From CrimeReads:
The history of crime-fighting in Britain and America was, for a long period, an overwhelmingly male-oriented narrative. Though fictional female detectives, police officers, and amateur investigators populated commercial literature throughout the nineteenth-century, options for real women to pursue detection were not available until close to the twentieth.
The London Metropolitan Police, founded in 1829, first hired female employees in 1888 (to assist female prisoners), but women were not permitted to work as investigators until 1914. In America, individual states began to appoint women to police capacities at different times, but the first appointment seems to have been in 1891 in Chicago (although, as covered recently in CrimeReads, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private company, hired Kate Warne in an investigative capacity as early as 1856). Slowly, other cities slowly began to follow suit.
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Marie Connolly Owens was the first woman hired as a full police officer in the United States. In 1888, Owens, a Chicago mother of five children, was widowed. She had never held a job, but was determined to provide for her family. She was hired by the city as a sanitary inspector—a new position created in light of legislation preventing children from working under age 14. Owens was one of five women hired to review workplaces and ensure safe conditions, as well as identify children working illegally. Owens went above and beyond, working to find alternate forms of income for them, by herself.
But Owens had another mission, as well—tracking down husbands and fathers who had abandoned their families, causing their children to begin working to help supplement income. When Owens found these absentee men, she would turn them over to the police. She brought in so many, that Chicago’s Police Chief Robert Wilson McClaughrey grew impressed and hired her. She was appointed as a Sergeant—with full privileges. She spent her career enforcing child labor and education laws.
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Indeed, as Livius Drusus has observed, “In almost every contemporary news article about her, her success in law enforcement was subsumed under her femininity, maternal instinct, charitable nature, and kind heart.”
. . . .
Mary Grace Quackenbos Humiston, a graduate of Hunter College and New York University Law school (coursework for which she finished a year early, graduating seventh in her class), was the proprietor of her own law office, the People’s Law Firm. Independently wealthy, her goal was to provide working people with “St. Regis Law at Mills Hotel prices,” focusing on cases on behalf of very poor and immigrant clients. In 1905, she solved a case that had baffled the police until they dropped it—the robbery of $3,000 worth of jewels from the Spanish Legation Secretary.
In 1907, she became well-known for presenting evidence on behalf of an incarcerated immigrant woman that commuted her death sentence. Around this time, working several missing persons cases, she uncovered a giant peonage scheme—the luring of poor workers and immigrants to the South to work in slave-labor conditions on turpentine and other plantations. She went undercover and infiltrated many of these camps, gathering enough evidence for the Justice Department to open an investigation. She was then appointed Special Assistant United States District Attorney for the Southern District of New York and, finally regarded as a specialist on peonage, was sent by the Secretary of State to investigate further trafficking. In 1916, she famously represented a death row inmate at Sing Sing, producing evidence of a false conviction that set him free.
But she became known to the public as “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes” in 1917, when she solved a famous cold case—the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old-girl named Ruth Cruger, who, months before, had left her house in Harlem to get her ice skates sharpened and never returned. The police insisted that Ruth had likely run away, and left the case alone. Working pro-bono for the desperate family, Humiston concentrated on the skate-sharpening shop where Cruger was last seen, interviewing countless neighbors. She was certain that the owner, Alfredo Cocchi (whom the police had refused to investigate because of his respectable repute) was behind Ruth’s disappearance—which seemed to be an even more viable theory after he suddenly left the country.
One of Humiston’s sources told her that, around the time of Ruth’s disappearance, Cocci had emerged from his cellar, covered in dirt. Humiston scoped out Cocchi’s house—securing a search warrant, and directing her team to dig up the floor of the basement. There, they found Ruth’s body. But Humiston also uncovered a connection between Cocchi and the police—a kickback system between local officers and the repairman that likely protected him from suspicion and allowed him to abscond. After this, Humiston was appointed Special Investigator with the New York City Police Department, to continue to track down missing women and girls.
Link to the rest at CrimeReads
Fascinating! Thanks, PG.