Ottawa’s second female officer helped many women
Alice Goyette was a widow with children to feed when she was hired in 1937. After her first night, she vowed to starve rather than go back. Instead, she spent decades working with women on the wrong side of the law. Bruce Deachman tells her story.
Alice Goyette did not believe there were bad women, or at least not very many of them. Rather, she described the shoplifters, prostitutes, forgers, drunkards and thieves she dealt with on an almost daily basis for 30 years as simply immoral — meaning they slept around — or misguided.
“Most are just foolish, simple women,” she said in 1965 as she looked back on her career with the Ottawa police department. “You have to remember, everyone is human. And everyone has some good and bad in him.
“Circumstances,” she added, “have a lot to do with the making of a criminal. During the Depression years, poverty, overcrowding and need drove mothers and young girls to desperate things. Many women considered it a favour to be taken off the streets and placed in jail in order to have a few meals.”
When Goyette was hired by the force in 1936, the then 37-year-old became only the second woman to serve as an Ottawa police officer, following in the footsteps of Flora Campbell, who broke through the all-male ranks in 1913.
When Campbell retired in 1935, however, the position of policewoman was abolished, the reasoning at the time being that the social-work nature of the position better lent it to the courts. The decision, however, raised the ire of members of such groups as the Local Council of Women, the St. Andrew’s Society Women’s Auxiliary, and the Ottawa Home and School Council, who felt that a female officer was better suited than a male one to deal with problems faced by women and children.
“Experience,” wrote the Ottawa Council of Social Agencies in a letter to the Board of Commissioners of Police, “has shown that women police are needed not so much to detect crime as to undertake a program for the prevention of crime and for the protection of women and girls.”
A year after Campbell’s retirement, the position was reinstated and Goyette, who was bilingual, was hired on a six-month probationary period. Her annual salary was $1,020, which was increased to $1,160 — slightly more than a third-class constable made — after six months.
Her path to the police force began, says her son Paul Goyette, out of necessity. Widowed in Saint-Hyacinthe, Que., in 1929, she eventually sent her two young boys, Paul and Mel, to Ottawa to live with their grandmother while she found a job teaching at a private school, where she earned $50 a month plus room and board. She kept just $2 for church collection and postage stamps, and sent the rest to her mother to help raise her sons. She didn’t love the job, however, and when a medical operation brought her to Ottawa, she chose to stay. When the position of police matron was announced, she was, according to an Ottawa Citizen story, among 250 women who applied.
“I was chosen,” she recalled at her retirement. “I just had to be. We had to eat.”
In her early days on the force, she was involved in investigations, staking out bawdy houses and calling in the arresting officers when she felt the time was right. She then returned to the station to help the arrested women through the process. After her first day on the job, she went home and vowed never to return, even if it meant she and her sons would starve.
But she relented, and grew into the position. Her chief role with the force was almost that of a social worker, interviewing and counselling women who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. She wrote pre-sentencing reports for Magistrate Glenn Strike, recommending leniency, or not, for the female offenders in her charge.
Strike noted Goyette’s evaluation of character was rarely wrong.
“I place great value in her judgment,” he said. “She saves the court a lot of time … and possibly a lot of mistakes.”
Goyette carried no weapon and wore no uniform, believing a full police outfit would set her at odds with prisoners and diminish their trust in her. Throughout her career, she relied on her sense of humour and her sense of humanity.
“Although much of my work is heartbreaking and sordid,” she once said, “there have been many humorous moments. I sometimes think I could match Mark Twain with some of my experiences.”
Cases that stood out for her included an interview with a young woman who was dying of complications from an abortion, and another with a 72-year-old woman who had only recently turned to prostitution.
Paul describes a favourite “client” of his mother’s, a first-time shoplifter known as Big Rosie, who sported a large hat and an even larger bosom, the latter the perfect place (almost) to hide two pounds of butter, a small ham, a package of cracker barrel cheese and a home perm kit, all of it belonging to A.J. Freiman’s department store on Rideau Street (as did the four cartons of cigarettes she had stuffed down her undergarments).
“She got thinner as the investigation carried on,” Paul jokes. “But mother also tried to help them. She tried to be helpful and get them a job if she could or direct them into something good.”
For this, Goyette, who also later served with the Morality Division, often won not just the respect of her clients, but some form of friendship, too. Many kept in touch with her after their brush with the law was concluded. Paul says when he was married at McPhail Memorial Baptist Church on Bronson Avenue, everything went smoothly until he said “I do,” at which point a large voice bellowed from the back row: “Atta way to go, Paul!” It was Big Rosie, who had snuck in to the service, “so mother could be petrified.”
For her first decade with the force, until 1946 when Edna Harry was hired, Goyette was the only policewoman in Ottawa. Yet Paul says she never felt she was leading any sort of charge for women in the workplace, nor did she feel any resentment from her co-workers.
“She was proud of what she did. I think she was happy to think that she was making yards for the women she was helping. She affected a lot of women, and stayed with them and looked after them.”
Goyette retired in 1965, at 67, after staying on two extra years at the request of Magistrate Strike. Soon after, she married Syd Green, the department’s deputy chief. Alice Goyette died in 1986 at the Perley Hospital.