Gender and probation in the Second World War
| Author | Anne Worrall |
| Published date | 01 August 2008 |
| Date | 01 August 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895808092432 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
317
Gender and probation in the Second
World War:
Reflections on a changing occupational culture
ANNE WORRALL
Keele University, UK
Abstract
An autobiographical novel by Julia Steel recounts a year in the life of
a probation officer working in London in 1945. The unpublished
manuscript, written in the mid-1950s, provides a rare contemporary
glimpse into the lives and social regulation of a group of families
living on a housing estate at the end of the Second World War. Steel
herself was a wartime graduate of the Cromwell Road Home Office
Training Centre. This article sets primary source material, including
lecture notes from Steel’s training course, in the context of both
contemporary and recent academic and professional literature.
Following the centenary year of the Probation Service in England
and Wales, it aims to contribute some new insights into the history
of (women) probation officers and their daily work. It argues that
Steel’s manuscript and lecture notes can be interpreted within an
analysis of state intervention in the lives of working-class families
that places professional women in a tutelary and disciplinary
relationship with mothers and daughters. It concludes by
demonstrating the relevance of such an analysis to our
understanding of the gendered nature of work in the Probation
Service in England and Wales.
Key Words
female offenders • female probation officers • occupational culture
• probation • Second World War
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2008 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 8(3): 317–333
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808092432
Introduction
The changing role of the probation officer has been documented exten-
sively, especially during 2007, commonly regarded as the centenary year of
the Probation Service in England and Wales. Government websites and
practitioner-focused publications such as Changing Lives: An Oral History
of Probation (NAPO, 2007) provide illustrated histories of the lives and
work of male and female probation officers over the past 100 years. This
article started out as a contribution to these celebrations. Its modest aim
was to use some hitherto unpublished primary source material from
some 50 years ago to fill a relative gap in the jigsaw of probation history,
namely, probation during the Second World War. But as the work pro-
gressed, I became increasingly preoccupied with the gendered nature of the
material I was reading, and the contribution it might make to women’s his-
tory in general, and the history of female probation officers in particular.
So, the article moves from a descriptive account of crime, criminal justice
and probation in this period to a discussion of the role of women as pro-
bation officers and, finally, the relevance of these discussions to an under-
standing of the ‘gender switchover’ (Annison, 2007: 148) that has
characterized the occupational culture of probation in the past decade.
Crime in the Second World War
Pearson (1983) has demonstrated that every generation of respectable citi-
zens has bemoaned the behaviour of its youth, the fecklessness of its par-
ents, the corrupting influence of its popular culture and the ineffectiveness
of its police and courts. The period of the Second World War was different
only insofar as evacuation, rationing, air raids and American soldiers could
be added to the list of the populist causes of delinquency. Then, as now,
public opinion was unconvinced by official crime statistics that appeared to
demonstrate a fall in crime. In lecture notes prescient of 21st-century under-
graduate criminology, Julia Steel, trainee probation officer at the Home
Office Training Centre in Cromwell Road, Kensington in 1944 (see
Vanstone, 2004: 100) wrote: ‘Statistics are not reliable as much depends on
whether the police are preoccupied with other matters’ (Steel, 1944, lecture
notes). But she continues with era-specific comments: ‘For example, in
1940 when aliens were being rounded up, delinquency figures fell. People
know this and are apt to feel sorry for themselves if they are the ones who
are caught’ (Steel, 1944, lecture notes).
Contrary to what Steel was told in 1944, recorded crime rose by 57 per cent
during the war (Smithies, 1982; Coleman and Moynihan, 1996). However,
there was scepticism about the reliability of this statistic,1even at the time,
because the annual Criminal Statistics were suspended and the police were dis-
tracted from their normal activities by special wartime duties including, as
above, rounding up aliens, dealing with the blitz and policing wartime
rationing. The public was less inclined to report crime, partly because of the
Criminology & Criminal Justice 8(3)318
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