The female born criminal surpasses her male counterpart in the refined, diabolical cruelty with which she commits her crimes

 Cruelty

Second, the female born criminal surpasses her male counterpart in the refined, diabolical cruelty with which she commits her crimes. Merely killing her enemy does not satisfy her; she needs to watch him suffer and experience the full taste of death.

In the band of assassins known as La Taille, the women were worse than the men in torturing captives, especially female captives. The woman Tiburzio, having killed a pregnant friend, bit her ferociously, tearing away pieces of flesh and throwing them to the dog. Chevalier killed a pregnant woman by driving a pair of scissors through her ear and into her brain. A certain D., when asked why she had not stabbed her lover instead of throwing vitriol at him, answered by quoting a Roman tyrant: “Because I wanted him to feel the misery of death.”

The very worst examples of such barbarity are provided by mothers in whom maternal affection—the most intense of all human sentiments—has been transformed into hatred. Hoegli beat her daughter and plunged her head into water to suffocate her cries. One day she kicked the girl downstairs, deforming her spine. Stakembourg, a loose woman, took to persecuting her daughter when she reached the age of forty-two and her lovers abandoned her. “I do not like girls,” she used to say. She hung her daughter from the ceiling by the armpits, knocked her on the head with a brick, and burnt her with a hot iron. One day, having beaten the girl black with a shovel, she laughed and said, “Now you are nothing but a little Negro.”

In short, while female born criminals are fewer in number than male born criminals, they are often much more savage. What is the explanation?

We have seen that the normal woman is by nature less sensitive to pain than a man. Because compassion is an effect of sensitivity, if one is lacking, the other will be too. We have also seen that women have many traits in common with children; that they are deficient in the moral sense; and that they are vengeful, jealous, and inclined to refined cruelty when they take revenge. Usually these defects are neutralized by their piety, maternity, sexual coldness, physical weakness, and undeveloped intelligence. However, when a morbid activity of the psychical centers intensifies their bad qualities, women seek relief in evil deeds. When piety and maternal feelings are replaced by strong passions and intense eroticism, muscular strength and superior intelligence, then the innocuous semicriminal who is always present in the normal woman is transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any male counterpart.

What awful criminals children would be if they had strong passions, physical strength, and intelligence, and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were aggravated by morbid psychical activity! And women are big children; their evil tendencies are more numerous and varied than men’s, but usually these remain latent. When awakened and excited, however, these evil tendencies lead to proportionately worse results.

In addition, the female born criminal is, so to speak, doubly exceptional, first as a woman and then as a criminal. This is because criminals are exceptions among civilized people,36 and women are exceptions among criminals, women’s natural form of regression being prostitution, not crime. Primitive woman was a prostitute rather than a criminal. As a double exception, then, the criminal woman is a true monster. Honest women are kept in line by factors such as maternity, piety, and weakness; when a woman commits a crime despite these restraints, this is a sign that her power of evil is immense.

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Vengeance

The chief motive for female crime is vengeance. The inclination toward revenge that we noted even in normal women becomes extreme in criminals. Because their psychic centers are irritated, the smallest stimulus can provoke an enormous reaction. But usually the female born criminal revenges herself more slowly than men. She has to develop her plan little by little because her physical weakness and fearful nature restrain her even when her reason does not.

Hatred

In certain very serious cases, female born criminals have no motive whatsoever other than a small and distant complaint. These crimes originate in an innate and blind savagery. Adulterers and poisoners, in particular, tend to commit oddly pointless crimes.

A passion for evil for evil’s sake is a characteristic of born criminals, epileptics, and hysterics. It is an automatic hatred, one that springs from no external cause such as an insult or offense, but rather from a morbid irritation of the psychical centers which relieves itself in evil action. Driven by continuous irritation, such women need to discharge their aggravation on someone. Thus some unfortunate with whom they frequently come in contact becomes, for some trifling defect or difference, the object of their loathing and victim of their savagery.

Love

Although the female born criminal has intensely erotic tendencies, love is rarely a cause of her crimes. For her love, like hatred, is just another form of insatiable egotism. There is no self-abnegation or altruism in her love, only a drive for self-satisfaction.

The impulsivity and casualness of these women’s passions are extraordinary. When they fall in love, they need to satisfy their desire immediately, even if that means committing a crime. Monomaniacal, as if hypnotized by desire, they think of nothing but how to satisfy themselves and rush to commit crimes even though if they were patient they might achieve the same goal without risk. Their affection is like that of children—intense but incapable of disinterested sacrifice or noble resignation. It can result in the kind of jealous tyranny more often found in the love of a man for a woman.

Greed and Avarice

Greed is a cause of crime in women, though less often than vengeance. Among dissolute female offenders, who need a great deal of money for their orgies and other pleasures but do not care to work for it, avarice takes the same form as in male criminals: both want to have large sums of money to waste. This inspires them to attempt or instigate crimes which can reap a rich harvest. Thus Bompard encouraged Eyraud to kill the porter, and thus Messalina had the richest citizens of Rome killed so she could appropriate their villas and wealth.

Dress

Another factor that pushes women into crime is a passion for objects of clothing and ornament. Madame Lafarge stole her friend’s diamonds, not to sell them, but only to possess them, even though doing so involved grave risks.39 According to Tarnowsky, many Russian thieves steal not out of need (they have jobs and are earning wages) but to obtain small luxury objects.40

In the psychology of normal women, dress and personal adornment play a role of immense significance. A poorly dressed woman feels she has disgraced herself. Children and savages have similar reactions. Among savages, dress is the earliest form of property, and thus we should not be surprised that it is also a frequent cause of crime.

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Summary

In general, the moral physiognomy of the born female criminal is close to that of the male. The atavistic diminution of secondary sexual characteristics which shows up in the anthropology of the subject appears again in the psychology of the female offender, who is excessively erotic, weak in maternal feelings, inclined to dissipation, and both astute and audacious. She dominates weaker people, sometimes through suggestion, sometimes through force. Her love of violent exercise, her vices, and even her clothing increase her resemblance to a man. These virile traits are often joined by the worst qualities of woman: her passion for revenge, her cunning, cruelty, love of finery, and dishonesty, which can combine to form a type of extraordinary wickedness.

It goes without saying that these characteristics are not found in the same proportion in every case. However, when muscular strength and intellectual power come together in the same individual, we have a female criminal of an indeed terrible type. A typical example is offered by Bell-Star, the female outlaw who several yeas ago terrorized all of Texas. Her education had developed her natural proclivities: as the daughter of a guerrilla chief who had fought for the South during the Civil War, she had grown up in the midst of fighting. At the age of eighteen she became head of her own gang, ruling her companions partly through superior intelligence, partly through courage, and to some extent through womanly charm. She organized attacks of great daring against cities and government troops; nor did she hesitate, the day after one of these raids, to enter a nearby town unaccompanied, dressed (as usual) like a man. Once she slept in the same hotel as the district judge without him suspecting her identity or even her sex. Her wish to die in her boots was granted when she fell in battle against government soldiers, directing the action until her final moment.

Bell-Star exemplifies the law we have formulated: that the female born criminal, when a full type, is more terrible than the male.41

Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero.