It was the coldest winter Philadelphia had seen in years, and a 22-year-old Philadelphia Police officer named Maureen Rush was patrolling North Philadelphia on foot. The year was 1976, and female police officers were not allowed to ride in patrol cars with their male counterparts -- leaving many female officers stuck walking, even when the temperature started to plummet. "When the police horses and dogs were taken in and I was still walking the beat, I didn't feel so good," Rush recalled.
The First 100
Rush, who has since become the chief of the University of Pennsylvania Police Department, was one of 100 women in the Philadelphia Police Academy's first class of female officers, which graduated in 1976. The PPD was forced to accept women as officers by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972, both of which mandated equal rights for women in the workplace. Despite the women's liberation movement, which gathered steam in the '70s, until 1976 women in the PPD continued to work mainly as juvenile aid officers, dealing with troubled and delinquent minors. The change was prompted when one juvenile aid officer who wanted to be a detective -- but was told she couldn't because of her gender -- filed a lawsuit against the city. A judge ruled in her favor and 100 women were accepted into the police academy. But according to Rush, Mayor Frank Rizzo and Police Commissioner Joseph O'Neill were less than thrilled about having to accept the female graduates as full-fledged officers. "If they could kill us, they would have," she said. According to Fels Center Director Lawrence Sherman, this attitude was common among police commissioners nationwide. "The police refused to cooperate," Sherman said. "There was widespread opposition" to accepting women as officers. The first city to hire full-fledged female police officers was Indianapolis, Ind., and other departments soon followed, either under court order or to prevent lawsuits. Rizzo and O'Neill had to let women work as Philadelphia police officers -- but they did not have to make it easy. "They made our lives as miserable and unbearable as possible," said Penn Special Services Director Pat Brennan, who was also a member of the academy's first class that included women. Brennan said her instructors at the academy made it more difficult for the women to graduate than for the men. "They created an obstacle course for the females," she said. "It was like a Marine boot camp. They did everything physically possible to prevent us from making it through the academy." According to Penn Detective Joseph Hasara, who was in the same class as Rush and Brennan, he saw more discrimination against women once they graduated. Women were treated badly "not so much in the academy, but once they got into the districts," Hasara said. "They were ignored.... Other officers were hesitant to back them up or to help them." Brennan also said she and the other female officers were assigned to patrol -- all alone, sometimes on foot, and often at night -- the districts with the highest crime rates in the city. "It was one of the deadliest districts for cops," Rush said of her own beat, which was in a commercial section of North Philadelphia. When Rush patrolled at night, all the stores were closed and the area was completely deserted. "There was nowhere to eat, nowhere to go to the bathroom," Rush said. Due to fear of sexual relationships between officers, female officers could not even hitch a ride with a male colleague to the nearest toilet or eatery. "The females were not assigned to the cars with males," Brennan said. "They were afraid we were going to have sex in the car." To add insult to injury, one of Rush's male colleagues was allegedly fond of pulling his car up alongside female officers patrolling on foot and yelling insults. "You're just a bunch of cows trying to do a bull's job," he would shout at them, Rush said. "Why in God's name would you stay in a place that didn't want you and was trying to kill you?" Rush said she thought at the time. "I hated this job." Still, Rush stuck it out and, before long, she began to enjoy police work. But 30 of Rush's 100 female classmates didn't -- they quit within the first year on the job. According to Rush and Brennan, these women were permitted to switch to being juvenile aid officers and earn the same pay as they had received as regular officers -- all they had to do was sign a document saying that women are not qualified to be police officers. But Brennan said she was too stubborn to give up. She persisted, she said, "because people told me I couldn't do it." And Rush finally gained the respect of her male colleagues after she accidentally interrupted a robbery in progress and won an armed standoff with the robber. "Instantaneously, I got credibility," she said. Since Rush's supervisors did not award her a commendation, her colleagues decided to give her an honorary one. "They got a star and pinned it on my sweater," she said. "They said, 'It means more because it came from us.'"
The Younger Generation
According to some younger female officers, gender bias in police work persisted well after the 1970s. When University Police Sergeant Margaret O'Malley started her career as a police officer in Darby Township in 1988, some of her male colleagues refused to shake her hand. "There were officers arguing with supervisors about having to take me out on the street," said O'Malley, who was 22 years old at the time. "I don't think they wanted to work with a woman." Penn Police Officer Joanne Ketler, who graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy in 1996, said some of her male colleagues mocked the women in the class. "There were comments and snickering, like 'Who does she think she is?' or 'Check her out,'" Ketler said. "But I wasn't treated badly by any of the instructors or anything like that." According to O'Malley, once she completed her training and began patrol work, male officers refused to back her up when she was at the scene of a crime. "I was scared to death," she said. "My nerves were so bad -- nobody was backing me up." Like Rush, O'Malley only gained the respect of her fellow officers after "proving" herself. Two police officers from a neighboring township chased a car into O'Malley's jurisdiction. The driver got out of the car and attempted to strangle one of the officers, but O'Malley put the driver in a headlock, wrestled him to the ground and stood on him. "Because I was there, [the other officer] was not hurt," she said. "Everywhere I went after that, I had backup from that township." And for O'Malley, coming to work at the Penn Police Department in 1991 was refreshing. "Coming to Penn, I was welcomed with open arms," she said. "None of the men treated me as a pariah."
Women in Police Today
According to Penny Harrington, director of the National Center for Women and Policing, the situation for women in law enforcement has not changed dramatically since the 1970s and '80s. Harrington said police academy entry exams are often biased against women because they focus heavily on upper body strength. "There is no study that shows upper body strength makes you a better police officer," she said. "You cannot set these standards that wash out all women and most men." If women pass the entry exam and become police officers, they are "just not valued for what they bring" to the department, Harrington said. O'Malley also said she believes women contribute important qualities to a police department. "I actually think we're better at it," she said. "We have a softer approach. We handle challenges a little bit better."
