The meming into existence of candidate Harris that took place online this summer featured a fantasy of the vice president as a steely feminine version of Marvel vigilante Captain America, un-fuck-with-able in the iconic spangled blue superhero uniform. In one image, an A.I.-generated Captain Kamala faces off against a certain orange-hued — now orange jumpsuited — prisoner. Her own sleek bodysuit sparkles with sheriff’s stars at the belt buckle and breastplate; her shoulder pads are trimmed with silver and red. Here, unmistakably, is light versus darkness, “Momala” versus the rapist-in-chief, civilizational order versus unbridled lawlessness. This framing of the 2024 U.S. presidential election was mirrored in the mainstream media. The Guardian cast the race as “Prosecutor Kamala Harris” against “felon Donald Trump”; a New York magazine headline described it as “The Cop Against the Criminal.” The Manichaean showdown between putative opposites doubles as an old-fashioned battle of the sexes: the Democrat is not just a cop, but a woman cop.

When Kamala ran last time around, her identity as California’s “top cop” — the term she was using to introduce herself as recently as 2016 — was not an asset. After years of Black Lives Matter organizing that drew national attention to the disproportionate police killing of black men and women, anti-cop sentiment was high throughout the 2020 primary. Critics hammered Harris’s history of enforcing laws against truancy and marijuana possession — while inadequately addressing police brutality — during her time as a Bay Area prosecutor and, later, as California’s attorney general. In a January 2019 New York Times op-ed, San Francisco law professor Lara Bazelon called on Harris to “apologize to the wrongfully convicted people she has fought to keep in prison.” At one primary debate, then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard assailed Harris for advocating to “keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.” Harris dropped out of the race before the end of 2019, and she likely made the right call, because a revived pandemic-era BLM insurgency hit the streets in May 2020 after a white police officer murdered black Minnesota resident George Floyd.

As Minneapolis’s third precinct burned, liberals grasping for easy solutions to the crisis of American carceralism turned to the figure of the female cop. A slew of pieces in venues from Ms. magazine to the Los Angeles Times called for police departments to hire more women. “Law enforcement agencies do not recruit, retain or promote women at the same rate they do men — even though research suggests that if they did, the nation would see far fewer tragedies like the killings of Floyd, Laquan McDonald, or Eric Garner,” a 2020 CNN piece bemoaned. In 2021, a self-described “coalition of police leaders, researchers, and professional organizations” launched the 30×30 Initiative, which aimed to persuade police departments to ensure women comprised thirty percent of new recruits by the year 2030. Police Chief magazine wrote that law enforcement should cultivate cops with people skills, deftness at “community partnerships,” and care for their neighborhoods. “Recruiting more women into policing is a critical step in achieving these three ideals,” they claimed. 

Pleas for more women cops served as a counterinsurgent alternative to the “defund the police” slogan, which was itself a watered-down version of the call to abolish the police. Now, four years after Harris’s ill-fated primary campaign, what was once a liability has become central to her appeal. “Those ‘Kamala the Cop’ memes certainly hurt Harris the last time she ran,” Elie Honig wrote in New York magazine in October. “But now she wears the label like a badge.” At an August rally in Philadelphia, the day after the party officially offered her the nomination, Harris trotted out familiar boasts about her prosecutorial victories — “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who scammed consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain” — before delivering the punchline that has become a sort of calling card: “So, hear me when I say, ‘I know Donald Trump’s type.’” At that, the crowd erupted in applause and chants of “lock him up,” an echo of the line that shocked liberals when Trump fans aimed it at Hillary Clinton.

While the GOP has generally been the more pro-police party, the right is not all that hot on the woman cop. Commentators like Joe Rogan suggest that women are too physically weak to be cops — “it’s not sexist to think that it’s a scary thing to have a 130 pound woman out there on her own, driving around in a cop car with a gun trying to pull over six-foot-four” men, he said in 2017 — and in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump in July, his supporters complained about “female Secret Service agents,” especially those present that morning. Certainly, when a self-described female “top cop” confronts an avowed pussy-grabber on the world stage, the revival of cop feminism — by which I mean the school of representational politics that champions a woman’s touch in policing — comes to seem like a distinctly liberal project. Historically, though, cop feminism has roots tangled with European fascism, and fascism’s traces remain present in the ideology’s modern-day incarnation — even as it’s used to bolster Harris’s campaign to “save democracy.”

In the English-speaking world, the ideal of the woman cop originated with a group of felons. The British feminist Mary Sophia Allen was repeatedly jailed as a soldier in the guerrilla “Votes for Women” army led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant feminist known for her early twentieth-century Women’s Social and Political Union. Allen had been one of the WSPU’s core terrorism coordinators at a time when the group was pouring acid into mailboxes and planting nitroglycerine bombs in public places. A lesbian, Allen delighted in breaking not only laws, but gender norms as well. She adopted a man’s hairstyle, called herself “Robert” among intimates, and required subordinates to address her as “sir.” By the 1930s, she had become a self-professed fascist who admired Adolf Hitler — and a “Pioneer Policewoman,” per the title of her first autobiography. (I am using she/her pronouns here in conformance with the anxious self-location within womanhood that Allen performed in her memoirs, which bear the pointedly gendered names Woman at the Cross Roads and Lady in Blue.) 

According to her biographer, Nina Boyd, Allen’s early political activity was motivated in part by an “obsession” with “white slavery.” In the Victorian era, newspapers breathlessly reported that young girls were being waylaid and debauched by foreign pimps and traffickers operating in railway stations, or being abducted and locked in padded cells by aristocratic pedophiles. Today, the scholarly consensus is that the phenomenon was more or less bullshit. English prostitutes generally did not recognize themselves as “white slaves,” but the difference between the sex industry and white slavery, in the minds of Allen and others, was nonexistent, or, rather, rightfully located in the eye of the uniformed beholder. Allen adored moral crusades in general and, per Boyd, cared not so much about fighting injustice as about fighting, for its own sake. For her, the suffrage cause was about securing authority for the “right” women: “working women were as far from her own sphere of experience as the elephants at the zoo.”

Allen’s pivot from militant feminist to militant Blackshirt coincided with the outbreak of war. Pankhurst, ailing after a series of hunger strikes — and stirred by the patriotism of the moment — called on the suffragettes to cease their fire against the British government. “The views I have always held I still hold. Nothing is more horrible than wars of aggression,” the formerly socialist WSPU leader said in a November 1914 speech. “But I believe that, whatever faults we have had in the past, now we are engaged in a righteous war.” The sudden stoppage of WSPU’s operations gave many of Pankhurst’s loyal feminist paramilitaries whiplash. Allen felt lost and abandoned. “I won’t pretend we liked it,” she wrote later of Pankhurst’s decision. “We were heart and soul in our fight to gain recognition for women.” Allen was desperate for a substitute vehicle for her fanaticism, and, Boyd writes, she found it with the volunteer police squads “being set up by women who saw an opportunity opening up for them with the deployment of men to the Front.” As a 1915 issue of the suffragist newspaper The Vote put it, “We want women police, women gaolers, women inspectors, and women in more and more departments of police life.” 

Allen soon became second in command of the Women Police Volunteers (WPV), a militia founded in 1914 and later renamed the Women Police Service (WPS). Under the wartime Defence of the Realm Act — a measure imposing martial law on all British subjects — the state commissioned organizations like the WPV to surveil homes, taverns, and munitions factories. The WPV’s raison d’être was to prevent sexual abuse and provide moral assistance to women in need. In Allen’s view, this kind of policing was consistent with the feminist cause, not only because the suffragettes had experienced brutality at the hands of male police, but also because women police could protect women from their own immoral instincts, which otherwise might reflect badly on the gender as a whole. According to Allen, the WPV uniform was so powerful it could combat “subversive forces” with its appearance alone. “It was evident,” she reminisced in 1925, “to all those closely concerned with the maintenance of order, that the uniform was in itself a deterrent, an actual weapon of defense, and that it had also a prompt moral effect.” She donned her cop regalia in 1914 and, by all accounts, was never seen in public without it again — an absurd affectation.

That year, Allen was deployed to Grantham, a town whose population had doubled with the stationing of twenty thousand soldiers. His Majesty’s troops were officially deemed at risk of venereal disease on account of all the loose women swarming around, and the WPV was enlisted to help. Eager to wield her truncheon, Allen exercised her right to enter any house, building, or land within a six mile radius of the Army Post Office, and helped impose the 6 p.m. curfew for single women. In a 1917 service report, the (now renamed) WPS declared that it had “cautioned” one hundred “wayward girls”; helped local picturehouses “blacklist” 10 “frivolous” filmgoers; “assisted” 18 “respectable girls”; proceeded against another hundred “prostitutes and disorderly houses”; arrested 16 “drunks, women”; intervened in 24 “illegitimate baby cases”; and reported 10 “dirty houses” to the authorities. The feminist police, by its own admission, spent a lot of time “inspecting lodging-houses” and driving men out of them, separating women “from the company of soldiers,” and reprimanding couples for reclining in “suggestive attitudes” in parks. Allen personally compiled dossiers on women she suspected of performing illegal abortions, and regarded extramarital sexuality — not, of course, her own, but that of the unwashed masses — with abhorrence. 

The British establishment was mostly amenable to Allen’s approach. Members of Parliament were hardly thrilled, of course, by her homosexuality, or the fact that she had such a lurid criminal record. But she had powerful supporters, including the Prince of Wales. She was knighted at the end of the war, and the Cabinet, having been convinced of the moral benefits of “feminine” policing, created an official unit of the Metropolitan Police modeled on Allen’s organization. It was a choice made in an all-too-brief moment of feminist triumphalism: by collaborating with the government, the WSPU had ostensibly won the right to vote in 1918, at least for women over thirty who met property requirements or were married. (It would take another decade for the Equal Franchise Act to pass, removing these restrictions.) Yet even as the police commissioner formed a women’s division, he decided that he didn’t like Allen’s autonomy or suffragette past. She was forced to disband her London units or risk being prosecuted for police impersonation. 

Even though she had no squadrons in London, the name Mary Allen O.B.E. swelled in domestic and international repute. Despite holding “no official standing,” Allen’s militia, now called the Women’s Auxiliary Service, remained active in multiple cities, including British-occupied Dublin. Allen, meanwhile, set out on a world tour, visiting Germany, the U.S., Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Uruguay, Scandinavia, and Palestine. To her delight, she was received almost everywhere as an emissary of the British crown. In 1929, Boyd writes, the Cairo-based magazine L’Égyptienne hailed Allen’s “star-like quality,” calling her “one of the most popular figures of contemporary feminism,” the “Chief of Women Police in England.” And no wonder: the Met’s new women’s division had even adopted the WPV’s uniform design in 1919, and in 1923, the British government hired Allen to consult on methods of policing the occupied Rhineland. If, in the end, the state did not officially absorb her force, it proved willing to partner with and emulate her.

Allen’s most ecstatic hour arrived when the British Trades Union Congress organized a general strike in May 1926 — a Bolshevik display of criminal treason she helped quell. Allen, who dreamed of purging the country of communists, foreigners, and communist foreigners, raised an emergency corps to break the strike. While she herself had, of course, participated in mass anti-government action before the war, she seems to have increasingly regarded that kind of lawbreaking as fundamentally patriotic, pro-British, and even protofascist. She was not the only suffragette who succumbed to the allure of fascism; following Mussolini’s rise, “fascisti” fan clubs popped up throughout the Anglophone world. The historian Martin Pugh writes that some disaffected, adventure-hungry suffragettes recaptured the thrill of “the semi-military style of the WSPU” by joining the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which “couched much of its propaganda in distinctly feminist terms.” When the Equal Franchise Act finally passed in 1928, giving women the vote on the same terms as men, it was seen as too little, too late by many right-radicalized feminists. The WSPU’s former general secretary came to believe, by the ’30s, that “fascism alone will complete the work” started “by the militant women from 1906 to 1914.” 

True to form, Allen took feminism’s flirtation with fascism to its extreme, hobnobbing in the late ’20s and throughout the ’30s with BUF founder Sir Oswald Mosley, Hermann Göring, and Adolf Hitler. She visited Spain, lectured at a pro-Franco meeting in England, and attended the Nazi Olympic Games in Berlin. After the burning of the Reichstag, she recounts in Lady in Blue, “for two and a half hours I sat absolutely entranced beside the Chancellor’s charming sister, listening to the great Dictator.” Hitler’s “hypnotic gestures, his passionate, forceful voice and his visionary eyes held me spellbound.” By turns secretive and open about her affinity for Nazism, she nevertheless often lauded the Führer in print and admitted to a journalist in 1940 that she had joined the BUF. But, she made sure to clarify, her enthusiasm for Nazi Germany was not mutually exclusive with a passion for female policing. “I would work for my country tomorrow — training women for the Services — if I was asked,” she said. 

In 2023, Allen’s picture appeared in a collage that graced the jacket of a new feminist tribute to the NYPD, written by Mari Eder, a U.S. Army veteran. The retired major general’s snappy title? The Girls Who Fought Crime: The Untold True Story of the Country’s First Female Investigator and Her Crime-Fighting Squad. The cover designer doesn’t seem to have cared about Allen’s British nationality, let alone her Nazism: the feminist credentials of a breaker of glass ceilings in the crime-fighting sector, not to mention a first wave suffrage pioneer, were all that was required to qualify for inclusion. A similar logic undergirds the lionization of Kamala Harris by virtue of her veritable litany of “firsts.” She is, as her Wikipedia page recites, the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to be San Francisco district attorney or U.S. vice-president, as well as the first South Asian American to be a U.S. senator or California attorney general, and even the “first resident of the Western United States to appear on the Democratic Party’s national ticket.”

Like Allen, Harris had radical beginnings. She portrays her parents as activists who, according to her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold, “met and fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement.” Harris reports that once, as a fussy toddler, her mother asked her “What do you want?” and she called back, “Fweedom!” with an implied fist in the air. When she told them she planned to become a prosecutor, Shyamala and Donald Harris “at best, found my decision a bit curious.” At times, the frustration sounds like it was mutual. “I like to joke,” tweeted Kamala in 2017, “my sister and I grew up surrounded by adults who spent their full time marching and shouting for this thing called justice.” (It’s not clear what the joke is here, but it’s probably on us.) During a 2012 speech at the Chicago Ideas Week, Harris mocked anticarceral activists, pantomiming holding a placard and chanting “build more schools, less jails!” Though she claimed to agree with the slogan conceptually, the “fundamental problem with that approach,” she said, is that such protesters “have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.” For Harris, the solution “is not not having jails, because there are people who do bad things who need to go to jail.” 

In Harris’s case, as in Allen’s, the pivot from radical to cop involved sex crimes. Finding out that her best friend in high school, Wanda, had been sexually abused by her stepfather was, Harris said in a 2020 campaign video, “a big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor,” adding that “the vast majority of my career as a prosecutor was about protecting women and children, including a significant period of time where I specialized in child sexual assault cases.” She told the same story in a speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, reiterating that she had been motivated by a desire to “protect people like Wanda, because I believe everyone has a right to safety, to dignity, and to justice.” 

As a prosecutor, and subsequently as district attorney of San Francisco, Harris did pay special attention to sex crimes, especially those against children. Even while she sought crackdowns on child sex trafficking in California, she cautioned against the standard approach that entails charging minors with prostitution rather than treating them as victims. This fall, Mackenzie Mays pointed out in the L.A. Times that Harris’s focus on sex trafficking “proved to be a smart political strategy, allowing her record to appear more moderate as she got tough on a crime that her progressive peers calling for less incarceration could not argue with: child abuse.” 

Even as Harris advocated for a more progressive approach to crimes involving minors, she took a hardline stance on sex work. In 2008, according to The Nation, she equated decriminalizing sex work with putting out “a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes.” The following year, in Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, she wrote, “we must arrest the prostitutes as well as the pimps and johns.” At a press conference, she accused sex workers of “terrorizing their neighborhood.” When she was attorney general of California, Harris brought criminal charges against the founders of Backpage.com, the host of a digital marketplace for classified adverts, not unlike Craigslist, that allowed sex workers to more effectively screen clients. (According to Harris, it amounted to “the world’s top online brothel.”) In 2016, her office resisted calls to investigate allegations that dozens of Bay Area cops had sexually exploited a teenage sex worker. As a senator, Harris supported the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA-FOSTA). When asked on a podcast in 2018 for her response to arguments that SESTA-FOSTA and the shutdown of Backpage made sex work “more difficult and more dangerous,” Harris rolled out a masterful non-reply. “Well first of all, I’ve spent a large part of my career — in fact, the majority of my career — working on issues that are crimes against women and children,” she said. “So that’s been part of my life’s work and I’m very, very familiar with the issues.” 

But around that same time, Harris seemed to sense that the political winds were changing. In a 2019 interview with The Root, she answered “I think so, I do” to the question of whether sex work should be decriminalized. Many publications ran with the narrative that she supported decriminalization, but it didn’t stick. This fall, Politico noted that although the Democrats’ 2020 platform included the promise to “work with states and localities to protect the lives of sex workers,” under Harris, the party has made no similar commitment. 

While Harris has flip-flopped on Medicare for All and the border wall, she has held firm in her vision of law enforcement as “a voice for the vulnerable,” especially women and children. This rubric has proven flexible enough to stretch and shrink to fit her sometimes contradictory record. Harris “pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent,” German Lopez wrote in Vox in 2019. She declined to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a cop, but also fought a district court ruling that advocates said would have overturned the death penalty altogether. If it sounds inconsistent that Harris sometimes paints sex workers as neighborhood terrorizers deserving of arrest, and sometimes as victims — or that she would crusade against those taking advantage of sex workers while ignoring such a case in her own jurisdiction — that’s because the domain of commodified sex is the field where feminist carceralism’s hypocrisies are laid most bare. 

Harris’s vilification of women in the oldest labor sector is part of a tradition that is threaded through the history of feminism’s right wing. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century suffragism was always wracked by internal tensions between some of its activists’ devotion to temperance, purity, and protection, and others’ desire for solidarity and liberation. That same division surfaced at the tail end of the second wave in America, in the form of a new female cultural nationalism propounded by femopessimists like Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin, and buttressed by that anti-prostitution, anti-pornography faction’s willingness to envision the armed wing of the state as a feminist weapon. This tendency’s ascendance ushered in a form of Women’s Lib very far afield from the “family abolition” dreams of the movement’s apogee. The new vanguard sought, instead, to use the power of the security state to protect “women and children” against male violence. In a 1975 lecture, for instance, Dworkin called for the creation of “squads of women police formed to handle all rape cases,” and for there to be “women prosecutors on rape cases.” Anti-trans, sex-worker-exclusionary groups of the era, like Women Against Pornography, morally exceptionalized the entire sex industry as a form of “slavery,” demanded mandatory arrests in rape and domestic violence cases, and cheered for female police.

Those demands jumped to the mainstream after 1991, when L.A. police officers almost lynched Rodney King, and for the first time, the proposal to add women and stir was heard around the world. Forget fewer cops, let’s try more and different cops, liberals said — and maybe even lady cops. In 1992, Time published an article called “Are Women Better Cops?”; in 1994, the Los Angeles City Council set a goal of increasing the proportion of women police officers in the LAPD from 14 percent to 43 percent. The possibility that those same lady cops might be especially well-suited to jailing sex workers — compassionately, and for their own good — was a plus. One law professor argued in a 1992 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism article that jail, as a gender segregated space, “is the closest thing many women in prostitution have to a battered women’s shelter.” As late as 2011, the renowned feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon reprised this chorus. While granting that “not being arrested” is “in general a real improvement” for sex workers, she suggested that detention might offer “a respite from the pimps and the street.” It was an idea Harris echoed in Smart on Crime, where she celebrated “making the women agree to follow a court-directed and monitored program of substance-abuse treatment, education, and counseling.”

The theory that women cops can help those they incarcerate thrives thanks to a pop-culture machine that buzzes with kind but firm figures; weary, gun-toting avatars of state-issued gender progress; glamorous shield-maidens of law and order. The first American female cop show was Decoy, which featured the undercover cop Officer Casey Jones and ran from 1957 to 1958. Sixteen years later — not long before Dworkin called for more women police — Police Woman premiered, with its central character, the coiffed blonde Sergeant “Pepper” Anderson, also undercover. Female law enforcement started to more fully come into the light when the NYPD duo Cagney and Lacey took their place on television in 1982. The trope flourished in ’90s entries such as Prime Suspect, in which Helen Mirren plays a glass-ceiling-shattering London detective, and The Silence of the Lambs, in which Jodie Foster plays an FBI agent uniquely suited to understanding the anthropophagous serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as well as to sniffing out a transfeminine butcher of women. The past three decades have seen Law and Order: SVU, Wonder Woman, Mare of Easttown, Top of the Lake, and Killing Eve, among countless more dramas and procedurals. It’s not hard to understand the appeal of this politics, which envisions a world of law enforcement that is armed yet sensitive.

In real life, women cops aren’t doing the warm fuzzy work that our media imagines. While their own frequent abuse at their male colleagues’ hands is a matter of record, their abuse, in turn, of civilians is equally well-documented. Girl cops, too, strip search and racially profile. Contra the expectation that policewomen are emotionally attuned, sociologists have found that they employ emotionally flat, macho, dehumanizing speech patterns in their dealings with civilians. Perhaps they feel pressure to perform toughness, or embrace violence — a curse that seems to have befallen Harris. In 2016, David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior adviser, speculated that “the image of toughness that comes from being in law enforcement may help candidates repel the biases against electing women to higher office.” In 2024, Harris is clearly leaning on that image. Take her lighthearted confession to Oprah Winfrey that she is a proud gun owner: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” Or her team’s declarations of “ironclad” support for Israel and her hawkish enmity vis-à-vis Iran. 

Cop feminism dresses up the armed wing of the state in new clothes; it quite literally puts lipstick on the pigs. This feminine filter neutralizes critique, and even when Harris telegraphs herself as tough on crime, tough on immigration, tough on foreign policy — ride-or-die with Israel through its genocide of Palestinians — liberals today are apparently unable to hear anything that comes out of the mouth of a black female Democrat as even a little bit fascist. Meanwhile, from the point of view of those trigger-happy “boys” of ours in whom the public’s trust has been so bitterly eroded since the uprising for George Floyd, the presence of a lady cop-in-chief promises a welcome vibe makeover. Women, so long as they are of good character, show us that policing can be fundamentally moral work: a thin pink line.