Anomalous Females

Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, translated and with a new introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004; 304 pp., £65, ISBN 0-82233-2078 (hbk); £16.95, ISBN 0-82233-2479 (pbk).

Valeria P. Babini, Il caso Murri: una storia italiana, il Mulino, Bologna, 2004; 309 pp., 21 Euro; ISBN 8815-097309.

In his well-known work L'uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), first published in 1876, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) introduced his theory of 'born criminals', according to which criminal behaviour is mostly an innate characteristic of individuals. He distinguished between 'born' and 'occasional' criminals, the first referring to someone born from the start with an inclination toward crime and with specific physical malformations, and the second to someone who became a criminal after his birth. The 'anomalies', as he defined the characteristics belonging only to criminals, were the result of adaptation during the evolution of the human species, enabling offenders to perform their role. He reached this conclusion by comparing the physical features and behaviour of criminals to those of people he considered 'normal', namely people who did not commit crime.

Lombroso applied those findings to female criminality in subsequent work devoted to the female offender. Contrary to the trend in male criminality, he argued, occasional female criminals far outnumbered born ones. Lombroso provided the reader with a detailed description of the individual physical characteristics of women criminals based on measurements of the weight and circumference of skulls, classifications of characteristics of hair, jaws, teeth, cheeks and the numbers of moles and tattoos. According to his conclusions, female offenders were different from males as they were much fewer in number and presented fewer criminal-type degenerative features. To explain that outcome Lombroso drew on the theory of atavism, according to which anomalies in criminals, consisting of primitive physical and psychological characteristics, were caused by their primordial state of human evolution. Since women had never reached as high an evolutionary state, their regression was only slight and was lower than that of men.

Given the long-term effect of Lombroso's theory on the study of female crime and on the treatment of women criminals, feminist criminologists since the 1970s have rightly challenged his biological approach. Emphasizing the relevance of social, economic, and cultural factors, their critiques were fundamental in the challenge to scholars who continued to employ Lombroso's assumptions, particularly those that linked female crime to women's sexuality. Instead feminist criminologists pointed out the relevance of sociological, economic, and cultural aspects. Though their analysis was undoubtedly an epistemological revolution, it was reductive insofar as it neglected to contextualize Lombroso's thought. Lombroso, an Italian Positivist, was influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution and concerned with the competitive adaptation of species to their environment in order to survive. At the end of the nineteenth century evolution, along with the scientific method, transformed the work of scholars in the social sciences, literature, and history, lending their theories a deterministic and naturalistic cast. Lombroso's reliance on the theory of atavism was an outgrowth of this development. As Daniel Pick observed in his 1989 Faces of Degeneration (p. 121), 'The theory of atavism was not only a matter of fervent belief, but also part of a broader conception of politics and society'.

The two books under review make a much-needed attempt to locate Lombroso's thought within its historical context and to draw a more thorough picture of the father of criminology. As Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson note in the introduction to their new English translation of La donna delinquente, 'Lombroso's work is historically valuable despite its scientific and logic naiveté'. A similar assessment emerges from Babini's work, which reconstructs a famous early twentieth-century Italian legal case involving a female offender. Here Lombroso figures as one of the many intellectuals who took part in the national debate provoked by the case. Both books suggest that Lombroso's reflections on...