Our case: How firefighters, policemen and priests appeared
There are still professions which are available only to men - and in the last century there were many more. Women had to prove their strength, endurance and courage, that is, to demonstrate that they have the right to work on a par with men. We talk about a few women who earned this right for themselves first.
First female firefighters
Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, fire extinguishing was considered exclusively a male occupation, for which it is necessary to possess not only endurance, but also strength. In most European countries, women began to receive fire brigades relatively recently. For example, in Austria, the first women's brigade was formed in 1912, and in advanced Norway, not a single case was documented in which a woman would put out fires, up to the 1980s. But now women in the fire department units.
The very first female fireman was an African-American slave Molly Williams. She belonged to a New York merchant named Benjamin Aymar, owner of Aymar & Co. family business. Aymar also worked as a volunteer in the fire brigade of the Volunteer Fire brigade Oceanus Engine Co. 11. Now it seems to us an amazing desire for successful men to go to work, for which they will not even be paid (besides, the work was, frankly, not easy), but at that time in the USA it was common: when you have something to lose and any Your warehouse together with the goods can burn to ashes in a matter of minutes, your motivation is obvious. It is not known exactly why Aimar took a slave with him to work - maybe he was attached to her and wanted her to dispel, or maybe, on the contrary, he thought that there was too little work for her at home.
Molly quickly learned how to handle machinery, and they said that she was "just as good a fireman as the other guys." In 1818, Molly had a chance to prove it. One winter, Williams was in her usual place with her master. The days were cold, and the whole team caught a monstrous cold, so Molly had enough worries. A blizzard outside the chalk window, but the fire does not choose time - the alarm bell broke the silence. Molly was the only one who was able to answer the call, and she did her duty - in a chintz dress and apron, because she didn't have any other clothes. After the debut, Molly was solemnly accepted into the ranks of the fire brigade (however, unofficially) and began to be called "volunteer number 11."
Many female names erased the story, but the units are preserved. For example, Lilly Hitchcock Coit, patroness and talisman of the Volunteer Fire Squad Nicerkoker No. 5 - Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 - was fascinated by the fire business from my youth. According to one version, in 1858, when she was fifteen years old, she heard a fire alarm and rushed to the aid of the brigade. Since then, Lilly has accompanied firefighters everywhere: on calls, on parades, and on banquets. Lilly was very eccentric: she wore trousers, a short haircut and smoked strong male cigars.
Later, the first female fire brigades at educational institutions and factories began to appear - one of the first was the female brigade of Girton College in the UK, founded in 1878. But truly women began to penetrate into the profession only during the Second World War, and Sandra Forsye became the first woman to be officially employed by the fire brigade in the United States only in 1973.
First policewomen
In modern terms, the first women called up to serve in the police were more likely to be guardians or supervisors. Almost two hundred years ago, employees in the United Kingdom and the United States appeared to keep order in the women's and children's wards of prisons, work houses and psychiatric hospitals. But this cannot be called a full-fledged police service.
For the first time, a woman received the authority of a detective only at the very end of the nineteenth century - it is noteworthy that she went to the police service not from a good life. Mary Connolly was born in 1853 in Canada, in a family of immigrants who fled across the ocean from a massive famine in Ireland. At twenty-six, she married a locksmith by Thomas Owens, and they soon moved to Chicago. But a few years later, Thomas died of typhoid fever, and Mary was left with five children in her arms - before that she had been a housewife all her life and had never worked outside the house.
At that very time, the city authorities of Chicago passed a resolution prohibiting the labor of children under the age of fourteen. To ensure compliance, the city established the position of sanitary inspectors, who were supposed to monitor the working conditions in shops and factories. For this task, it was decided to hire married women or widows, since working with children was considered their "natural vocation". Mary Connolly Owens was among those inspectors.
The young widow enthusiastically set to work. She checked businesses in search of illegally working children (some were under seven years old), returned them home, helped families find other livelihoods, and even shared their wages with them (at that time her salary was fifty dollars a month was considered a large amount). She also sought out fathers who left wives and children and handed them over to the police in order to force them to support their family.
Soon her talent and energy attracted the attention of the new chief of the city police, Major Robert McClory. He decided to involve Mary Owens in investigating crimes. In 1891 she received the title of Detective Sergeant with the right to wear a badge and arrest of suspects and soon gained respect among new colleagues. Her immediate boss, Captain O'Brien, spoke of his subordinate in this way: "Give me men like this woman, and we will have the best detective bureau in the whole world."
"I like doing police work," Mary Owens herself told the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1906. "It gives me the opportunity to help women and children who need it. Of course, I never go out to catch thieves and robbers. This occupation remains men. But in sixteen years [in the police] I have seen more human grief than any male detective. "
But despite her excellent work, Mary Owens, who bore the star of a police sergeant, was still a wonder. In the early 1900s, the city of Chicago adopted the new rules of public service, according to which women began to be appointed inspectors of working conditions, regardless of the police. It seemed that from now on policewomen were no longer needed. The same Chicago Daily Tribune wrote that "Mrs. Owens will undoubtedly remain the only female police officer in the whole world."
But this assumption was disproved only four years later, when Lola Green Baldwin was accepted into the state of Portland, Oregon. Her responsibilities included protecting women from engaging in sex work. And on the eve of the First World War, more than thirty women served in the US police.
In the Old World, policewomen also appeared only at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first of these was Henrietta Arendt, the daughter of the head of the Jewish community of Konigsberg, who received her education as a nurse in Berlin. In 1903, she entered the Stuttgart police station, where she was supposed to be present during interrogations and be engaged in a medical examination of sex workers, prisoners and other women from the “moral hazard” group.
So Henrietta Arendt began to explore ways to involve women and children in sex work and crime. She later published a book about it and began to give lectures, but the leadership did not like this activity: in 1908, Henrietta Arendt was accused of lack of loyalty, "questionable moral fitness" and even in a forbidden connection with a police colleague, forcing him to resign. She moved to Switzerland, where she worked with orphans and started a campaign against international trafficking.
And in Britain, women were taken to the police only during the First World War: in order to replace men called up to the front, about four thousand women were recruited in the country to patrol streets, parks and railway stations. The first female constable with the right of arrest was Edith Smith - in 1915. But she was also mainly engaged in what we would call social work: trying to reduce the number of sex workers in the city of Grantham, where the military base was located. Her fate was difficult: having worked seven days a week, Edith Smith retired, she was a nurse for several years, and in 1924 she committed suicide.
First women priests
Prior to the beginning of our era, there were both priests and priestesses in almost all religious cults of Europe. But with the adoption of Christianity, everything changed. “Your wives in churches are silent, for they are not allowed to speak, but to be subservient, as the law says. If they want to learn something, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is indecent to the woman to speak in the church” - on these words The apostle Paul from the First Epistle to the Corinthians establishes a ban on ordination (ordination) of women both in the Catholic and in all Orthodox churches to this day.
However, in the early history of the church, there were cases of women being ordained as priests. “I present to you Thebes, our sister, to the deaconess of the Church of Kenhrei,” writes the same apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. It was only at the end of the fifth century that Pope Gelasius I forbade this practice when women learned liturgy in some temples in southern Italy.
More than a thousand years have passed, and the Protestant Reformation, rejecting many of the dogmas of Catholicism, questioned and banned the female priesthood. Some denominations immediately allowed women to preach. For example, George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement, believed that the "Inner Light" (part of the divine nature that is inherent in man) shines in both men and women. One of the fundamental principles of Quaker dogma has become the equality of all people before God, regardless of gender and other signs.
The other Protestant movement in the United States — the Methodists — began to ordain women in the late nineteenth century. Anna Howard Shaw became the first woman pastor of the United Methodist Church. She grew up on a farm in Michigan, where she had to work from an early age and look after younger children instead of a sick mother, while her father spent time debating in the tavern of a nearby town.
Since childhood, Anna has been drawn to knowledge and received an education of a school teacher. She then graduated from the School of Theology at Boston University, where she was the only woman. Many did not like that she was present at the lectures, in addition the university refused to give her financial support: her male classmates got a free place in the hostel, while Anna had to rent a room in the city.
Nevertheless, in 1880, Anna was ordained a priest in the Methodist church. In order to earn a living, she also graduated from the medical faculty, where, during her studies, she met with suffragists. Later, Shaw became an active participant in the suffrage movement and, until 1915, she headed the National Association for the Fight for the Right to Vote for Women. She died at the age of seventy-two, only a few months before the Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote in elections.
As for Europe, in most Protestant denominations there until the twentieth century, women remained on the sidelines. The turning point occurred after the First World War, when, due to the mass death of men at the front, women replaced them in factories, in shops - and in churches. In the 1920s, the first students appeared at the faculties of theology at leading European universities. A few years later, they also became the first female pastors.
In France in 1930, Bertha Burch became the pastor of the Reformed Church of Alsace and Lorraine. In other regions of the country, pastor women appeared only by the end of the 1930s. At first it was very difficult for them: often the parishioners resented the appointment of women, called them “ugly”, accused of courage and aggressiveness. But gradually women-pastors became more and more. Many of them went down in history: for example, Marie Helene Offe during the German occupation of France participated in the resistance movement.
Since the 1940s, female pastors have appeared in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and many other countries. But in the UK, resistance to the female priesthood remained particularly long. Only in 1994, in the Anglican Church, Angela Berners-Wilson was ordained, who is now the chaplain of the University of Bath. “My husband's father, like my own father, was a priest, and my mother-in-law is a doctor,” she says. “Therefore, my husband never expected me to become a housewife. He always supported me very much and put up with what I had there is no weekend on Sundays. He understands what a responsible job I have and how much work and discipline it requires. "