The Truth Machine (12 page)

Industrialization, the changing birth rate, women's growing political emancipation, and other demographic and economic forces served to shift criminal anthropology's gaze toward women. The
Archives of Criminal Anthropology
regularly published articles on women in the 1890s, the decade that witnessed the emergence of first wave Italian feminism.
⁶⁷
Ottolenghi acknowledged that the question whether “women feel more or less than men” was “intimately related to the difficult problem of the position of women in society.”
⁶⁸
Criminality, Lombroso and Ferrero had claimed: “increases among women with the march of civilization.”
⁶⁹
Because “housework and school work is presently improperly executed,” Lombroso wrote in 1892, “our civilization has fallen in physical degeneration, pauperism and crime.”
⁷⁰
It was well known that in all countries there were fewer convictions for crimes committed by women compared to men. Contemporary European crime statistics apparently demonstrated that conviction rates varied “from the highest, 37 per cent, in Scotland, to the lowest, rather less than 6 per cent, in Italy.”
⁷¹
Women made up ten to twenty percent of all offenders in Italy.
⁷²
The upper figure is commensurate with the percentage of women convicted in England during the second half of the nineteenth century.
⁷³
In England in 1870, women made up twenty-one percent of the average daily local prison population.
⁷⁴
Yet in accordance with criminal anthropology's guiding degenerationist thesis, they were assumed to be more criminal—because less evolved—compared to men. This paradox was explained, first, by claiming that women exhibited less variation than men did, due to their reputed inherent conservatism. Their sex produced numerically fewer born offenders, it was conceded, but also fewer geniuses. Second, the statistics were assumed to underestimate true levels of female offending because “female crimes”—abortion, receiving stolen goods, and poisoning—were easily concealed.

Positivist criminology was convinced that female nature was innately duplicitous and secretive.
⁷⁵
Women were considered to have a physiological incapacity
for truth telling, and were thought to be habitual liars. This, it was claimed, was caused by the need to hide menstruation from men and sex from children.
⁷⁶
It was due to “weakness, timidity, and shame of their sex,” according to Béla Földes, that “women take greater pains than men to commit their crimes in such a way as to escape detection.”
⁷⁷
Földes echoed Quetelet's much earlier claim that women committed both fewer and different crimes compared to men because they were motivated more by the sentiments of shame and modesty.
⁷⁸
“A further characteristic of female criminality is that, owing to the weakness and the sense of shame of those who perpetrate them, the crimes are less those of open violence than of deceit and secrecy.”
⁷⁹
In 1881, Vito Antonio Berardi claimed that the uterus holds “a tyrannical sway over the organism” so that it is called “the second brain of a woman.”
⁸⁰
For Guglielmo Ferrero, the female was characterized by deceit, dishonesty, a tendency for vendetta, and a passion for clothes. Ruled by an innate and eternal sexual force, even “normal” women were thought to be easily led into crime or prostitution.
⁸¹
Maternity, in contrast, was a “lofty affection … foreign to the degenerate nature of criminals,” fostering a “moral antidote” to criminality.
⁸²
The fixation on sexuality was the most significant and disturbing legacy of positivism to criminology.
⁸³

Fascinated by women in general, criminal anthropology's gaze intensified when it surveyed the prostitute. Lombroso's “elucidation of the connection between prostitution and all other kinds of crime will always remain a masterpiece,” wrote one of his obituarists.
⁸⁴
“The primitive woman was rarely a murderess,” Lombroso and Ferrero claimed, “but she was always a prostitute, and such she remained until semi-civilised epochs.”
⁸⁵
By the time he was writing, prostitution had come to be regarded as the quintessential social evil, surpassing drunkenness, blasphemy, and adultery in the state's dossier of the undesirable.
⁸⁶
In England, the prostitute was a prominent actor in the moral panic over the spread of venereal disease, which culminated in the three Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. These legislated for the gynecological examination of any woman suspected by any policeman of prostitution.
⁸⁷
“There is no woman, then, however virtuous,” protested philanthropist and campaigner Josephine Butler, “to whom this law is not applicable, for there is no woman on whom the
suspicion of a policeman may not fall.”
⁸⁸
“Women criminals are almost always homely, if not repulsive,” Mantegazza claimed, “many are masculine; have a large, ill-shaped mouth; small eyes; large, pointed nose, distant from the mouth; ears extended and irregularly planted.”
⁸⁹
According to Lombroso and Ferrero, not only was the prostitute's
foot shorter and narrower than in normal women, but it was also shorter proportionately to the hand.
⁹⁰
The “greater weight among prostitutes” was “confirmed by the notorious fact of the obesity of those who grow old in their vile trade, and who become positive monsters of adipose tissue.”
⁹¹
Within criminological discourse, the prostitute did not represent womanhood's abject other but was rather an emblem of the inherent depravity of all women. The male was considered normal, the female abnormal, but the prostitute was corrupt.

Lombroso and Ferrero complained that the Italian authorities refused to let criminologists study actual convicts. But thanks to one Madame Tarnowsky, the authors had available to them a collection of photographs of Russian and French female criminals. They thought nothing of making an assessment merely on the basis of looking at them. “Louise C.,” whose “habits were vagabond and unruly,” “threw her dolls in the gutter, lifted up her skirts in the street.” Although she was only nine years old, Lombroso and Ferrero concluded that “she offers the exact type of the born criminal.” “Her physiognomy is Mongolian, her jaws and cheek-bones are immense; the frontal sinuses strong, the nose flat, with a prognathous under-jaw, asymmetry of face, and above all, precocity and virility of expression. She looks like a grown woman—nay, a man.”
⁹²
“Contrarily to criminals,” Lombroso and Ferrero wrote, “these women are relatively, if not generally, beautiful.” “Some of the photographs are quite pretty,” they conceded: “This absence of ill-favourdness and want of typical criminal characteristics will militate with many against our contention that prostitutes are after all equivalents of criminals, and possess the same qualities in an exaggerated form. But in addition to the fact that true female criminals are much less ugly than their male companions, we have in prostitutes women of great youth, in whom the
beauté du diable
, with its freshness, plumpness, and absence of wrinkles, disguises and conceals the betraying anomalies.”
⁹³

The lack of visible stigmata was, by no means, thought to be evidence of a lack of criminality. On the contrary, an absence of pathology was itself considered a cause for suspicion: “It is incontestable that female offenders seem almost normal when compared to the male criminal, with his wealth of anomalous features.”
⁹⁴
This puzzled Lombroso. It was an undoubted fact, he wrote, “that atavistically [the female] is nearer to her origin than the male, and ought consequently to abound more in anomalies.” And yet “an extensive study of criminal women has shown us that all the degenerative signs … are lessened in them; they “seem to escape … from the atavistic laws of degeneration.”
⁹⁵
Lombroso and Ferrero suggested that prostitutes were obliged to hide their abnormalities with cosmetics and wigs. Furthermore, even if external anomalies were rare in prostitutes, internal ones, “such as overlapping teeth, a divided palate, &c.,” were not.
⁹⁶
Such disguises could not be maintained forever, however: “And when youth vanishes, the jaws, the cheek-bones, hidden by adipose tissue, emerge, salient angles stand out, and the face grows virile, uglier than a man's; wrinkles deepen into the likeness of scars, and the countenance, once attractive, exhibits the full degenerate type which early grace had concealed.”
⁹⁷
For positivist criminology, woman was a suspect category.

Lombroso and Ferrero proposed a number of theses in an attempt to explain “the rarity of the type” in women: sexual selection; the absence of stigmata “throughout the whole zoological scale”; women's “conservative tendency … in all questions of social order due to the immobility of the ovule compared to the zoosperm”; their lesser exposure to “the varying conditions of time and space in [the] environment” compared to men; and a less active cerebral cortex “particularly in the psychical centres.”
⁹⁸
The authors concluded that the crimes that women did specialize in, such as adultery, swindling, and prostitution, required an attractive appearance that prohibited “the development of repulsive facial characteristics.”
⁹⁹
Lombroso and Ferrero's preferred explanation for the lack of the criminal type in women, however, was atavism. Their account returned women to a period of human prehistory when there was supposedly less differentiation between the sexes. What was normal for men became criminal in women. Prostitutes were considered even less evolved than normal women, possessing characteristics such as small cranial capacities, narrow foreheads, left-handedness, and prehensile feet.
¹⁰⁰
Although female born criminals were less common than the males, they were considered “more ferocious.” Havelock Ellis preempted the objection that prostitution was more of a vice than a crime by asserting that from an “anthropological point of view” it was impossible to demarcate between the two forms of deviancy: “While criminal women correspond on the whole to the class of occasional criminals, in whom the brand of criminality is but faintly seen, prostitutes sometimes correspond more closely to the class of instinctive criminals. Thus their sensory obtuseness has been shown to be often extreme, and it is scarcely necessary to show that their psychical sensitiveness is equally obtuse.”
¹⁰¹

“Women's preference for strong scents,” Albrecht asserted, “is to be explained only by the fact that they do not smell as keenly and therefore endure strong odors better.”
¹⁰²
Criminals were thought to have an inferior sensibility
compared to law-abiding citizens. Lombroso invoked a hierarchy to conceptualize the problem, claiming that sensibility was highest in con artists but lowest in robbers. Criminals were more likely to be sensitive to the effects of metals and magnets and have acute eyesight. Garofalo pointed to the widespread practice of tattooing among criminals as evidence of their relative insensitivity to pain. Because “the normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain,” wrote Lombroso and Ferrero, women would possess less compassion— “the offspring of sensitiveness”—compared to men.
¹⁰³
Women were also assumed to be less sensitive to pain compared to men because of the burdens of childbearing. Women's cruelty was a consequence not only of their weakness, according to Albrecht, but also of their higher pain thresholds. Other deleterious consequences followed from this: “Compared to that of men the morality of women is also inferior. They know only one honor, honor of sex. This inferior morality, too, comes from their lesser sensibility and intelligence, for also in the latter respect women are inferior. The highest plane of intelligence, genius, is completely lacking among women.”
¹⁰⁴
Francis Galton confirmed women's inferior sensory powers, claiming to have found that “as a rule that men have more delicate powers of discrimination than women”: “The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I understand are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like.” He reasoned that if “the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.” “Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table,” he concluded, and bizarrely, added that they were considered to be “far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”
¹⁰⁵

Lombroso had conducted experiments on the “threshold of sensibility” to pain in 1867, using the electrodes of an induction coil. He and four male colleagues held the electrodes to various parts of their bodies, including their gums, nipples, tongues, lips, eyelids, soles of the feet, and the glans of the penis. Having previously used the device to deliver electrotherapy to his patients, Lombroso reported that the induction coil produced sensations such as a “series of hot pricks,” “scalding pain,” and pains like a “knife blade that passes through the joint.”
¹⁰⁶
The skin's thickness was proposed to mediate the experience of pain, which in turn was assumed to correlate with a person's intelligence. The mentally ill were alleged to be less sensitive to pain: “the demented, pellagroids, and apathetic melancholiacs presented diminished sensibility, erethismic melancholiacs presented increased sensibility.”
¹⁰⁷
The female body's alleged relative insensitivity to pain was in turn proposed as
an explanation of why women had poor powers of sensory discrimination compared to men. Lombroso regarded most women as “frigid.”
¹⁰⁸
Salvatore Ottolenghi attributed women's insensitivity to pain to their increased vitality and longevity.