It’s taken more than 100 years, but the Mounties have finally got their women.
—Toronto Star, 1974
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Constable Beverley MacDonald was a twenty-three-year-old RCMP rookie just out of training when she arrived at her first posting in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, in 1975. Salmon Arm was a small, working-class farming and logging community located in the interior of the province. Most of the RCMP officers posted at the detachment were young, single men with just a few years of service. MacDonald, who was one of the first thirty-two women to be hired by the RCMP, recalled that members of the community felt special to have been chosen as one of the first towns in Canada to be assigned a female Mountie. Many of Salmon Arm’s citizens had never seen a female police officer before.
Although people in the community were generally supportive of the idea of women in the RCMP, they were also curious about whether a woman could do the work. While on routine patrol in town one day, MacDonald noticed that her police cruiser had a flat tire. Pulling over in front of the Shuswap Inn Pub, she radioed in to the detachment to say she would be out of the vehicle to change the tire. Just out of training and in good physical condition, MacDonald had little difficulty in replacing the flat. When she finished, she was greeted by a round of applause from the patrons of the pub who had been watching her through the window. She also heard members of the detachment, who were hiding in nearby bushes, cheering her on.[1] Stories such as MacDonald’s demonstrate the importance of recording the history of women in the RCMP. Their narratives offer an alternative and more inclusive approach to the historical record of the police force, one that tells us much about changing societal values and shifting attitudes toward gender.
The narratives of the first women to join the RCMP in the 1970s and 1980s have only recently begun to receive some public attention. Historical accounts of the police force continue to be dominated by men in much the same way as they have since the nineteenth century. In 1873, following the formation of the North-West Mounted Police, journalists began to write stories of Mounties tracking whiskey smugglers, capturing outlaws, and keeping the peace between settlers and Aboriginal people. It was not long before memoirs written by former members of the police force, featuring tales of danger and adventure on the wild Canadian prairie, captured the imagination of popular readers. Throughout the twentieth century, the image of the RCMP continued to be shaped by the print media, popular histories, dime novels, and even comic strips. Hollywood soon capitalized on the public’s ongoing interest in the men of the RCMP, producing over 240 Mountie movies that portrayed them as dashing and handsome heroes, protagonists who always saved the day. For its part, the RCMP did not discourage the idealization of its image. Such an image generated respect and trust, values that were essential to maintaining lawful authority in the communities Mounties policed.
Given this history, it is not surprising that most Canadians continued to think of the men of the RCMP in heroic terms as late as the 1970s. Policing was generally thought of as a manly pursuit and few Canadians, including RCMP officers, could conceive of female Mounties. Of course, women have been active in the work of the RCMP, both in paid and unpaid capacities, for most of its history. But their absence from the historical record has led to assumptions that the RCMP and police work has always been the explicit province of men.
Silenced: The Untold Story of the Fight for Equality in the RCMP offers an alternative perspective of the history of the police force. Based on forty-three interviews with male and female police officers, including some of the first women to be hired by the RCMP, it recounts how between 1974 and 1990 the first women challenged assumptions about police work as an exclusively male occupation. Their narratives reveal that despite a great deal of resistance and some pretty incredible odds, the women of the RCMP managed to assert their equality as police officers on their own terms. Although the first women to join the RCMP did not think of themselves as feminists who were breaking ground for women’s rights, their work as Mounties nevertheless signified women’s changing role in Canadian society.
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Why did the RCMP wait 101 years to hire women? Despite the fact that women had worked in policing in municipal departments across Canada since 1912, the RCMP’s journey toward hiring the first female Mounties was long and complex. There were two key reasons for the delay. The first, and most important, had to do with the preservation of the masculine image of the police force and, as a corollary, the country. The RCMP enjoyed a privileged position as Canada’s federal police force, a status not held by any other police department. The force’s long paramilitary history was intimately connected to Canadian nationhood, and by the 1970s the figure of the manly Mountie in his red serge tunic was firmly entrenched as an iconic symbol of Canada, both at home and abroad. It was an image of the country that the federal government was reluctant to alter, and one that the RCMP’s commanding officers were very keen to maintain.
The second reason had more to do with inexperience. Quite simply, the RCMP did not know in what capacity women could most effectively be utilized. The force’s refusal to hire women earlier in the century handicapped their decision-making process seventy years later. Although the NWMP briefly hired women to act as matrons and gold inspectors during the Yukon gold rush, they were not engaged in patrol or enforcement activities in the same way women working for municipal police departments had been throughout the century. When commanding officers began to consider hiring women in 1970, a number of questions emerged. Could the RCMP use women to work in more traditional policing roles—as matrons or to do social service work with female offenders and children? Should they be hired strictly for traffic or bylaw enforcement work, freeing up male officers to investigate more serious crimes? Or should their work be confined to plainclothes investigations, an area where they were already proving successful? Most importantly, were women capable of performing as uniformed personnel with full police powers? These questions may have been more easily answered if the RCMP had had a point of reference from earlier decades on which to base their decision.
Despite the delay, when the decision was finally made in 1974 to hire women on an equal basis with men, the RCMP officially promoted itself as a gender-neutral organization. Female Mounties earned the same rate of pay, underwent the same training, and were invested with full police powers. Unofficially, however, questions about whether women were equal to, or different from, male police officers were often at the centre of much of the discrimination they encountered within the organization. Male members of the RCMP understood brawn and physical size as essential to effective law enforcement. In contrast, women possessed a number of inescapable “natural” conditions, such as a smaller stature and lesser physical strength. According to many of their detractors, these physical characteristics only emphasized their biological inferiority and therefore their unsuitability to the work.
Were the women of the RCMP, then, equal to or different from male police officers? Many of the first female Mounties struggled with the pressure of having to choose one or the other category to define themselves. Within RCMP culture, if they considered themselves to be equal to men, they were branded as unfeminine and manly, a “women’s libber” who hated men. If they considered themselves to be different from men, they were characterized as poor substitutes for “real” police officers and unable to perform the work. It was a no-win situation for female Mounties, who would always fail to live up to male standards of policing no matter which category they chose. Few within or outside the RCMP had considered the possibility that women could be both equal to and different from their male colleagues.
Finally, there is one additional reason the RCMP waited so long to hire female police officers. The men of the RCMP, like those in most other private and public industries and institutions in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, viewed advances being made by women in society as coming at the cost of men. Many Canadians did not see how increased rights for women benefited society as a whole. Men and women were still thought of in dichotomous terms and their roles were understood as existing in opposition, rather than in tandem. The maintenance of power became an important issue within the RCMP where many men strove to maintain control of the police force rather than relinquish any part of their monopoly. At least from a gendered point of view, it was obvious that the RCMP was an organization that was not representative of the communities they were policing.
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It was against this historical backdrop that 292 young women from across Canada applied to join the RCMP in 1974. Thirty-two, representing every province, were chosen to form the first female troop in the history of the RCMP, Troop 17 (1974/75). For most of the women, becoming a Mountie meant job security, interesting work, a chance to help others, and the opportunity to don the famous RCMP uniform and represent their country. None realized that being a woman and a Mountie would present them with a number of unique challenges that they were expected to negotiate to be considered good police officers. Their fight for equality as members of the RCMP was only just beginning.