Women's History Month: Misbehaving Women Who Made History (March 2024): Crime Fighters and Criminals

Ellen Gracie Northfleet made history in 2000 when she was appointed as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court in Brazil.  She also served as the first woman Chief Justice from 2006 to 2008.  In addition to her role as a judge, Northfleet has been the Vice-President of the Federal Electoral Court and President of the National Judicial Council.  Like many judges, she began her career as a lawyer and was a federal attorney with the Ministerio Publico Federal.  Later, she served as a judge in the Federal Court of Appeals, where she was a member of the Regulations Committee and the Continuing Education Committee.  A Fulbright scholar, Northfleet is known not only for her breaking the class ceiling of the judiciary, but for technological improvements in the Brazilian judicial system with the case filing and management systems, and she further increased and encouraged the use of alternative dispute resolution models both as a judge as an advocate off the bench.

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World Justice Forum IV Speaker: Ellen Gracie Northfleet

Ellen Gracie Northfleet - The Dialogue

Brazil’s First Woman Chief Justice Wants General Applicability to Alleviate Courts - Brazzil

Women's History Month: First Women Lawyers, Judges Around the World - Duke Law (scroll down to find information on Northfleet)

Tcheng Yu-hsui was a rebel from an early age, refusing to bind her feet at age 6 and refusing to get married at age 13.  She left China and became involved in international affairs and revolutionary activities first through her time in Japan and then in France.  Attending the prestigious Sorbonne, Tcheng earned both a masters and doctorate in law.  While in France, she met her husband, Wei Tao-ming, and together, they returned to China to open up a joint law practice.  By doing so, she became the first woman to practice law in modern China.  After handling a particularly difficult divorce case between two prominent opera singers, Tcheng She was appointed President of the District Court in Shanghai, making her the country’s first woman judge in modern China's history.  In addition, she was involved in drafting the government’s new Civil Code that permitted divorce for both men and women.  She constantly tried to balance the rights of women with traditional cultural ideals. She would later go on to become a legislator for the Kuomintang Party and eventually became the President of the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. 

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The Revolutionary Life and Times of China’s First Woman Lawyer & Judge - The Next Hundred Years

20th Century, Activists & Revolutionaires, Asia, Contributions:  Tcheng Soumay - Sheroes of History

Women's History Month: First Women Lawyers, Judges Around the World - Duke Law (scroll to the bottom of the page)

Genevieve Rose Cline made history as the first female appointed as a federal judge when President Calvin Coolidge nominated her in 1928 to the US Customs Court, which later was renamed the Court of International Trade.  She started out, however, in private practice with her brother before becoming the first woman to be assigned to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she was an appraiser of merchandise at the port of Cleveland, Ohio.  Cline was a staunch advocate for women's rights and consumer protections.  She served twenty-five years on the bench before stepping down.

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Women as 'Way Pavers' in the Federal Judiciary - United States Courts

Cline, Genevieve (1877-1959) - Encyclopedia.com

Dubbed "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" for her investigative skills, Mary Grace Quackenbos Humiston had a passion for helping the downtrodden and making sure that the average person got justice.  She studied law at the New York University Law School and opened The People's Law Firm.  She often took cases on a pro bono basis, and she regularly assisted immigrants and the working poor with their legal problems.  In her investigative work, she would even don disguises and infiltrate groups gaining valuable information and even affidavits.  She was very successful in her work and caught the attention of the Justice Department.  They appointed her Special Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1907 before women had the right to vote.  As a special assistant, she was responsible for identifying and prosecuting peonage (a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work without paying them a wage) schemes and was tasked with industry trust-busting.  After uncovering corruption in the NYPD, Humiston became a special investigator to the NYPD and was eventually tasked with finding missing girls. She also formed the Morality League of America, an organization dedicated to locating, recovering, and supporting girls and women who had been forced into prostitution.  She dedicated her life to social justice.

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Mary Grace Quackenbos Humiston: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes - Three Village Historical Society 

Searching for Grace Humiston: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes - The History Reader:  Dispatches in History from the St. Martin's Publishing Group

“Mrs. Sherlock Holmes” Takes on the NYPD - Smithsonian Magazine

Mrs. Sherlock Holmes: The True Story of New York City's Greatest Female Detective and the 1917 Missing Girl Case That Captivated a Nation (available through Link+)

Constance Baker Motley was a Civil Rights hero, but her story is often lost amid the many famous names associated with the movement.  Motely was a front-line lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and led the litigation that resulted in the desegregation of the University of Georgia, the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi, and many other institutions and places, such as parks.  A graduate of Columbia law school, she not only was the first African American woman to argue before the Supreme Court, but she argued before SCOTUS a total of ten times and won nine of her cases, an impressive feat.  After leaving the NAACP in 1965 to pursue politics, she became the first African American women elected to the state senate in New York.  Later, President Johnson appointed her to the Southern District of New York.  While a judge, she mentored many individuals and encouraged them in their legal pursuits, shaping a generation of litigators.

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Constance Baker Motley: Judiciary’s Unsung Rights Hero - United States Courts

Constance Baker Motley - Columbia University in the City of New York

Celebrating the Life of Constance Baker Motley ’46 - Columbia Law School

The Life and Legacy of Constance Baker Motley -  NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Henriette Arendt made history as the first woman police officer in modern Germany and also the first woman police officer of any modern European nation at the time. The daughter of a Jewish city-council chief, Arendt studied to be a nurse and entered into this profession soon after finishing her education.  In 1903, Arendt became a police woman and medical examiner, and ostensibly her task was to arrest prostitutes, but she soon became disillusioned by what she saw as laziness and corruption.  Eventually, she left the police and moved to Switzerland where she worked to prevent the international trafficking of children.  During WWI, she worked with refuges from Galicia and then later with the Red Cross.

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Henriette Arendt, 1874-1922 - Brigam Young University

Women Police in Weimar: Professionalism, Politics, and Innovation in Police Organizations - Law & Society Review

Ruthless and politically savvy, Zheng Yi Sao was one of the most powerful pirates in history, and she was a woman.  By 1804, she and her husband were able to create a federation of 400 junks with over 70,000 pirates.  They organized these pirates into six squadrons of the Red, Black, White, Green, Blue, and Yellow Flags.  After her husband's death, she kept the federation together and dominated the coast of the Kwangtung Province in China between 1795-1810.  She picked lieutenants who would be loyal to her and acceptable to the crews and punished crew members severely for breaking any of the rules that she had in place.  For example, if a pirate raped a female captive, he could be put to death.  Zheng would make sure that the pirates' law was enforced and that punishment was swift and brutal.  Her brutality, intelligence, and diplomacy made her a formidable force upon the high seas.  In fact, she was so politically savvy that she was able to negotiate with the Chinese government and retire from being a pirate while still maintaining a fleet for legitimate trade.

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Cheng I Sao, Female Pirate Extraordinaire - JSTOR Daily

One Woman's Rise to Power: Cheng I's Wife and the Pirates - Historical Reflections

Rogue History:  Anne Bonny to Zheng Yi Sao: The Notorious Women of Piracy - PBS

Princess Sela was one of the first known female pirates recorded in Norwegian history, and she was active in the 5th century CE.  She was reportedly the sister of King Koller of Norway.  Theirs was not a cordial relationship, and sibling rivalry took on a whole new meaning when she decided to become a pirate and plunder his ships.  A skilled warrior and rover, Sela was able to accumulate a large fortune.  While she was busy with piracy, the former King of Jutland, Horwendill, decided he would become a pirate, too, and challenged King Koller on the high seas.  Sela heard of this and, putting aside her hatred of her brother, went to aid him, but she was too late.  Horwendill had killed her brother and, in a fierce battle, she was also slain by the same man.

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The Danish History:  Books I-IX - Project Gutenberg (search for Sela using the find feature, and the third entry is for Princess Sela)

Princess Sela - Daring Pirate Women

Ann Dieu-Le-Veut (also known as Marianne or Marie-Anne) was one of the women that the French government sent to Tortuga in the Caribbean to be the wife of a colonist, but instead, she married a pirate, Pierre Length, and ended up becoming a pirate herself.  Operating in the Caribbean and later Mississippi, she and her husband plundered numerous ships.  Then, after Laurens de Graaf, another pirate, killed her husband, she challenged de Graaf to a duel.  He refused, but he was reportedly so taken by her courage that he proposed to her on the spot.  When he did so, he was already married, but he had abandoned that wife, and Dieu-Le-Veut and Graaf's marriage could never be officially recognized.  Together, they continued to terrorize the Caribbean.  Accounts after this encounter differ.  Some say that she and de Graaf settled in Mississippi, and some say that he was killed and she took over command of his ship.  Although women were considered bad luck on ships, she was not.  In fact, her name meant "as God wills it," and her crew took that to mean that she was blessed by God, and indeed, it seemed that way.  One story has her captured and taken to Cartegena, and supposedly when the the French Marin Secretary of Pontchartrain heard of this, taken with her exploits, he wrote to Louis XIV of France and asked if he would request that the king of Spain intervene.  Whether she was eventually a prisoner and freed through this favor between kings or whether she and de Graaf retired together, one thing is certain, women were, indeed pirates, and Dieu-Le-Veut was one of these often romanticized figures.

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Census • Person • Anne Dieu-Le-Veut - Colonial Sense

French Pirate:  Anne Dieu-le-Veut - People Pill

Veronica Mireya Moreno Carreon, also known as "La Flaca" (which roughly translates to "the skinny girl"), was reportedly one of the first female sicarios and the first female boss of the Zetas drug cartel.  Once a decorated police officer, Moreno switched sides and threw her lot in with the Los Zetas cartel.  She rose to become the boss until she was pulled over in a stolen car with 100 bags of cocaine and 50 bags of crack.  Her rise to power, however, signaled a shift in traditional gender roles in drug gangs and cartels, and women have begun to take leadership positions in the world of crime. 

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Mexico Captures First Female ‘Zetas Boss’ - InSight Crime

Curse of the Cartel's Skinny Hitwoman - Daily Beast

Kilos and Killer Heels: These are the Female Bosses Running Mexico's Brutal Cartels - LatinOne (scroll down to find Carreon's name)

The Countess, Elizabeth Bathory (also known as "The Blood Countess") has been called a serial killer, a witch, and even a vampire.  Legend has it that she killed somewhere between 50-650 female virgins in an effort to stave off epileptic fits, and others claim that she bathed in the blood of virgins in order to preserve her youth.  Some historians have suggested that she was a lesbian or that she had unconventional sexual liaisons, including relations with teenage boys, both of which might have contributed to the myths and dark history surrounding her.  Various accounts during her lifetime describe horrific tortures from which she supposedly enjoyed sexual satisfaction.  Due to her family influence, however, she was never officially charged with any crimes, and her reign of terror over her household continued relatively unabated until her death in 1614.

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Bathory, Countess - The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (log into Credo Reference before clicking on the link)

The Bloody Legend of Hungary’s Serial Killer Countess - National Geographic

Elizabeth Bathory - Biography.com

Leonarda Cianciulli, also known as "The Soap-Maker of Correggio," lured three women to their deaths, making her a serial killer.  This unassuming woman and shop owner reportedly committed these murders out of devotion to her children.  She'd had three miscarriages and ten other children had died while babies; only four of her children lived.  A gypsy supposedly convinced her that, through human sacrifice, she could keep those four remaining children safe.  So, between 1939 and 1940, Cianciulli lured three middle-aged women into her shop and killed them.  She turned them into soap and teacakes, the latter of which she served to guests in her shop and which she and her husband enjoyed, making her also a cannibal.  She was arrested, tried, and convicted.  Cianciuli served 30 years in prison and 3 in a criminal asylum, where she died.

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"That Woman Was Really Sweet": The Italian Serial Killer Who Turned Her Victims Into Soap & Cake - Investigation Discovery

The Serial Killer Who Made Soaps and Cakes Out of the People She Killed - Medium