101 years ago, the first woman cop walked the streets of Lexington

Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history - some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.

By the time Margaret Egbert spoke to the Lexington chapter of the Christian Temperance Union in March 1931, she’d been on the beat for seven years. At 98-pounds and a little over five feet tall, she was not what anyone would suspect a police officer to look like.

Margaret Egbert was 53 when she joined the force. A widow with two children, she was charged with helping attend to the needs of female criminals and victims of crime.

Police departments had started hiring women in response to the women’s suffrage movement. There were concerns among officials in numerous cities that male officers weren’t as in tune with the needs of unwed mothers and abused children, and that a female presence could make a difference.

The Los Angeles Police Department was first to break the sex barrier and hired the first policewoman in 1910. By 1915, 25 cities across the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Chicago, had female officers.

Egbert joined the Lexington Police Department on Feb. 21, 1917. The city’s Board of Commissioners had set out to find a police matron and settled on Egbert, the widow of Col. Edwin Egbert, a private secretary to Ky. Gov. James Proctor Knott, as the most qualified candidate.

Primarily, according to a story in the Lexington Herald that year, Egbert’s duties would be to “attend sessions of the police court, look after women prisoners confined in the city lock-up and should any of them be compelled to remain at the police station overnight to sleep there herself to exercise supervision over them.”

She also was to do some patrol work especially keeping an eye on “motion picture shows to see that young men and women deport themselves properly.”

Egbert earned just $50 a week as the police matron, often working well into the morning. Her exploits read like a romance novel or young adult heroine adventure of the day.

In one newspaper account, she rescued an innocent girl who had been led astray by “a new beau in Lexington.” In another, she attended to a young woman who said she’d been lured to Lexington under the promise of good jobs, only to be trapped there.

In another, she led home a local politician who had too much to drink.

She wasn’t shy about placing blame, either. In her speech to the Christian Temperance Union in March 1924, she said when girls drink, it’s the mothers who are to blame for not looking out for their children’s moral education.

“That is too often the thing that the mother thinks,” she said in a Lexington Herald article. “They think of the children’s physical welfare, but they don’t think about what’s going on in their minds.”

For more than 30 years, she tackled the duties of her office as well as she could, often going above and beyond what was required of her. She even helped establish a venereal disease clinic in the city.

In 1946, at the age of 82, she retired from the force.

“I have no regrets that I had chosen the work of a policewoman as my profession,” Egbert wrote when she retired. “For there is no greater opportunity for service than comes to the police department.”

Egbert died in a Nicholasville nursing home in 1959 at the age of 95.

This story was originally published March 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM.