Kate Warne
One afternoon in 1856, a woman walked into Allan Pinkerton’s Chicago office and asked whether he would employ her as a detective. Pinkerton later remembered her as “slender, graceful in her movements, and perfectly self-possessed in her manner…her features, although not what would be called handsome, were of a decidedly intellectual cast. Her eyes were very attractive, being dark blue, and filled with fire. She had a broad, honest face, which would cause one in distress instinctively to select her as a confidante.”
Still, employing a woman as a detective was not the custom, Pinkerton told her. It was “unheard of,” in fact.
She answered that she could “go and worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access,” winning her way into the confidence of the wives and sisters of men his agents were chasing, hearing what people said carelessly around a woman.
Pinkerton asked her to come back the next day. When she did, he had made up his mind. He hired her. And with that decision, Kate Warne became the first known woman employed as a professional detective in the United States.
Five years later, in 1861, Warne would help uncover, and help Abraham Lincoln escape, a plot to kill him before he could be sworn in as president.