Joining the male-dominated FBI wasn’t easy for females in the 1970s. But after a 50-year policy of disallowing female special agents, the FBI finally welcomed an era of gender equality and encouraged female agents to apply. And women did apply – even women who were nuns in a former life. These women, while few in number, paved the way for all women to take their place among the ranks of famous FBI Special Agents.
Even though the first Black FBI Special Agent, James Wormley Jones, was hired by the FBI in 1919, a female counterpart didn’t make her way into the FBI until 1976.
Sylvia Elizabeth Mathis completed her Special Agent training at a time when there were only around 40 female agents. How much do you know about this groundbreaking Special Agent? Take our quiz to find out!
The first female FBI agents had graduated from FBI training just four years before Mathis arrived on the scene. The fight for gender equality in the FBI aligned with the Civil Rights movement, and Black females began applying for agent positions soon after. Mathis wasn’t the first Black female to enter the demanding four-month training program at Quantico, but she was the first to complete it successfully.
Mathis’s career with the FBI was short-lived, and she eventually returned to her roots, working as an attorney in New York City. But before she left the FBI, she worked on projects investigating illegal gambling and extortion cases in the New York Field Office’s organized crime squad. She also worked on interviewing survivors of the Jonestown Massacre.
Even though Mathis’s FBI career didn’t last long, she still did important work that helped pave the way for all women, and especially Black women, to serve their country in the FBI.
