“THE ETIOLOGY OF FEMALE CRIME”

Dorie Klein (1973)

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LOMBROSO: ‘THERE MUST BE SOME ANOMALY…’

[…] The works of Lombroso, particularly The Female Offender (1920), are a foremost example of the biological explanation of crime.  Lombroso deals with crime as an atavism, or survival of ‘primitive’ traits in individuals, particularly those of the female and non-white races.  He theorizes that individuals develop differentially within sexual and racial limitations which differ hierarchically from the most highly developed, the white men, to the most primitive, the non-white women.  Beginning with the assumption that criminals must be atavistic, he spends a good deal of time comparing the crania, moles, heights etc., of convicted criminals and prostitutes with those of normal women.  Any trait that he finds to be more common in the ‘criminal’ group is pronounced an atavistic trait, such as moles, dark hair etc.,  and women with a number of these telltale traits could be regarded as potentially criminal, since they are of the atavistic type.  He specifically rejects that idea that some of these traits, for example obesity in prostitutes, could be a result of their activities rather than an indicator of their propensity to them.  Many of the traits depicted as ‘anomalies’, such as the Sicilians, who undoubtedly comprise an oppressed group within Italy and form a large part of the prison population.

                Lombroso traces an overall pattern of evolution in the human species that accounts for the uneven development of groups; the white and non-white races, males and females, adults and children.  Women, children and non-whites share many traits in common.  There are fewer variations in their mental capacities: ‘even the female criminal is monotonous and uniform compared with her male companion, just as in general woman is inferior to man’ (1920: 122), due to her being ‘atavistically nearer to her origin than the male’ (1920: 107).  The notion of women’s mediocrity, or limited range of mental possibilities, is a recurrent one in the writings of the twentieth century.  Thomas and others note that women comprise ‘fewer geniuses, fewer lunatics and fewer morons’ (Thomas, 1907: 45); lacking the imagination to be at either end of the spectrum, they are conformist and dull…not due to social, political or economic constraints on their activities, but because of their innate physiological limitations as a sex.  Lombroso attributes the lower female rate of criminality to their having fewer anomalies, which is one aspect of their closeness to the lower forms of differentiated life.

                Related characteristics of women are their passivity and conservatism.  Lombroso admits that women’s traditional sex roles in the family bind them to a more sedentary life.  However, he insists that women’s passivity can be directly traced to the ‘immobility of the ovule compared with the zoosperm’ (1920: 109), falling back on the sexual act in an interesting anticipation of Freud.

                Women, like the lower races, have greater powers of endurance and resistance to mental and physical pain than men.  Lombroso states: ‘denizens of female prisons…have reached the age of 90, having lived within those walls since they were 29 without any grave injury to health’ (1920: 125).  Denying the humanity of women by denying their capability for suffering justifies exploitation of women’s energies by arguing for their suitability to hardship.  L.ombroso remarks that ‘a duchess can adapt herself to new surroundings and become a washerwoman much more easily than a man can transform himself under analogous conditions’ (1920: 272).  The theme of women’s adaptability to physical and social surroundings, which are male initiated, male controlled, and often expressed by saying that women are actually the ‘stronger’ sex, is a persistent thread in writings on women.

                Lombroso explains that because women are unable to feel pain, they are insensitive to the pain of others and lack moral refinement.  His blunt denial of the age-old myth of women’s compassion and sensitivity is modified, however, to take into account women’s low crime rate:

Women have many traits in common with children; that their moral sense is deficient; that they are revengeful, jealous…in ordinary cases these defects are neutralized by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, weakness and an undeveloped intelligence.  (1920: 151)

Although women lack the higher sensibilities of men, they are thus restrained from criminal activities in most cases by a lack of intelligence and passion, qualities which criminal women possess as well as men.  Within this framework of biological limits of women’s nature, the female offender is characterized as masculine whereas the normal woman is feminine.  The anomalies of skull, physiognomy and brain capacity of female criminals, according to Lombroso, more closely approximate that of the man, normal or criminal, than they do those of the normal woman; the female offender often has a ‘virile cranium’ and considerable body hair.

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THOMAS: ‘THE STIMULATION SHE CRAVES’

[…] In The Unadjusted Girl (1923), Thomas deals with female delinquency as a ‘normal’ response under certain social conditions, using assumptions about the nature of women which he leaves unarticulated in this work.  Driven by basic ‘wishes’, an individual is controlled by society in her activities through institutional transmission of codes and mores.  Depending on how they are manipulated, wishes can be made to serve social or antisocial ends.  Thomas stresses the institutions that socialize, such as the family, giving people certain ‘definitions of the situation’.  He confidently – and defiantly – asserts:

There is no individual energy, no unrest, no type of wish, which cannot be sublimated and made socially useful.  From this standpoint, the problem is not the right of society to protect itself from the disorderly and antisocial person, but the right of the disorderly and antisocial person to be made orderly and socially valuable…the problem of society is to produce the right attitudes in its members.  (1923: 232-3)

This is an important shift in perspective, from the traditional libertarian view of protecting society by punishing transgressors, to the rehabilitative and preventive perspective of crime control that seeks to control minds through socialization rather than to merely control behaviour through punishment.  The autonomy of the individual to choose is seen as the product of his environment which the state can alter.  This is an important refutation of the Lombrosian biological perspective, maintains that there are crime-prone individuals who must be locked up, sterilized or otherwise incapacitated.  Today, one can see an amalgamation of the two perspectives in new theories of ‘behaviour control’ that uses tactics such as conditioning and brain surgery, combining biological and environmental viewpoints.      Thomas proposes the manipulation of individuals through institutions to prevent antisocial attitudes, and maintains that there is no such person as the ’crime prone’ individual.  A hegemonic system of belief can be imposed by sublimating natural urges and by correcting the poor socialization of slum families.  In this perspective, the definition of the situation rather than the situation itself is what should be changed; a situation is what someone thinks it is.  The response to a criminal woman who is dissatisfied with her conventional sexual roles is to change not the roles, which would mean widespread social transformations, but to change her attitudes.  This concept of civilization as repressive and the need to adjust is later refined by Freud.

                Middle-class women, according to Thomas, commit little crime because they are socialized to sublimate their natural desires and to behave well, treasuring their chastity as an investment.  The poor woman, however, ‘is not immoral, because this implies a loss of morality, but amoral’ (1923: 98).  Poor women are not objectively driven to crime; they long for it.  Delinquent girls are motivated by the desire for excitement or ‘new experience’, and forget the repressive urge of ‘security’.  However, these desires are well within Thomas’s conception of femininity: delinquents are not rebelling against womanhood, as Lombroso suggests, but merely acting it out illegally.   Davis and Pollak agree with this notion that delinquent women are not ‘different’ from non-delinquent women.

                Thomas maintains that it is not sexual desire that motivates delinquent girls, for they are no more passionate than other women, but they are manipulating male desires for sex to achieve their own ulterior ends.

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FREUD: ‘BEAUTY, CHARM AND SWEETNESS’

The Freudian theory of the position of women is grounded in explicit biological assumptions about their nature, expressed by the famous ‘Anatomy is Destiny’.  Built upon this foundation is a construction incorporating psychological and social-structural factors.

                Freud himself sees women as anatomically inferior; they are destined to be wives and mothers, and this is admittedly an inferior destiny as befits the inferior sex.  The root of this inferiority is that women’s sex organs are inferior to those of men, a fact universally recognized by children in the Freudian scheme.  The girl assumes that she has lost a penis as punishment, is traumatized, and grows up envious and revengeful.  The boy also sees the girl as having lost a penis, fears a similar punishment himself, and dreads the girl’s envy and vengeance.  Feminine traits can be traced to the inferior genitals themselves, or to women’s inferiority complex arising from their response to them: women are exhibitionist, narcissistic, and attempt to compensate for their lack of a penis by being well dressed and physically beautiful.  Women become mothers trying to replace the lost penis with a baby.  Women are also masochistic, as Lombroso and Thomas have noted, because their sexual role is one of receptor, and their sexual pleasure consists of pain.  This woman, Freud notes, is the healthy woman.  In the familiar dichotomy, the men are aggressive and pain-inflicting.  Freud comments:

The male pursues the female for the purposes of sexual union, seizes hold of her, and penetrates into her…by this you have precisely reduced the characteristic of masculinity to the factor of aggressiveness.  (Millett, 1970: 189)

Freud, like Lombroso and Thomas, takes  the notion of men’s activity and women’s inactivity and reduces it to the sexual level, seeing the sexual union through Victorian eyes: ladies don’t move.

                Women are also inferior in the sense that they are concerned with personal matters and have little social sense.  Freud sees civilization as based on repression of the sex drive, where it is the duty of men to repress their strong instincts in order to get on with the worldly business of civilization.  Women, on the other hand,

have little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life; for the demands of justice are a modification of envy; they lay down the conditions under which one is willing to part with it.  We also say of women that their social interests are weaker than those of men and that their capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less.  (1933: 183)

Men are capable of sublimating their individual needs because they rationally perceive the Hobbesian conflict between those urges and social needs.  Women are emotional and incapable of such an adjustment because of their innate ability to make such rational judgements.  It is only fair then that they should have a marginal relation to production and property.

                In this framework, the deviant woman is one who is attempting to be a man.  She is aggressively rebellious, and her drive to accomplishment is the expression of her longing for a penis; this is a hopeless pursuit, of course, and she will only end up ‘neurotic’.  Thus the deviant woman should be treated and helped to adjust to her sex role.  Here again, as in Thomas’s writing, is the notion of individual accommodation that repudiates the possibility of social change.

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THE LEGACY OF SEXISM

[…] [Gisela] Konopka (1966) justifies her decision to study delinquency in girls rather than in boys by noting girls’ influence on boys in gang fights and on future generations as mothers.  This is the notion of women as instigators of men and influencers on children.

                Konopka’s main point is that delinquency in girls can be traced to a specific emotional response: loneliness.

What I found in the girl in conflict was…loneliness accompanied by despair.  Adolescent boys too often feel lonely and search for understanding and friends.  Yet in general this does not seem to be the central core of their problems, not their most outspoken ache.  While these girls also strive for independence, their need for dependence is unusually great.  (1966: 40)

In this perspective, girls are driven to delinquency by an emotional problem – loneliness and dependency.  There are inherent emotional differences between the sexes.

Almost invariably her [the girl’s] problems are deeply personalized.  Whatever her offence – whether shoplifting, truancy or running away from home – it is usually accompanied by some disturbance or unfavourable behaviour in the sexual area.  (1966: 4)

Here is the familiar resurrection of female personalism, emotionalism, and above all, sexuality – characteristics already described by Lombroso, Thomas and Freud.  Konopka maintains:

The delinquent girl suffers, like many boys, from lack of success, lack of opportunity.  But her drive to success is never separated from her need for people, for interpersonal involvement.  (1966: 41)

Boys are ‘instrumental’, and become delinquent if they are deprived of the chance for creative success.  However, girls are ‘expressive’ and happiest dealing with people as wives, mothers, teachers, nurses or psychologists.  This perspective is drawn from the theory of delinquency as a result of blocked opportunity and from the instrumental/expressive sexual dualism developed by structural-functionalists.  Thus female delinquency must be dealt with on this psychological level, using therapy geared to their needs as future wives and mothers.  They should be adjusted and given opportunities to be pretty, sociable women.

                The important point is to understand how Konopka analyzes the roots of girls’ feelings.  It is very possible that, given women’s position, girls may be in fact more concerned with dependence and sociability.  One’s understanding of this, however, is based on an understanding of the historical position of women and the nature of their oppression.  Konopka says:

What are the reasons for this essential loneliness in girls?  Some will be found in the nature of being an adolescent girl, in her biological make-up and her particular position in her culture and time.  (1966: 41)

Coming from a Freudian perspective, Konopka’s emphasis on female emotions as cause for delinquency, which ignores economic and social factors, is questionable.  She employs assumptions about the physiological and the psychological nature of women that very well may have led her to see only those feelings in the first place.  For example, she cites menstruation as a significant event in a girl’s development.  Thus Konopka is rooted firmly in the tradition of Freud and, apart from sympathy, contributes little that is new to the field.

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The resurgence of biological or physiological explanations of criminality in general has been noteworthy in the last several years, exemplified by the XYY chromosome controversy and the interest in brain waves in ‘violent’ individuals.  In the case of women, biological explanations have always been prevalent; every writer has made assumptions about anatomy as destiny.  Women are prey, in the literature, to cycles of reproduction, including menstruation, pregnancy, maternity and menopause; they experience emotional responses to these cycles that make them inclined to irrationality and potentially violent activity.

                Cowie, Cowie and Slater (1968) propose a chromosomal explanation of female delinquency that hearkens back to the works of Lombroso and others such as Healy (Healy and Bronner, 1926), Edith Spaulding (1923) and the Gluecks (Glueck and Glueck, 1934).  They write:

The chromosomal difference between the sexes starts the individual on a divergent path, leading either in a masculine or feminine direction…It is possible that the methods of upbringing, differing somewhat for the two sexes, may play some part in increasing the angle of this divergence.  (Cowie et al., 1968: 171)

This is the healthy, normal divergence for the sexes.  The authors equate masculinity and femininity with maleness and femaleness, although contemporary feminists point out that the first two categories are social and the latter ones physical.  What relationship exists between the two – how femaleness determines femininity – is dependent on the larger social structure.  There is no question that a wide range of possibilities exist historically, and in a non-sexist society it is possible that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ would disappear, and that the sexes would differ only biologically, specifically by their sex organs.  The authors, however, lack this understanding and assume an ahistorical sexist view of women, stressing the universality of femininity in the Freudian tradition, and of women’s inferior role in the nuclear family.

                In this perspective, the female offender is different physiologically, and psychologically from the ‘normal’ girl.

                The authors conclude, in the tradition of Lombroso, that female delinquents are masculine.  Examining the girls for physical characteristics, they note:

Marked masculinity traits in girl delinquents have been commented on…[as well as] the frequency of homosexual tendencies…Energy, aggressiveness, enterprise and the rebelliousness that drives the individual to break through conformist habits are though of as being masculine…we can be sure that they have some physical basis.  (1968: 172)

The authors see crime as a rebellion against sex roles rather than as a maladjusted expression of them.  By defining rebellion as masculine, they are ascribing characteristics of masculinity to any female rebel.  Like Lombroso, they spend time measuring heights, weights, and other biological features of female delinquents with other girls.

                Crime defined as masculine seems to mean violent, overt crime, whereas ‘lady-like’ crime usually refers to sexual violations and shoplifting.  Women are neatly categorized no matter which kind of crime they commit: if they are violent, they are ‘masculine’ and suffering from chromosomal deficiencies, penis envy, or atavisms.  If they conform, they are manipulative, sexually maladjusted and promiscuous.  The economic and social realities of crime – the fact that poor women commit crimes, and that most crimes for women are property offences – are overlooked.  Women’s behaviour must be sexually defined before it will be considered, for women count only in the sexual sphere.  The theme of sexuality is a unifying thread in the various, often contradictory theories.

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