President Herbert Hoover appointed tax lawyer Annabel Mathews to the U. S. Board of Tax Appeals in 1929. As a judge, she sat on that court until 1936.
Mathews, a graduate of Brenau College in Gainesville, went to Washington, D. C. in 1914, working in a clerical position in the Internal Revenue Bureau by day and studying law at George Washington University at night. After she was admitted to the Washington, D. C. bar, she worked as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Bureau until her appointment to the court.
She was an adent feminist. She fought to get Federal Judge Florence Ellingwood Allen nominated to the United States Supreme Court when Justice Brandeis retired in 1939.
Once when she was on the Board of Tax Appeals she wrote a male applicant for a position, “I have not appointed my second legal assistant, but I expect to select a woman attorney. In view of this fact, I suggest that you do not apply.”
