Women in Magic

She married into magic early in life, at the age of nineteen. With no theatrical training in her formative years, Emma Reno was a quick and agile student of magic, and soon had her own magic act allowing her and her husband to maintain not one but two successful acts in the early 1900s.

She was a resilient, pioneering magician who had a family with strong magic ties. She also grew up performing on stage. When her father died in 1939, she took over his show and as a young, Black woman, she toured successfully through the segregated South.

Learn more about Dell O’Dell, the glamorous, comedy magicienne and television pioneer, and discover how she became to be known as “The World’s Leading Lady Magician.”

Born into the life of fairground theatre in 1896, discover how Suzy Wandas—inspired by the elegant mastery of coin manipulation by Mercedes Talma—transformed from caravan act and into to The Lady with the Fairy Fingers.

While her father may have sparked the initial interest in magic by performing some delightful sleight-of-hand, and perhaps a hopeful beau captured more attention by producing a bouquet of roses from fire for her, this magician found her true calling as a stage performer, all on her own.

Mary Ann has to be one of the busiest women in magic. As a performer, she is, of course, a model for female magicians; but it is her creative use of magic as a financial teaching tool that can be an inspiration for any performer.

Name rings a bell? Many magicians have been part of magical families, and this magician was daughter-in-law to Louis “Pop” Krieger, who famously charmed high-society audiences in New York. Norma’s husband, Willie Krieger, was also a magician and Punch puppeteer, and her brother-in-law was the legendary “Coney Island Fakir,” Al Flosso .

While Dell O’Dell would be an obvious choice for this installment, I’ve already written about her life and career, so come and meet a magician with Irish heritage and a lively onstage persona (several of them, in fact).

One of the first female members of The Magic Circle, Paula Baird was a skilled manipulator, and consistently impressed both lay audiences and her peers with her flawless magic. Meet this two-time FISM award winner and find out how she charmed the crowd with card manipulation, despite following Cardini.