This is an absolutely fascinating topic which tells us more about gender at the end of the 19th century than the Metropolitan Police. Historical study of British crime and police forces, and particular perceptions of both are vehicles which are inescapably linked to the society, values, and norms of the day. Thus, a conversation around the Metropolitan Police invariably becomes one of broader social history of the period, and an understanding of one is vital for the other.

There are two separate questions here: what was the actual role of women in the Metropolitan Police, and what does the rash of fin de siècle ‘lady detective fiction’ in the period tell us about perceptions and understandings of femininity, criminality, and policing. I will deal with these in turn, but in reality both are two manifestations of the same complex and changing forces of Victorian social fabric in the twilight of pre-war Britain.

The mainstream conception of policing among officers and the wider public emphasised athleticism, physique, manliness, a form of authority which was inherently masculinised, and violence. Following on from the widely-held image of the police constable as a dam between the ever class-conscious (wealthy or poorer) respectability and the heaving mass of residuum beneath it, violence (both to and from) was implicit through this worldview - but he simultaneously was not an instrument of violence, nor defined by it. Violence was necessary but not staining - similar as it would be for a 'noble defender' dealing with the base and violent. This is not thug vs thug, but the paternalist respectable working-classes keeping the mob in line and society moving, I have best heard this characterised as 'sentinels in a world of violence'. The murder of officers by thugs and vagabonds were widely reported, with assault and injury considered par the course among officers and the wider public. Indeed, given the intensely social dynamics of beat-policing, violence in some divisions and beats would almost be a professional requirement (while others a mile away it very much wouldn’t!). For example in the working-class ‘H’ division new officers were expected by their peers and community to fight the local ‘champion’ as part of establishing the dynamics of authority before settling into the beat. For these reasons popular representations of police officers by the end of the 19th century combine an emphasis on physicality and (regulated) violence and almost disembodied, respectable, and ‘neutered’ social authority without irony of juxtaposition. This is because policing was considered in social terms, a regulation of a type of order which thus made the role contingent on the subset of community he was engaged. Violence in policing (and perceptions of police violence) in this period is thus symbolic and highly bracketed by a bunch of norms as opposed to simply manifesting a particular institutional ethos of policing – something misunderstood looking back as we see policing in far more institutional terms.

Such was the emphasis in violence and physicality in the popular imagination (and reality) that recruits were expected to be exceptionally tall, with an emphasis on physicality, ability in physical sports, healthy and young. Against the backdrop growing eugenics-informed lens of urban social problems the public tended to conflate the residuum to be policed with biological limitations. The police constable who was expected to be a distinct 'stock', separate to the working class communities they policed (and were frequently from), manifesting as a biological ‘healthiness’ distinction from that of the urban squalid masses (similar to how military forces often prized reliable peasant stock over suspicious urban poor in terms of physicality). The vision of role of the police officer and gender-coded modes in which these were understood essentially made them conflated with masculinity of the era. This combined with the replication of many military (inherently masculine in the day) values around hierarchy, obedience, uniformity etc. to produce a model of policing which by its very conception was inherently male by the gender definitions of the time.

With the understanding and conception of policing so clearly defined along the time's masculine terms it is unsurprising that the police hierarchy, officers, politicians and society at large did not see policing as a career suitable for women. Now, a lot is made of the ‘bourgeois values’ of the Victorians, and a lot of scholarship in that area is as much about undoing our popular image as this era having a strict moral code followed by all, with a hyper conformism to gender/sexuality/class. The 19th century in reality was much messier, and all women absolutely did not follow the conventional image of domestic sphere wives and daughters encouraged by our popular imagination. However, given the hyper-gendered modes of police work, as well as the fact the government acted as gatekeepers of the profession unlike many others it proved easier to ensure a lack of permeation of women into the Metropolitan Police.

This becomes more complex around the 1880s, where the moral concerns of elements of British society became increasingly aware of the complexity and existence of social problems within these poorer communities. The liberal paternalist moral concern (although we should avoid hastily describing this as necessarily a proto-feminism) for the more ‘blameless’ sections of this community (including children and women) had been growing for some decades, with local, charitable and political work undertaken to this end. Naturally this intersected the policing world as the lone arm of the state in these communities and areas to exact this desired reform. In response to concerns around the vulnerability of women who found themselves in contact with the police (based on the causes which brought them to the police, not so much the threat to them from male police officers) a role for women to participate within the policing system was increasingly sought.

However, the fundamental modes of gender-roles and the conception of the inherently masculine policing had not changed, so the framework which this change occurred precluded women acting as police officers. Instead, women were sought in areas of policing coded as specifically ‘feminine’. There are sporadic hints in the sources that women had been undertaking this work with little/no pay or formal recognition for decades (centuries if one squints) for police forces. Invariably these were the wives (never daughters! – things don’t change because you are in a police officer’s family) of police officers, often detectives or sergeants with more authority and respect, yet still of the proletariat (and not the respectable wife of a superintendent slumming it!), acting almost as ‘vicars wives’ (to use an English concept) on an ad hoc basis where the officer/police station in question needed help with 'feminine problems'. One colourful example of this has a few CID detectives who “decided to try a little French police trickery” and used the wife of a retired constable ‘undercover’ (actually as a entrapment-like strategy, not an autonomous evidence gathering agent), however examples such as this were exceedingly rare, with the vast vast majority of examples helping calm down a ‘hysterical’ woman, talk to a woman about an assault, look after the children of the arrested etc.