This dissertation examines the processes of judicialization of women accused of participating in the crime of counterfeiting money in Rio de Janeiro during the first decades of the 20th century. In dialogue with the social history of crime from a gender perspective and with the history of women in Brazil, it seeks to provide elements for thinking about the economic agency of women workers, their strategies for survival, and their ways of using money in the world of commerce. Wives, mistresses and sisters of counterfeiters, owners of boarding houses, buyers of various products: the women arrested by the police and whose cases ended up in the courts are seen here as part of complex networks of economic interactions involving families, affective and commercial relationships. To this end, a corpus of police, judicial, and journalistic documentation is analyzed, focusing on the criminal cases preserved in the Historical Archive of the Federal Justice of Rio de Janeiro. Most of the cases involving women were cases of circulators of counterfeit notes and coins and were ultimately dismissed by federal court judges. While paying attention to this broader universe of cases, the methodological strategy adopted was to select three women who, unlike most of the defendants, were tried and convicted by the courts. As such, they are exceptional cases whose documentation nevertheless sheds light on the role of the police and judicial authorities in cases of women involved in counterfeiting networks, as well as on the defense strategies of the defendants. In contrast to the way they have been portrayed by the press, the police, and often their own lawyers, as women incapable of committing monetary crimes and even ignorant of the social uses of money, this research seeks to show an active and often haughty female economic agency in everyday monetary interactions.