The Criminal Female

I have spent the time since the Viva pouring over a text from 1895,  The Female Offender, by Professor Caesar Lombroso, part of the Criminology Series published T. Fisher of London.  I stumbled upon it in the Library, I believe it’s an original and I am pretty sure it should be in short loan not full loan, since I now have it until October.

The introduction, written by W. Douglas Morrison, expresses the surety that Lombroso’s study of criminal anatomy will shed light on what creates and defines an offender and allow the penal system to better administer justice.  I find it incredibly interesting that in an introduction to a ‘scientific’ text about the physical deformities of female offenders, Morrison manages to make it through the entire introduction only mentioning female offenders once.

Morrison does however point out the rather interesting statistic that in the US, in 1850, 6,737 (1:3,442) people were housed in prison accommodation for a variety of reasons, by 1890 this number had swelled to 82,329, (1:757) and this increased was described contemporaneously as ‘a tide that has no ebb.’  A huge increase by anyone’s standards, although nothing to today’s US prison population.

Lombroso’s study examined a number of races and nationalities, with some measure of outsourcing of the post mortem examinations to various countries.   The monograph upon which the entire 620 page study is founded studied the anatomy of:

• 26 skulls and 5 skeletons in the possession of Signor Scarenzi  (All prostitutes)
• 60 subjects who died in a prison in Turin, examined by Messrs. Varaglia and Silva
• 17 in Rome, examined by Mingazzini and Ardú

Constituting

• 4 Prostitutes
• 20 Infantacides
• 2 Complicity in Rape
• 14 theft 
• 3 Arson
• 4 Wounding
• 10 Assassins 
• 1 Abortion

On a purely curiosity basis I want to know the measure of their definition of ‘assassin’.
Anyway!

For Lombroso physical deformity and criminality walk hand in hand, he identifies deformities in the face and skull and equates those with criminal behaviours, drawing connections between specific deformities, their prevalence in woman, as opposed to men, and the sorts of crimes committed by women with specific deformities.

Lombroso posits that the number of cranial anomalies present in a skull indicates a propensity towards criminal behaviours and that the number of anomalies can determine the type of crime that those women were predisposed to.  His observation that male criminals had a higher number of anomalies would seem to lead to the suggestion that it takes fewer abnormalities to turn a woman into a criminal than it does a man.

Lombroso’s work was, in effect, a method of using the physicality of women against them, women who suffered from genetic deformities, or who were simply unprepossessing were criminalised because of their appearance and any lack of feminine grace they might have possessed with hairy moles ‘marking degeneration in the female subject.’  It is hard to believe now that this was ever considered science, logic would dictate that when examining a woman in her 60’s that wrinkles would be a sign of ageing rather than her moral degeneration.  Taken in isolation, you could be forgiven for thinking they were describing a Disney witch rather than an attempt to 'scientifically' render the female criminal's features.  

He cites the case of Maria Köster who killed her mother with a hatchet – Lombroso posits that her facial asymmetry and asymmetrical pupil was indicative of her predisposition.  He identified a large number of ‘features’ of the female criminal, from projecting ears, flat nose, to ‘Mongolian features’ – an expression of casual racism which is hardly surprising when an examination of the plates provided in the book show several woman who bear obvious features of being mixed race.

However, while the work incites nothing short of horror in me, as a modern reader, the work makes the acceptances that ‘a man suffering from an attack of typhoid fever cannot be subjected to the same dietary, to the same exercise, as another person in the enjoyment of ordinary health.  The regime to which a patient is subjected must be suited to the anomalous condition in which he happens to be placed.  Criminal codes to be effective must act upon precisely the same principle,’ This is one of the first times, in my reading, that I have seen any sort of acknowledgement made of the adaptive nature of criminal penal administration. While it is not aimed at women, this acceptance would seem to be a first step towards the acceptance of the unique judicial position of criminal women.


Reading through the description of the degenerate female I was disconcerted to see that I fit the mould of more than one, I am of ‘unusual short stature’, ‘gigantic canine’,  deep set eyes’, with ‘prehensile feet’, and ‘very black hair’…so all in all…it’s a wonder I haven’t killed more than one person by now.