Police Court Rota: women’s archiving and access to legal life in early twentieth-century England

Abstract

The period of the early twentieth century is marked by an intense struggle on the part of women to gain access to professional careers and the public sphere. This paper contributes to a wider discourse on women’s professionalisation, by focusing specifically on women’s access to legal professions and the role archiving played in that process in the years preceding the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 in light of the Police Court Rota, run by the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH). The members of the Rota acted as observers in criminal cases, interviewers, writers and activists at the time when women were formally excluded from courtrooms and legal life. The paper draws extensively from the archives of the AMSH and National Vigilance Association and argues that observations, legal record creation and archiving gave middle-class women volunteers access to legal professions and power, despite formal exclusions. These records and collections, in part, counter law’s missing archive on women and criminal justice. This paper examines what these counter archives tell us about exclusion of women from legal history and the role archiving played within women’s professionalisation, and in turn, how class and colonial bias manifested within that process of archive creation.