Hoover was almost certainly aware of Elizebeth Friedman. But he would not yet have had many chances to cross her path. She wasn’t allowed to eat in the gentlemen’s dining room at Harvey’s. There were a lot of male enclaves like this in the city, inaccessible to her. And Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972.
