“Right, we have to do something about it!”: Policewomen’s agency against the Royal Ulster Constabulary
‘The Chief Constable at that time […] decided that he didn’t want women working, really, because they weren’t armed. Everything was getting worse at that stage; so, it meant, then, the Superintendent in Strandtown, he stopped the part-time women working, and then we got the Sex Discrimination Act, and had a look at it, and you could see, when you read it, the only way they could discriminate against us was in height or uniform, according to it. […] It was actually my husband that got me the Sex Discrimination Act and even though I took it to the Superintendent and showed him, he still wouldn’t do it because the Chief Constable said we weren’t working – so I didn’t give up. I […]got in contact with women that were in other stations to see where they’d been dealt the same blow, sort of thing. It ended up that, one night, we had a meeting in our house, and there was about 50 women there – part-time women – who all had the same thing, so we thought, “Right, we have to do something about it”. If [the] Chief Constable […] had realised it was in our house, my husband would have been transferred to dear-knows-where, you know. Some of the women, they decided who was going to go to the Federation to take a case, and they went then and took the case, and it ended up meaning we won the case.’ [1]
The decision to continue the non-arming of servicewomen into the 1980s helped sustain the non-combatant narrative and had the knock-on effect of being used as a justification for reducing women’s employment. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) seized on what they saw as an opportunity and used the non-arming of women as a means to attempt to restrict and thus reduce their employment. Chief Constable Jack Hermon decided in 1980 that, given the numbers of police officers killed in Northern Ireland, members of the RUC and RUC Reserve would start routinely bearing arms when on patrol. Since women were not permitted to bear arms, they would only be employed for work deemed to require a woman officer and would not continue with general operational duties, such as driving and patrolling. The Chief Constable felt he had sufficient women officers to perform these duties and as such he ceased to renew any servicewomen’s contracts or issue any new contracts[2]. In an act of resistance, the policewomen mobilized against this decision, with 50 of them getting together after work at one of their houses leading to a case against the Federation going to the European Court who ruled that the policewomen had been unlawfully denied work[3]. The policewomen were financially compensated and reinstated but it took a further 7 years until they were armed in 1993[4].
My fellowship with the Women’s History Network is enabling a feminist retelling of the history of women’s participation in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, specifically through the forgotten voices of former policewomen.
Throughout the Troubles, women served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and later, following the Good Friday Agreement, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), being out on the ‘front line’ day and night, for which the organisation was awarded the George Cross by the late Queen to recognise their courage in the face of sustained terrorist action against them. But the political sensitivities that endure in Northern Ireland mean that the majority of policemen and women have maintained a low profile since. Consequently, given policewomen’s presence on the ‘front line’ defied traditional societal expectations at the time, threatening the ‘front line’ as a male domain, their participation has been written out of the history of this conflict.
I recently visited the oral archive of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation to listed to the recorded interviews of some 30 former RUC policewomen. This oral archive presents a rare opportunity to hear their stories of the conflict and includes 350 oral testimonies, of which approximately 10% are from women. Women’s voices expose the mainstream masculinised narrative of this campaign and enable a reconceptualization of the ‘front line’ as somewhere where women have been, and thus can be.
This project builds on my postdoctoral research which tells the non-linear story of servicewomen and policewomen in Northern Ireland showing how they defied the myth that women have only recently been permitted to serve on the ‘front line’.[5]Their stories reveal a gendered power dynamic that sustained the conceptualisation of policewomen as non-combatants by not arming them and requiring them to wear skirts (as it was argued that their visibility as women meant they wouldn’t be targeted by the IRA) which actually increased their exposure to risk. I will be extending these findings to challenge generalisations that assume homogeneity, by examining the regional variation in policewomen’s experiences. I am in the process of mapping oral testimonies to the geographical areas of operation of the different policewomen to compare women’s ‘front line’ experiences between urban and rural settings. I look forward to sharing a visual representation of these findings in due course.
[1] RUC veteran NI-17, 2019, Interviewed by Hannah West, 25 July.
[2] European Court, ‘Judgement of the Court of 15 May 1986 (Marguerite Johnston v Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’, 1986, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:61984CJ0222, (accessed 29 December, 2020).
[3] European Court, ‘Judgement of the Court of 15 May 1986’.
[4] David McKittrick, ‘Female RUC officers to be armed: David McKittrick reports on moves to extend equality of opportunity to the carrying of weapons’, The Independent, August 11, 1993, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/female-ruc-officers-to-be-armed-david-mckittrick-reports-on-moves-to-extend-equality-of-opportunity-to-the-carrying-of-weapons-1460552.html (accessed 28 January, 2024).
[5] MacKenzie, M. (2015). Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Short bio: Dr Hannah West is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar whose research explores gendered knowledge production about war through creative methods. She is Co-Chair of the Defence Research Network and Communications & Engagement Officer for the Female Veterans’ Transformation Programme.
