“Minnesota women’s clubs are working for a woman’s reformatory and one of their leaders who has had long experience in prison work insists that reform can only be a success ‘when society makes good its teaching to unfortunates that it pays to be good.’” THE GUARDING OF A CITY With the advent of the policewoman, the prevention of harm to women and children comes as a new note in the protection of a city, and brings this municipal service into harmony with other services where prevention is the dominating purpose. Gradually policemen are being converted into social workers with the idea of controlling those forces that lead to delinquency in all its forms. Policemen too are sometimes sanitary or housing or poverty inspectors as well as custodians of the criminal and vicious. As yet the police department is distinctly removed from feminine control. Policewomen as a rule do not supplant male police, but are an additional force established for a specific purpose. In Cleveland, Mildred Chadsey is head of the sanitary police. In Hunnewell, Kansas, Mrs. Marshal was appointed by Mrs. Wilson, the mayor, as local police officer. New York has a woman as deputy sergeant, and Dr. Katharine Davis, the commissioner of corrections, thinks a woman might make an excellent police commissioner there; but this radical step has not been taken. By their activities, however, women sometimes affect the number and distribution of the police force: when they agitate for better patrolling of parks and playgrounds or other poorly protected districts and when they influence the number of saloon licenses issued. Women and policemen are each a problem to the other of the deepest concern. The uncorroborated testimony of a plain-clothes policeman against the girl or woman whom he arrests on the street is often accepted in the court whereas corroborative testimony is required in the case of a man arrested for sexual irregularity. Voteless women strikers have been grossly mistreated by the police in industrial centers and the graft exposures have revealed the all too frequent alliance of the police with the vice interests to the injury of the city’s womanhood. Women’s entering wedge into the police department, the policewoman, we venture to predict, will not be withdrawn, but rather will attacks be made until, through a constructive program, all human life is better safeguarded in the communities of this country, and the idea of social service permeates the police departments, as it does other municipal departments. CHAPTER IX PUBLIC SAFETY