'Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle': The Women in NYPD's Early Mugshot Files

In June 1908, a young Austrian woman named Sadie Schoen was hauled into a New York City police station and photographed twice, once facing the camera, once in profile. The charge on her card read simply: swindling. Her case is one of the ones that gave a later exhibition of these photographs its title, "Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle," a phrase that says as much about how the era's press covered women's crime as it does about Schoen herself. Beyond that card, history doesn't remember...