Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero (1895)

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Atavism helps to explain the rarity of the criminal type in woman.  The very precocity of prostitutes – the precocity which increases their apparent beauty – is primarily attributable to atavism.  Due also to it is the virility underlying the female criminal type; for what we look for most in the female is femininity, and when we find the opposite in her we conclude as a rule that there must be some anomaly.  And in order to understand the significance and the atavistic origin of this anomaly, we have only to remember that virility was one of the special features of the savage women.

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                The criminal being only a reversion to the primitive type of his species, the female criminal necessarily offers the two most salient characteristics of primordial woman, namely, precocity and a minor degree of differentiation from the male – this lesser differentiation manifesting itself in the stature, cranium, brain, and in the muscular strength which she possesses to a degree so far in advance of the modern female.

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The analogy between the anthropology and psychology of the female criminal is perfect.

                Just as in the mass of female criminals possessing few or unimportant characteristics of degeneration, we find a group in whom these features are almost more marked and more numerous than in males, so while the majority of female delinquents are led into crime either by the suggestion of a third person or by irresistible temptation, and are not entirely deficient in the moral sense, there is yet to be found among them a small proportion whose criminal propensities are more intense and more perverse than those of their male prototypes.

                ‘No possible punishments,’ wrote Corrado Celto, an author of the fifteenth century, ‘can deter women from heaping up crime upon crime.  Their perversity of mind is more fertile in new crimes than the imagination of a judge in new punishments.’

                ‘Feminine criminality,’ writes Rykere, ‘is more cynical, more depraved, and more terrible than the criminality of the male.’

                ‘Rarely is a woman wicked, but when she is she surpasses the man’ (Italian Proverb).

                ‘The violence of the ocean waves or of devouring flames is terrible.  Terrible is poverty, but woman is more terrible than all else’ (Euripides).

                ‘The perversity of woman is so great,’ says Caro, ‘as to be incredible even to its victims.’

[…] Another terrible point of superiority in the female born criminal over the male lies in the refined, diabolical cruelty with which she accomplishes her crime.

[…] We may assert that if female born criminals are fewer in number than the males, they are often much more ferocious.

                What is the explanation?  […] [T]he normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man, and compassion is the offspring of sensitiveness.  If the one be wanting, so will the other be.

                We also saw that women have many traits in common with children; that their moral sense is deficient; that they are revengeful, jealous, inclined to vengeances of a refined cruelty.

                In ordinary cases these defects are neutralized by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, by weakness and an undeveloped intelligence.  But when a morbid activity of the psychical centres intensifies the bad qualities of women, and induces them to seek relief in evil deeds; when piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies, much muscular strength and a superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear that the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.

                What terrific criminals would children be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and sufficient intelligence; and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were exasperated by a morbid psychical activity!  And women are big children; their evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men’s, but generally remain latent.  When they are awakened and excited they produce results proportionately greater.

                Moreover, the born female criminal is, so to speak, doubly exceptional, as a woman, and as a criminal.  For criminals are an exception among civilized people, and women are an exception among criminals, the natural form of retrogression in women being prostitution and not crime.  The primitive woman was impure rather than criminal.

                As a double exception, the criminal woman is consequently a monster.  Her normal sister is kept in the paths of virtue by many causes, such as maternity, piety, weakness, and when these counter influences fail, and a woman commits a crime, we may conclude that her wickedness must have been enormous before it could triumph over so many obstacles.

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