A Sad Bit on Positivist Criminology, 1893 (And on Women & Tattoos)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2262

In an interesting article in Popular Science Monthly (volume 44, December 1893) Helen Zimmern reviews the work and vision of positivist-criminologist Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Woman.  Lombroso was a believer in certain bits of investigation and experimentation that he took as science. He examined the physical characteristics of criminals and made aggressive assumptions on how the shared statistics of visual clues could elucidate the character of a person.  He measured all sorts of things in prisoners--head shape, skull capacity, all manner of other body part measurement,s hearing ability, strengths,m weaknesses. color determination, acuity, agility, sagacity of facial features, and on and on, and was fairly well satisfied that he had unlocked a code of criminality determined by mostly visual interpretation--in effect, a naked-eye DNA.  It was certainly in keeping with the time and the belief in New Statistics.  Most of it was bunk, dangerous, and useless.  

IT was all taken as a science of sorts at the time, and Ms. Zimmern reviewed the Lombroso work as a scientific, evidentiary document.  Mostly the conclusion are sad and wilting.

Here's a bit from the review, followed by a couple of links to other works in English by Lambroso.  

“...on tattooing in women, the tendency to tattoo being, according to Lombroso, an infallible indication of criminal tendencies.”--Cesare Lombroso, "Criminal Woman" review, page 221. 

 

Page 220:

"In the Pathological and Anthropometrical Anatomy of Female Criminals and Prostitutes, which forms the third part of the book, all the measurements which serve to establish those irregularities from which the criminal school draws its conclusions have been taken with the greatest care. According to Lombroso, they are for women the following :

Height, the length of the arms when opened, and the length of the limbs are inferior in criminals weight being, in relation to their stature, greater in prostitutes and assassins than in ordinary women.

The hands are longer and more developed in prostitutes, the foot shorter, the fingers less developed than the rest of the hand.

The size and circumference of the skull in female thieves, and even more so in prostitutes, are small; vice versa, the facial diameter and especially the jaw are more developed than in normal specimens.

The hair and iris are apt to be darker in criminals, and up to a certain point in prostitutes, in whom, however, fair and red hair are often lighter or darker than the normal color. White hair, which is rare in ordinary women, is twice as frequent in criminals ; vice versa, with them baldness is rarer during youth and middle age than among ordinary women, while wrinkles are more frequent only when they are middle-aged."

"It has been difficult to gather these facts with certainty about prostitutes, who are nearly all painted and made up even when quite young ; but from the data Lombroso had to go upon, precocious white hair and baldness would be a common defect, as it is in those who are born delinquents. Irregularities of countenance are to be met with in a greater degree in female assassins and poisoners than in infanti- cides. The real criminal type is rarer among female than male delinquents ; it is found more frequently among prostitutes, and according to a still more precise study made by Tarnowsky, there are more female murderers than thieves, while prostitutes are the most numerous of all."

" In short," as our author writes, " female criminals have less typical faces, because they are less criminal than men, and women in every degeneration present fewer digressions than men, be- cause women being organically conservative preserve the average type even in their moral aberrations ; besides which, beauty being a supreme necessity for them, this overcomes all the attacks made by moral degeneracy. Still, it can not be denied that when wickedness is deep-rooted, then the general rule which stamps crime with a type, conquers every obstacle, at least in civilized races, and this is particularly the case with prostitutes, because the latter recall the type of primitive woman much more than female criminals."

Page 222:

“Few women are born with criminal tendencies, according to Lombroso ; but when this is the case, criminality is more intense and depraved in them than in men. They prove themselves most cruel, and when compared with normal women they are found wanting in every attribute belonging to the latter. For example, among women born with criminal tendencies there is a total want of maternal affection, pity, and love ; they are excessively erotic and revengeful, revenge among women naturally criminals being one of the chief motives for crime.

...Lombroso concludes thus : "Since these women are morally insane, and are wanting in all noble and deep sentiments, they exchange them for exaggerated sophistications, just as a coward boasts of a chimerical and absurd courage in his discourses."

"Women born criminals are intelligent, and make up for their weakness and want of physical power to satisfy their natural depravity by having recourse to cunning in their fight against society. But as a whole the type of the woman born to be a criminal shows a great likeness to the type of men criminals, and in the rare case of complete criminality women surpass men in wickedness. Females who have become delinquents by accident and the greater number of female criminals belong to this class may be divided into two categories : the one represented by fe- males born with only slight criminal tendencies, the other con- taining delinquents who differ very slightly from normal women, and who sometimes are nothing but ordinary women whose condition in life has been such as to develop that fund of immorality which is latent in every woman. Prof. Lombroso determines by indubitable data the much-debated question of the affinity be- tween prostitution and criminality, concluding that the psycho- logical and anatomical identity between criminals and born prostitutes could not be more complete ; both being morally insane, by a mathematic axiom they become equal. In drawing his conclusions on women who have become prostitutes through circumstances Lombroso says that mentally these are more abnormal than women who have become criminals by choice, because, ac- cording to the theory of his school, prostitution and not criminality is the true degeneration of woman, innate female criminals being rare and monstrous exceptions. He says : " Chastity is the strongest feminine sentiment after maternity ; it is a sentiment toward which the minds of women have worked for so many centuries in order to create and consolidate it : thus, if a woman, who though not wanting in chastity loses it easily, she must be more deeply abnormal than a woman who when exposed to great temptations forgets to respect other people's property.”

Other works by Lombroso:

• (1895) The Female Offender, D. Appleton & Company (with William Ferrero).

• (1911) Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, Little, Brown, and Company.

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

Lombroso seems to have had a thing about tattooing. See also:

(1896) "The Savage Origin of Tattooing", Popular Science http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ryIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA793#v=onepage&q&f=false

I love the introduction, which argues that London society ladies must have "an inferior sensitiveness" due to being so "obtuse to pain" as to have tattoos.

[John F. Ptak]

There's a LOT of cringeworthy sentiments in these works, though entirely appropriate for the time, and more so the pity. L was also into spiritualism it looks like, and perhaps a believer--for all of what he did in his career, the numbers just should'nt've added up for whoo whoo.