In the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the first to hire women, and in other major cities, policewomen's roles were constructed as maternalistic. The book describes how the early policewomen succeeded in expanding the scope of their police work, and how, within a generation, those gains and women's authority eroded and a masculinized model of crime fighting took hold. A section on gender, the police and criminal justice reform, discusses the female reform tradition and the origins of the movement for women police. A section on women police in Los Angeles studies the city's Mother Bureau, policewomen and the LAPD Juvenile Bureau, and the death of the crime prevention model. The book also reviews the legacy of the crime control model. Tables, notes, index