Voices from the Blue

'God, I love these women! Their breeziness, compassion, humour and resilience are a tonic' Libby Purves, Times Literary Supplement In February 1919, London's first women police officers took to the streets of the city. They battled entrenched gender stereotypes, institutional inequality, sexual harassment and assaults disturbingly familiar to those affecting today's #MeToo generation of modern women.

Female officers, facing resentment from male colleagues, were expected to do little more than 'Make the tea, luv . . .' and were charged with the sole task of looking after women and children who fell into police hands. Yet, in the course of a century, policewomen have won the equality they demanded, overcome sexism and prejudice, rejected harassment and sexual assaults and smashed through the glass ceiling to lead, rather than follow, their male colleagues. One hundred years on from those first Women Police Constables, a woman, Cressida Dick, holds the most powerful position in British policing, the Metrop