Before there was internet fraud and phone scams, there were always swindlers.

Female swindlers too.

Discover the stories of women from the past who not only survived, but thrived as con-artists and thieves.

How did they use their feminine characteristics to swindle in a world where men made the rules?

Join me, Lucy Worsley, historian and author, and my all-female team in ladies swindlers, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.

This month we're talking about women who found themselves at the center of controversy,

whether deserved or not. Today, she won the nation's first ever national spelling bee,

outspelling hundreds of other students from across the country.

Her victory was a major blow to the segregationist and racist superintendents who'd tried to keep a black student from participating at all.

And yet, her own family didn't even learn of her victory until after she'd passed.

Let's meet Marie C. Bolden.

Marie C. Bolden was born in 1894. Her father was a postman and her mom ran a home for senior

citizens. Marie was 14 years old in 1908 when people from cities across the country were invited to her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in the first ever national spelling bee.

Students from 34 cities in total traveled to the Midwestern city to spell.

But trouble was brewing before the competition even started.

Just 50 years after the Civil War, much of the South was governed by Jim Crow laws.

These laws were a formal system of racial apartheid that encompassed every aspect of life for black people in the U.S., including school segregation.

So when administrators from the southern city of New Orleans learned that Marie, a black student, was going

to participate in the competition along with her white counterparts. They threatened to drop out.

The Cleveland superintendent refused to remove Marie from the team. Marie prepared for the

competition, and the New Orleans educators decided to move ahead as well. So on June 29, 1908, Marie joined more than 500 other 8th grade students from across the country in Cleveland's lavish hippodrome theater.

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