduation ceremonies, made a rare public acknowledgment of Mountie wives for their unofficial work for the RCMP: “Wives of members stationed on detachments were in many cases unofficial, unpaid and all-too-often unrecognized—but always appreciated—members of the Force.”[464] Nadon’s reference to wives as “members” of the police force may have been inadvertent, but it is unlikely that many would have contested this characterization. In a similar vein, the RCMP Gazette, in its extensive coverage of the graduation of Troop 17, also included an article that paid tribute to Mountie wives: “Little did they know when they pledged their marriage vows, that they were taking on an unknown partner—namely the Force. This often left them in the position of being the third party, or odd-woman out!”[465] Despite these accolades, some RCMP wives were clearly feeling the odd woman out, now that female Mounties were about to begin partnering with their husbands at work.
It was not long before the women of Troop 17 learned that the rumoured antagonism of Mountie wives was not unfounded. When Trish O’Brien was asked about her reception at her first posting in the Maritimes, her initial recollection was of the wives at the detachment. O’Brien remembered that the wives were particularly upset at her arrival. She recalled one of her male colleagues saying, “My wife said if you work with me, our marriage is over!” The wives viewed O’Brien as a threat:
They didn’t want us working with [their husbands] in the car, and all this was going on without me even knowing. No one said anything about it. And once I got in there and I got to know the people, then you started hearing stuff … how all the wives got up in arms when they found out the female’s coming here; no one wanted you.[466]
Marianne Robson described the resistance of the wives as a big internal issue within the RCMP. She was unsure if the wives reallybelieved that female Mounties were there to “steal their husbands away,” but she remembered that there was a real sense that female Mounties were viewed as a threat. “We were there to do a job and my intent was not to break up anybody’s marriage or steal somebody’s husband by any means,” stated Robson.[467] Linda Rutherford remembered that the wives at her first posting in rural Manitoba were asked in advance by commanding officers what they thought of a female police officer working with their husbands. Her trainer’s wife had “absolutely no problem” with him training a woman.[468]
Wives employed a number of tactics, including shunning and gossip, to register their resistance to female Mounties. Allison Palmer recalled that the wives at her first posting ignored her outright. They did not want anything to do with her until her trainer’s wife stepped in and defended her. Palmer remembered that she was the one who finally went to a stitch and bitch and said to the women who were present, “If anyone should be jealous it should be me. She’s working with my husband.” One wife later telephoned Palmer to make amends. They are still friends today.[469] Janet Porter also remembered that her trainer’s wife was interviewed prior to her arrival and that “everyone had to be on board” with her husband training a female member. While Porter found that the wives were nice to her, they did not ask her to dinner, to go shopping, or to otherwise join them in socializing.[470]
This tension continued for the women who followed Troop 17. Margaret Watson, who graduated from Depot in 1977, realized early in her policing career that the wives of male members were concerned about female Mounties “coming on” to their husbands. “They were not happy,” recalled Watson, who said that female members had to prove themselves to the wives too. Supervisors at her first detachment even organized “contact parties” so the wives could get to know her. But it was not until Watson began to date a single constable her own age that the wives’ concerns over her presence diminished somewhat.[471] When Kate Morton was posted to a small detachment on the east coast of Canada, she found that while most of her male colleagues were respectful, their wives were less trusting. She recalled that whenever the detachment had summer ride-along programs for law students, her male peers preferred that she take the female students so they would not “get in trouble” with their wives.[472]
Although Cherise Marchand had a good relationship with her male trainer and his wife at her first posting in western Canada, they abruptly ceased all social interaction with her after she completed her Recruit Field Training (RFT) program. Marchand recalled that both had treated her very well during her training, inviting her to social functions or to their home at Christmas. But as soon as her training was over, her trainer “didn’t want to have anything to do with me.” Marchand, who was surprised by this turn of events, speculated that once their social responsibilities and working requirements as the trainer and the trainer’s wife had been met, a continuing personal relationship with her was seen as unnecessary.[473]
Carolyn Harper was posted to a large urban detachment in the 1970s where she encountered animosity from Mountie wives. Harper and the other single women at this posting discovered that the wives would not speak to them at social functions. Harper blamed their husbands for the situation:
I actually blame a lot of the men for that because the culture is such that they really didn’t take their jobs home with them. They really didn’t talk to their wives about their work. Having somebody there that they knew their husband was talking to was probably more upsetting to them. I don’t think they always looked to us as sexual rivals. I think they looked at us as rivals for their husbands’ time. I think that it really hurt them that they knew that their husbands were talking to us about things that their husbands wouldn’t talk to them about at home.[474]
As a result, female members who were single did not attend social functions at this particular detachment when the wives were present.
Some male Mounties handled the arrival of female members better than others by introducing their wives to them right away. Carol Franklin found the wives at her first posting very accepting and inclusive. Franklin still “writes Christmas cards to one of the members’ wives that befriended me. I feel so fortunate to have been in that place.”[475] The wives at Louise Ferguson’s first detachment were also supportive, once they had met her. “I mean, you got invited to everybody’s place for supper. First of all, the guys wanted their wives to meet me so that tension was settled down. I got lots of dinner invitations right off the bat. We all socialized together.”[476] Some male Mounties recognized that it was important to quickly defuse any tensions that may have been created in Mountie marriages by the arrival of female police officers.
The women who were married to RCMP officers were not alone in their trepidation over female police officers; it was a familiar response from the wives of police officers across Canada. Carolyn Harper’s application to a municipal police department in British Columbia was initially rejected in 1974. When she contacted the recruiter to ask for the reason, she was told the department was being careful in their selection of its first female constable because of resistance from the wives. According to Harper, the department was treading carefully after receiving “so many complaints from wives.”[477] Harper, who was single and twenty-one years old at the time, remembered that the wives were especially concerned about their husbands riding around all night with a young woman in a police cruiser. That particular police department eventually hired a divorced woman in her thirties with two children. Harper successfully applied to the RCMP instead.
In 1982, researchers Rick Linden and Candice Minch, sociologists from the University of Manitoba, conducted extensive research into women in policing in North America, including the RCMP. Their discussion of family problems amongst police officers included the reasons for high rates of divorce. They pointed to the strains placed on marriages by shift work, long hours, and social isolation within communities. As well, the “entry into the department of fairly large numbers of women who may be sharing a car eight hours a day with their husbands is seen by the wives as an additional threat to their marriage.”[478] Researcher A.O. Maguire, in an undated study on the RCMP, found that Mountie wives grew concerned every time they discovered that a new female police officer was arriving at the detachment. Maguire found that “in one case, the fears of the wives are alleviated when the new constable turned out to be a ‘plain Jane’ and was not perceived as a threat.” Similarly, the wives became more accepting of female officers after they began to go out with single males on the detachment.[479] The RCMP’s own research identified several issues female Mounties had to overcome as they attempted to socialize and integrate into their communities, including negativity from wives.[480]
Of course, not all Mountie wives responded to the presence of female police officers in negative ways. But like the wives of men in many male-dominated professions that were admitting growing numbers of women in the 1970s, the unpaid Mounties relied on conventional concepts of gender when resisting the idea of women working closely with their husbands. Their response demonstrates that women were not a homogeneous, unified group but, like men, were often divided when it came to beliefs and opinions regarding the shifts in gender relations that were occurring.
The residents of the first Canadian communities to receive a female Mountie in 1974 responded to their arrival in a variety of ways. Most residents in small towns and rural communities had never seen a female police officer before. People at Louise Ferguson’s first posting felt gratified when their community was chosen as one of the first to have a female Mountie. “Everybody in the community was really pleasant. Very nice,” recalled Ferguson, who felt supported and appreciated by the public.[481] At Allison Palmer’s first posting, people viewed her as a novelty. She recalled one incident when she stopped to have a coffee with some of her male colleagues. “Somebody had never seen a female member before and paid for my coffee,” said Palmer, who never discovered the identity of her benefactor. She also recalled that her colleagues were somewhat upset that they had never experienced the same from a member of the community.[482]
After a while, however, so much attention was like living in a fishbowl for the women of Troop 17. Janet Porter, posted to a small town in the prairies, remembered that the whole community knew she was coming and that heads turned whenever she drove through town in the police cruiser.[483] Linda Rutherford found the attention difficult at times: “It was hard. You’d stop the police car at an intersection, and people would be walking by and they’d be pointing. I had no privacy. You couldn’t go anywhere. Everybody knew who I was and they’d be pointing … I remember so distinctly people pointing. It was a novelty.”[484] Marianne Robson remembered being stared at wherever she went, both on and off duty. She commented, “I guess it was just so unusual, so unique, that people wanted to see what it was all about.”[485] It was attention that the women of Troop 17 did not anticipate or want.
The rarity of female Mounties contributed to their social isolation. Researchers in one 1982 study concluded that small and isolated communities posed particular challenges for the women of the RCMP, especially when they attempted to socialize off duty. Because the women were so well-known in the community, it became difficult for them to escape the “pressures of the police role.” Although male RCMP officers were also recognized in their communities, it was a problem that was particularly acute for women “who have no friends or working associates in remote areas.” Researchers discovered that social isolation contributed to low morale and led to lower retention rates for women in the RCMP.[486]
In addition to social isolation, the lack of privacy sometimes posed safety concerns for young female Mounties in the 1970s. Donna Burns recalled that groups of young men at her first posting, who were well-known to the local police, attempted on several occasions to intimidate and frighten her. Because it was a small town, they knew where she lived. They sat outside her apartment in their vehicles late at night, put sugar in her gas tank, and followed her around while she was patrolling. Burns commented, “There were numerous times when the groups would be following me while out on patrol and just trying to set me up” in potentially harmful situations.[487] However, she stood her ground and refused to be intimidated. Burns always felt supported by the male members she worked with, many of whom she referred to as “gentlemen” who did not hesitate to back her up in dangerous situations. Their support afforded her a level of personal security that contributed to her growing confidence as a rookie police officer.
It took some time for members of the public to accept female Mounties as legitimate figures of authority. Many of the first female Mounties recalled incidents when members of the community requested help from a male police officer rather than a female member. Denise Bell, who was stationed in a small town in the prairies in 1978, answered the detachment telephone on one occasion only to have someone ask to speak with a male police officer instead. Bell assured the caller that she was capable of helping with the query.[488] Trish O’Brien’s community in the Maritimes had never seen a female Mountie before she arrived. She recalled that, initially, members of the public assumed that she was married to her male partner when they were spotted out on patrol together. O’Brien also found that civilians would invariably prefer to speak to the male officer during calls or would ask to speak to a man when they came to the detachment.[489] These accounts illustrate how the public initially lacked confidence in a woman’s authority or her ability to do what was still considered to be a man’s job.
Janice Murdoch recalled that in 1987, some in her first community thought she was not old enough to drive a vehicle, let alone enforce the law. Murdoch’s ponytail and braces made her look younger than her twenty-one years. After a while, Murdoch noticed that if she was riding with a male auxiliary member, people would approach him first at a crime scene or during a call, making it necessary for her to step in and tell them that she was the police officer. Murdoch’s husband, who was not a police officer, occasionally rode along with her as a volunteer during her shifts. On at least two occasions, witnesses turned to him for assistance instead of Murdoch, even though he was not wearing a police uniform. Even after nine years of service, Murdoch found that members of her community still preferred to speak with a man rather than a female police officer.[490]
The sight of a young woman in a uniform sometimes confused the public. Jane Hall, who looked like a teenager in 1978 even though she was twenty-three years old at the time, recalled responding to a routine call in North Vancouver, British Columbia. When she knocked on the door of a home, a “well-dressed woman in her mid-seventies” answered and “called to her husband, sitting on the couch behind her, ‘Dear, the Girl Guides are here!’”[491] Cherise Marchand was the first woman to be posted to a detachment in a small city in western Canada. She recalled that she “just about caused a few accidents” when members of the public “did a double take” after seeing her on the street for the first time.[492] When Allison Palmer attended one accident scene, her presence created so many problems for investigators that they asked her to leave. Several passing motorists were so distracted by the sight of a female Mountie on the road that they almost caused another accident trying to get a second look at her.[493]
It was not long before female Mounties had to confront violence in their communities. Some men resisted the authority of female police officers by physically attacking them. It was one way they actively negotiated their masculine identity within their communities. Denise Bell recounted an incident in 1978 in which a man tackled her in a restaurant and tried to “put me through a wall” for no reason. Immediately, “before my feet even hit the ground someone grabbed the man and said, ‘Don’t you ever hit a woman!’” Bell then had to break the two men up after they entered into a fistfight over the incident.[494] Bell’s experience illustrates the often contradictory responses women in the RCMP received from the public. While one man chose to react violently toward Bell as a figure of authority, the other reacted in a chivalrous manner to protect her from being attacked further.
Shelly Evans experienced high levels of violence from men at her first posting in 1988. She recollected that she seemed to be doing an inordinate amount of fighting there, in what she characterized as a “rough” community that included transient men working in the oil industry. Evans, who was just twenty-one years old at the time, remembered that there were always people who were surprised to see a woman responding to a police call. For Evans, gender was a factor in many of her dealings with the public, some of whom “had a real problem with a girl with a gun.” One night she responded to a call about a bar fight, only to find that the bouncer at the bar resented her presence at the scene. In front of the bar’s patrons, the bouncer slapped her across the face. “The next thing he knew he was picking himself up off the floor and he had a broken nose ’cause I laid him out,” said Evans.[495] Whether or not the bouncer would have considered slapping a male police officer in the face is speculative. However, the bouncer clearly equated police authority, and his own, with masculinity and the use of force. On this occasion, Evans was unwilling to be humiliated in front of the bar’s patrons. It was extremely important to her that she establish her authority as a police officer and remove any considerations of gender from future dealings with the public.
On another occasion, outside the same bar, Evans was attacked by a university student whom she was attempting to arrest for impaired driving. The student was “so scared at the thought of losing everything and being impaired and going to jail” that he attempted to strangle Evans by the side of the road. According to Evans, if she “had been able to get to my gun I probably would have shot him. But I couldn’t, and I was, luckily, physically able to contain him until the backup troops could arrive.” Evans suffered a broken hand that required surgery. She was then placed on light duties at the detachment for eight weeks while she waited for it to heal. Nerve damage and arthritis in her hand are her permanent reminders of the incident.[496]
Female Mounties were sometimes surprised by their own abilities. Louise Ferguson recalled her surprise at being able to physically restrain an impaired driver who attempted to escape arrest. A “big fight” took place when she tried to subdue him, but because she was “a pretty good scrapper at the time” she made the arrest and took him back to the detachment. When the breathalyzer operator finally arrived at the office, the suspect exclaimed, “Thank god you’re here! She already tried to kill me once!” Ferguson acknowledged that he was “a little beat-up looking” after their fight.[497]
When Pam Osborne’s authority was challenged by an older man in her community, she responded to his gendered attitude toward her with physical force. “I fought with this German farmer one night, a grandfather … We [the RCMP] were involved in an incident on the block and he came up to it and I told him to get out of the way and continue on. He refused. It was a definite ‘I don’t have to listen to you, you’re just a girl.’” Osborne ended up in a physical altercation with the man, whom she arrested, took to jail, and charged with obstruction.[498] The farmer’s response to Osborne was informed by his belief that a woman did not have the authority to direct the activities of men in public spaces. Although female Mounties preferred to use negotiation rather than physical confrontation in their dealings with the public, they had little choice but to rely on their training to defend themselves when needed.
Donna Burns relied on her RCMP training to see her through her first life-threatening altercation, which took place just one week after her arrival in Port Alberni, British Columbia, in 1975. While attempting to question a suspect in a local restaurant, Burns touched the man lightly on the shoulder and asked him to step outside:
[As] soon as I touched him, he went berserk. He got up, the table flew, he pushed me back over the counter and he starts choking me. And he’s choking and nobody’s coming to help me, of course … But it was that Depot training, the ground fighting. [My hand] came up behind him, and like I said, he had that long blond hair and I just yanked it. And I got him off me and he’s just going. And I don’t remember how I got him from the fish and chip place to the car. But I remember … I couldn’t get cuffs on him … I’ve got him in the back seat of the car, and he’s just going wild … But I’ll never forget that he had his hands [on my neck] and I had bruises on my throat and he was choking me.[499]
Burns was so new to police work that she did not know how to turn on the police cruiser’s siren as she made her way back to the detachment with the suspect.
When Burns returned to the detachment and her male colleagues saw who she had in the back of the police cruiser, she garnered their immediate respect. The suspect, who by this time was trying to kick out the windows of the cruiser, was well-known to the members of the Port Alberni detachment. “I couldn’t do anything wrong” after that incident, said Burns. She knew that as a rookie police officer she needed to communicate to her male peers that she was not easily intimidated or afraid to defend herself. And if members of the community who were watching the altercation in the restaurant had any questions about the ability of women to handle violent confrontations, their concerns were answered. The media eventually caught wind of the story about the assault on Burns and published an account of it in the local newspaper. Burns thought it was very fortunate that the incident happened so early on in her career since it gave her a lot of credibility, both with her peers and with members of the public.[500]
Louise Ferguson also gained credibility as a rookie police officer following a fortuitous altercation with an intoxicated man:
The guy was quite combative, you know, pushing people and fighting. I just clicked into training mode, and of course at that time I was strong and still jogging every day. I got him in a choke hold and by the time the other member got there, I was just putting the cuffs on him and putting him in the car … It was so easy, like it was really quite easy. But the next day it was all around … that I’d been in this big fight and single-handedly took down this big huge logger guy. I mean, it wasn’t even close to the truth.[501]
Not only did word about the altercation spread throughout her community, but neighbouring communities and detachments heard about it as well. Ferguson sensed that rumours about her encounter with the big logger would only help her credibility, so she did not dispute them.
Occasionally, male civilians came to the aid of female police officers. One day, Cherise Marchand’s trainer decided to let her answer a call to pick up a man who was drunk and had passed out. Unbeknownst to Marchand, her trainer had already surmised who the man was, based on the location of the call. Marchand knew she had a problem when she arrived at the scene to find that the inebriated man was approximately six feet three and weighed well over two hundred pounds. As she was pulling the man down the driveway toward the police cruiser, an older man stopped his car, asked if she needed help, and gave her a hand in getting the man into the cruiser. Back at the detachment, when Marchand’s trainer saw that she had successfully arrested the man, he responded, “That’s not fair! I’ve been in the RCMP for six years and nobody’s ever given me a hand for anything. This is the first time you go out by yourself, and you get somebody to help you put this drunk in your car?”[502] It was obvious to Marchand that her trainer believed he had set her up for failure. However, neither Marchand nor her trainer had anticipated that gentlemanly codes of conduct toward women sometimes resulted in successful outcomes to tough situations for female Mounties.
Understandings about gender worked in their favour in other ways. After Marianne Robson had arrested a male suspect at a local inn, he escaped from the back of her police cruiser. Robson chased him and caught him. The next day, word about their altercation spread through the community, including the fact that the suspect “got caught by the female Mountie.” According to Robson, the man was so embarrassed about being chased and caught by a woman that he left town.[503] Carolyn Harper, a special constable stationed at a major Canadian airport, recalled that people actually thanked her when she wrote them a traffic ticket. “In 1975, they [would] thank you for writing a speeding ticket” because female Mounties were so novel. She remembered that they often exhibited a paternalistic attitude toward her by complimenting her for doing a good job. In her opinion, the fact that she was a female officer “contributed to a calmer situation,” even when handing out tickets.[504]
Female Mounties were not above taking advantage of gendered attitudes to make their jobs easier. Jane Hall arrested an impaired driver in North Vancouver one night. After politely reading the breathalyzer demand to him and before he had time to think, she opened the back door of the police cruiser, slipped the handcuffs on him, and put him in the back seat.[505] Unbeknownst to Hall, her suspect was one of the city’s most notorious criminals and was under surveillance at the time by a member of the drug squad, who observed the entire arrest. The drug squad member later communicated a different version of events back at the detachment: “It was brutal … She must be a black belt or something; he never got a chance to even touch her,” he recalled, marvelling at how easily Hall got the suspect into the cruiser. Many men, including RCMP officers, suspected that female police officers held some type of martial arts training. The suspicion was based on the assumption that the only way women could gain entrance to the RCMP in the first place was to possess specialized skills that could compensate for their weaker bodies. Few realized that most female Mounties did not possess martial arts skills apart from the arrest techniques they learned while at Depot. Despite the fact that the suspect was highly intoxicated and cooperated with Hall, even calling her “Ma’am” at one point, she allowed this version of events to circulate freely.[506]
Some male civilians preferred to be arrested by a female Mountie during tense situations. Pam Osborne remembered walking into a bar fight one night only to see that a suspect was “chest to chest and nose to nose with three male members around him, ready to go and fight.” When Osborne arrived, the suspect decided to be arrested by her instead of fighting his way out with the three male Mounties. She walked him out of the bar without incident.[507] According to one study on policing, women were able to reduce violent situations because they had less to prove as far as their identity was concerned when they encountered hostile civilians.[508]
Louise Ferguson also thought that having a female presence at a bar fight tended to calm a potentially violent situation down significantly:
Because there was less to prove from a male perspective, you know … you could see the guy thinking, “Number one, she’s either got a black belt in karate and will beat the shit out of me and embarrass me in front of all my friends. Or, I will get the upper hand and all I’ve done is beaten up on some girl.” If you’re aware of that and play that you can defuse a lot of situations and offer someone the “out”—they don’t have to find out one way or the other. You say, “Let’s go to my police car and talk about it.” They’ll race you there. They want to get the situation resolved … In some cases, most people don’t really want to have their friends see them beat up this lady cop.[509]
All of the female Mounties interviewed for this research utilized stereotypical understandings of femininity and masculinity at some point in their careers, not only to diffuse violent situations but to negotiate with suspects.
Gender stereotypes were often a double-edged sword for female police officers, though. Members of the public also used gendered approaches to female Mounties in an attempt to manipulate their way out of trouble. Shelly Evans cited several examples of men in the community who thought that they could get out of trouble by flirting with a female member. When their advances were rejected, they often characterized the female Mountie as “a bitch” who must be gay and circulated the information around the community.[510] Conversely, female civilians who relied on their femininity when dealing with male police officers were disappointed when they encountered a female Mountie. According to Carolyn Harper, women knew that “they had lost the little bit of an edge” when a female officer responded to a call.[511] Similarly, when Jane Hall responded to a call about a bar fight, one of the female combatants was disappointed to see her. The woman had grabbed one of the male constables as he struggled to arrest a suspect. Hall remembered that up until that point the “female obviously felt untouchable,” because she knew that if a male member grabbed her, the drunken onlookers would come to her rescue. “How unfortunate for her I was there, because the same social code that applied to her also applied to me,” recounted Hall, who arrested the woman.[512]
Margaret Watson, who did not shy away from using physical force when necessary, found that women in her community were as dangerous as men at times. Watson cited domestic disputes as the type of incident in which women were more likely to be violent with police officers, male or female. But they were not the only calls in which she experienced violence from women. Watson remembered arresting a mentally unstable woman who dragged her down a flight of stairs and ripped her shirt off before she could restrain her.[513] Women in the community were sometimes as violent with female Mounties as men were, an indicator of the unpredictability of gender.
Some men assumed that they could outrun a woman and evade capture. Janice Murdoch found that men “might decide to fight or they might decide to run, but more often than not they will run, thinking I won’t catch them.”[514] Murdoch, a dog handler, recalled assisting in the apprehension of two men suspected of a violent assault. She tracked the suspects with her dog into an area of bush that was heavily wooded. Although she initially had backup officers aiding her in the search, they were soon left behind as Murdoch and her dog followed the suspects’ trail. Even physically fit men found it difficult to track suspects for long periods of time without specialized training. Eventually, Murdoch located the two suspects and brought them out of the bush. On the way back to the detachment, one of the male officers asked the suspects why they had decided to run into the bush. They responded that when they saw the female police officer, they assumed that she would never catch them. Laughing, the male officers informed the suspects that Murdoch had just returned from running the Boston Marathon, so the chances of them outrunning her were slim.[515]
*
Male members of the public, like the men in the RCMP, understood physicality and violence as manly characteristics. They also understood policing as masculine work in which the threat of force served as the definitive standard of police authority, even when they were on the receiving end of that force. These concepts were challenged when female Mounties met violence with violence, contrary to notions of the female body as an unlikely conduit of authority. Many female Mounties were willing to adopt the masculine standards they were trained to execute in order to reach their policing objectives, demonstrating that female Mounties were willing to break out of conventional constructions of gender to succeed.
At the same time, however, they resorted to understandings of difference to achieve their goals. Sometimes they relied on understandings of femininity to defuse dangerous situations and avoid physical confrontations. They also relied on their ability to talk their way out of tough situations, an alternative approach that ultimately differentiated the work of female Mounties from that of their male colleagues. As the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada wrote, “true equality requires differences to be accommodated,” a concept that was gradually accepted by members of the communities where female Mounties policed.[516] Male Mounties, however, had greater difficulty relinquishing traditional standards of policing, and many refused to believe that alternative methods worked too.