40 YEARS OF RCMP TRIALS AND TRIUMPH
40 years of RCMP trials and triumph Pioneers of Troop 17 — the first 30 female recruits who signed up to be Mounties — formed a bond that endures today
History was made in Regina four decades ago.
Pioneers of Troop 17 — the first female recruits who signed up to be Mounties — formed a bond that endures today.
The Leader-Post’s Barb Pacholik takes a look back at 40 years of sometimes triumphant, sometimes troubled, history of women in the RCMP.
Driving through a small town one evening, Jan Graham seemingly looked suspicious. She was in uniform and at the wheel of an RCMP cruiser. “The guard got a call that a police car had been stolen — because there was a lady driving,” she recalls with a chuckle.
It was 1975, one of her first night shifts alone on patrol in Ponoka, Alta., and Graham was then one of just 30 female Mounties across the country.
The only thing they took was their place in Canadian history four decades ago. And it was earned through hard work and perseverance.
“(There) was sort of the attitude — you think you can do a man’s job? Show us you can do it,” recalls Cheryl Joyce, also one of the first policewomen in red. “And we did.” The women of Troop 17 formed a bond that endures today, prompting regular reunions. Some members recently got together in Vegas to mark the 40th anniversary.
“I think because we were so-called pioneers that we did develop a closeness,” says Joyce, now retired in B.C.
Moving into what was previously a men’s-only club, they regularly swapped stories and advice, particularly in the early days of their new careers. “We were able to get through a lot of things, realizing that we weren’t alone,” remembers Joyce.
The RCMP announced in May 1974 that women could join its ranks, four years after the Royal Commission on the Status of Women recommended it. (Restrictions on married applicants were also lifted at that time as was the policy barring members from marrying before a set number of years’ service.) The doors had been open to women in civilian jobs — matrons, stenographers, radio operators — since 1966.
Growing up in Raymore, Graham aspired to policing right out of high school but was rejected for being too young by the municipal forces — some of which were hiring women even before the Mounties. She was teaching at a Regina elementary school when she switched careers at age 25.
“I never really thought about being a trailblazer,” says Graham, who subsequently became Watson when she married a fellow Mountie.
In an unprecedented move, the RCMP’s first 32 female recruits signed up simultaneously across the country on Sept. 16, 1974, so no one individual could claim to be first. They reported a week later to the RCMP Training Academy, Depot Division, in Regina.
A home economics teacher at Thom Collegiate in 1974, Joyce actually took a $5,000 pay cut to join the Mounties, where the starting wage for men and women alike was $10,700. “I wanted something where I would be outside of four walls ... I needed a challenge.”
She found it, even before stepping onto the front lines.
The 29-year-old, who grew up in smalltown Saskatchewan, was fit but not an athlete. Like all the recruits, the women launched into gruelling paramilitary training — early morning runs, marching drills, swimming, weightlifting and “ground fighting.”
Having never trained women before, instructors — not all of whom were supportive — had to sort out by trial and error what worked and what didn’t. Several women suffered foot and knee injuries. One Troop 17 member graduated on crutches.
“It was stressful,” recalls Joyce. Often, she went to bed and asked herself, “Cheryl, what are you doing here? But there was something that got you up in the morning.” Two women did pack it in — one for “personal reasons” and the other for a new airport special constable job.
The physical training was typically women versus women. “But at one point, they put us up against the male troop. Any thoughts that we kind of knew it all were tossed,” says Graham. At 5-foot-4½, she narrowly made the cut for women by that half inch. It was at 5-foot-8 for men. (The height restrictions were eventually scrapped to achieve more cultural diversity.)
“A lot of us came to know that we’re going to have to rely on our tongue maybe a lot more than our brawn,” she adds.
Speaking of tongues, some men had to mind theirs. “They swore in front of the men, but they weren’t allowed to swear in front of the women,” says Joyce, recalling one instructor who was reprimanded. There were bigger challenges. One of the more unusual entrance requirements was around female chest size: “No set restriction on size but rejection could result on recommendation of medical examiner if applicant endowed with abnormally large or pendulous breasts.”
While Troop 17 had a woman from the military assigned as an adviser, in her PhD dissertation, B.C. professor Bonnie Reilly Schmidt, a former Mountie, notes the men of the force were largely responsible for choosing the female officers’ clothing, including RCMP-issued bras, pantyhose, skirts (knee-length for dress wear and floor-length for formal attire), pillbox hats, white polyester blouses that proved sheer and clingy and training bathing suits with a so-called “modesty panel” over the crotch area.
Some choices proved ridiculously unworkable — like the purse to carry the women’s guns or Oxford shoes with inch-and-a-half heels. Thanks to lobbying by the women, their guns were in a holster come graduation. The shoes persisted much longer. The heel eventually gave way to a flat, but not before Graham broke a bone in her foot trying to run in her Oxfords.
Graham notes the force seemed to still want to distinguish the women from the men. Female RCMP graduates weren’t given pants, boots and Stetsons, like the men, for their dress uniforms until after an administrative change in 1990. And only in 2012, after a long-running internal complaint, did the force extend the option of pants instead of the long navy skirt for formal wear.
Back on graduation day on March 3, 1975, the 30 newly minted female Mounties, in navy skirts, white turtlenecks and red blazers, drew national media attention as they had throughout their 22 weeks of Depot training.
Graham was valedictorian.
“Here at Depot we have been shown we are capable of going beyond what we thought were our limits,” she said in her address.
“Many eyes will be upon us — both critical and encouraging. It is up to us to prove our worth.”
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Bob Mills joined the RCMP in 1947.
He had wanted to be a soldier. But the Second World War ended before the 17-year-old, who lied about his age, got overseas.
“He was devastated because he was quite looking forward to it,” interjects Betty, his wife of 62 years. (It likely would be even longer, but the RCMP policy of the day prohibited members from marrying until five years on the force.)
Mills’ first RCMP posting, at $46 in take-home pay, was in Camrose, Alta., where his future wife worked as a telephone operator. Back then, if someone needed the Mounties, they called the phone company, then operators like Betty flipped a switch to turn on a red light atop the water tower, visible to the Mountie on foot patrol — a sort of early 9-1-1 system. Bob often walked his rounds without his sidearm. “We never carried them; there was no need to,” he says.
Mills, who retired in 1981 as commanding officer at Saskatchewan’s F Division, witnessed decades of evolution in the RCMP. He took each change in stride, including the move to female officers. “It was quite a novelty,” he admits.
He was commanding officer at Depot from 1975 to 1978, when the women that followed Troop 17 trained and graduated.
“In the years I was a senior supervisor, I had to ... make sure everybody was going to be treated the same and get on with this major change in the organization and support it,” he says.
But he recalls some naysayers.
“The odd one (was saying), ‘are they going to have to strength to do the job? And what happens when ladies marry members?’ And, of course, that all happened and they got over it without too much,” he says.
Still, some habits die hard.
“He was travelling, like to Ottawa,” Betty recalls. “A female member came to drive him to the airport and so she carried his suitcases. That was not easy, not easy for Bob anyway.”
Before the promotion to Depot, Mills was the superintendent responsible for central Alberta when Graham arrived at Ponoka.
“She was an excellent lady and an excellent example for the first lady member that I met,” says Mills.
But there was a learning curve for all concerned.
Graham says her supervisors — a staff sergeant and a corporal — set the tone for her acceptance in that first posting. If anything, they were overly protective. Someone quietly pointed out she wasn’t getting any night calls. “(The supervisors) just didn’t know — they wouldn’t be sending one of their daughters out at night,” she says.
Graham spoke to the corporal, who agreed she needed to gain experience through night calls.
The female officers’ skirts were for dress occasions, like parades and presentations, but their work uniforms consisted of pants and jackets — without pockets. When her staff sergeant noticed she had nowhere to carry anything, he gave her a pair of men’s pants with pockets and sent her off to the tailor. He similarly replaced her thin storm coat, issued to the female Mounties, with the warmer one worn by the men.
When Joyce reported at the Stoney Plain detachment, the secretary told her, “ah, that’s what you look like. Come on back. They’re all waiting to see you.” The curiosity didn’t stop at her colleagues.
Responding to a collision, she noticed cars slowing so the occupants could gawk at her, not the crash. “Everybody wanted to see what the lady Mountie looked like,” she says.
Joyce also recalls, “There wasn’t a problem with the guys I worked with, but some of the wives didn’t want me working with their husbands.” When the newlywed wife of the male officer assigned to her initial on-the-job training lent her support, it quieted the others.
“Down the road, there were still some of the oldschool thinkers that didn’t think there should be females in the force. But for the most part, they were pretty receptive,” she adds.
Jane Hall graduated from Depot in 1977, a member of the fifth troop of women to become Mounties. She is also author of The Red Wall: A Woman in the RCMP.
She calls the inclusion of female Mounties “a great Canadian achievement,” setting the tone for other police forces and occupations in Canada and internationally.
“It just seemed like a no-brainer that this was a man’s job — especially a big man’s job. So to get that opportunity to test it; we kind of felt the weight as well,” says the Langley, B.C., woman. “Because if we couldn’t do it, it would provide a lot of rationale for continuing on with the second-class status of women.”
She calls her 21 years with the force, “the biggest adventure of my life.” She doesn’t regret her career choice, but there were parts that weren’t “so great” — including porn deliberately tacked up near her office, “dinosaur” thinking or superiors that limited opportunities for women — as reflected in her book.
Since The Red Wall was released seven years ago (a second book is in the works), she’s heard from women in a variety of professions who still face obstacles or work in “toxic situations,” like she encountered at one point.
“None of us in the ’60s expected that. We expected that we would have succeeded totally. And I think we need to discuss it,” she says, adding that’s why she wrote her book.
A few years ago, Hall was at a book signing when a man told her: “If it wasn’t for women in the force, (Robert) Dziekanski would still be alive.”
She pointed out the officers involved in the 2007 Vancouver airport death were male; but the man insisted they wouldn’t have had Tasers if not for women in the force.
“It has nothing to do with females at all,” Hall fired back.
“I have my own informed opinion,” the heckler replied.
“I said, ‘no, you have an opinion”
Sexist attitudes by some inside the force have also proven equally intransigent. By the 1980s and 1990s, harassment claims by female members started to trickle into the public sphere, culminating with a proposed class-action lawsuit, joined by some 300 women, in 2012.
One Regina woman waited four years for her harassment complaint to be heard — only to have it tossed out for procedural delays in 2009, even though RCMP superiors found her claims founded. She quit after reaching a legal settlement in a civil action; the member she accused was promoted — and recently named in another complaint currently under investigation.
Joyce, who retired after what she describes as a fulfilling 30-year career, recalls challenges — crude jokes, sexist language. “I chose to ignore it, if I couldn’t change it, or ... try to deal with the issues.
“But I know some of the girls have experienced some awful situations and I hope that the force is — they’re talking about doing the right things,” she adds.
Hall says the problem is systemic. “If they shore up leadership, then everything else will follow. If they go after individuals, nothing is going to change. It’s just going to drive it underground.”
Hall, who married a Mountie, says their youngest daughter is considering following in her parents’ footsteps.
“I just hope this leadership issue is fixed for her.”
Hall has found reason for optimism in the promises of Commissioner Bob Paulson to fix the problems. Many are counting on it. Four decades after the country’s first 30 female Mounties, their numbers have grown to almost 4,000 or 21 per cent of the force — a number it hopes to grow to 30 per cent in the next decade.
From Troop 17 came Bev Busson (nee MacDonald) who reached the highest Mountie rank in Canada as commissioner before retiring in 2007. Others also broke that glass ceiling, like current Depot Division commanding officer Louise LaFrance, the second woman to hold that post, or F Division commanding officer Brenda Butterworth-Carr, the first aboriginal woman in such a position in Canada. At the time of their promotions, they were reluctant in interviews to dwell on their “firsts.”
As with Graham 40 years ago, a woman in the driver’s seat might arouse unfounded suspicions in some quarters that she doesn’t belong there — or got there by tokenism instead of merit and hard work.
“I know people think that,” Butterworth-Carr said in an interview when she became head of F Division’s criminal operations.
“I know myself, I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for everything I’ve accomplished,” she added.
For Hall, as far as the force and society has come in four decades, it still has a way to go.
“We will achieve equality when nobody’s looking at race or gender where you’re looking at qualifications.”