This paper looks at a prototypical German example of the kleptomania diagnosis in its heyday around 1900, reading the phenomenon as a means of social control of women in a period of suffragist agitation. It argues that the medicalization of women in early-twentieth century forensic psychiatric treatises, such as this one -- Leopold Laquer’s Der Warenhausdiebstahl -- was in part an attempt to curb female enfranchisement, and a reaction against the social upheavals of modernity, while establishing the credentials of forensic psychiatry, a relatively new branch of medicine.