Deviance Gendered, Criminology Exposed
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPIn recent years, legal history has expanded dynamically. Research on law and society especially has demonstrated new ways of thinking about human relationships and about the roles of violence, crime, and the law in everyday life. The authors under review contribute to this disciplinary expansion by analyzing how race, class, and gender issues within the law challenge common assumptions about discipline, state formation, and national identity. As readers of the Journal of Women's History are already aware, particular attention paid to gender in academic scholarship complicates traditional historical narratives, even narratives that are, themselves, relatively innovative.
Research on criminology and gender is not entirely new, however, as Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson demonstrate with their recent translation of Cesare Lombroso's classic text about women and deviance. This "founder of modern criminal anthropology" was one of the first researchers "to bring scientific methods to bear on the study of crime" (3). Researching in Italy during the late Victorian period, subsequent generations of criminologists sometimes dismissed his work as pseudoscience, but his theories about the "born" criminal continue to affect the application of laws today. Rafter and Gibson correctly acknowledge his work as a starting point for [End Page 214] historians interested in gender, race, science, and the law. They also point out that Lombroso is recognized today "as one of the most fertile, if uncritical, thinkers in nineteenth-century Europe, and a man whose work marked a turning point in conceiving of the body as a sign of human worth" (4).
In his day, Lombroso tackled a question that continues to voyeuristically fascinate modern society: what makes women, the "kinder, gentler sex," commit crimes? Contemporary thinkers are undoubtedly more skeptical about the inherently nurturing disposition of all women, but many individuals still consider crime and violence largely to be male preserves. Consider the public's almost obsessive interest in Aileen Wuornos, (mistakenly) billed as the United States' first female serial killer: Charlize Theron won a much-deserved Academy Award for her emotional portrayal of Wuornos's difficult life and her decision to kill several men along a Florida highway during 1989–1990. The Western public's morbid fascination with women, violence, and crime transcends U.S. borders, as evidenced by the press generated in Great Britain over Fred and Rosemary West's brutal crimes carried out at 25 Cromwell Street, especially after Fred West committed suicide in 1994 while awaiting trial; his wife was later convicted on several counts of murder. The recent media outcry about the 2005 release of Karla Homolka, who helped her husband kidnap, sexually torture, and kill several Toronto-area women during the late 1980s and 1990s, also suggests that the response to female criminals is rooted in the (erroneous) belief that women are simply not as violent as men; when women prove themselves capable of criminal atrocities, people demand to know why.1
In the late nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso and his research assistant Guglielmo Ferrero proposed that both women and men had the potential to be born criminals, thus explaining how the passive female sex could engage in violent...
