Shirah Neiman, a bookish Brooklynite who in 1970 cracked open the boys’ club that was the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, becoming the first woman in decades to be hired into its criminal division, died on Jan. 4 in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 81.

Her sister and only immediate survivor, Dassi Gurfein, said that the cause of death, at a nursing facility, had not yet been determined, but that she had recently been diagnosed with multiple tumors.

The daughter of an intellectually minded Orthodox Jewish couple — her father taught Hebrew literature, her mother was a concert pianist — Ms. Neiman first applied for a job with the Southern District in 1969. Of the 50 lawyers in the criminal division at the time, not one was a woman.

“I was advised by Peter Fleming, the administrative assistant then, that I probably wouldn’t be hired,phl63 casino but that I ought to try to force the issue,” she told The New York Times in 1970.

During the interview process, she faced a barrage of sexist questions, like whether juries would listen to a female prosecutor or how she would manage to work with male F.B.I. agents. “I began to get so discouraged that I withdrew,” she said.

She was about to take a job with a private law firm when the new U.S. attorney for the district, a liberal Republican named Whitney North Seymour Jr., called and asked her to reapply. This time she was hired almost immediately.

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But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

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