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.

Lombroso on intelligence in women

Compared to male intelligence, female intelligence is deficient primarily in creative power.

Genius

This deficiency reveals itself immediately in the absence of female geniuses. There is no lack of names of illustrious women: in poetry, Sappho, Corinna, Telesilla, Browning, David John, Gauthier, Ackermann; in literature, Eliot, Sand, Stern, DeStael in art, Bonheur, Lebrun, Maraino, Sirani; in science, Sommerville, Royer, Tarnowsky, Germain. Yet it is clear that we are far from the greatness of male geniuses such as Shakespeare, Balzac, Aristotle, Newton, Michelangelo. With respect to the frequency of geniuses in the two sexes, the man’s superiority is widely recognized as immense.

Some, such as Sagnol,h attribute this inferiority to social conditions, especially to enforced ignorance in which woman is held and her lack of opportunity for intellectual labor. But women’s ignorance is not in fact as general as some think. In the 1500s in Italy and in the first century of the Roman Empire, upper-class women received the same education as men; and in the French aristocracy of the last century, women were well educated and attended lectures by Lavoisier, Cuvier, and so on, and so on. Yet even under these favorable conditions no genius appeared. As for environmental difficulties, these did not impede Browning or Sommerville from emerging; and they are by no means as large as those that an impoverished male genius encounters. Yet from males of the lower classes geniuses emerge more often than from women, even women of the wealthy classes.

Moreover, as I have already demonstrated,51 women of genius frequently have masculine appearances. Female genius can be explained as Darwin explained the coloration of certain female birds that resemble the males of their species: by a confusion of secondary sexual characteristics produced by a mismatch of paternal and maternal heredity. One need only look at pictures of women of genius of our day to realize that they seem to be men in disguise.

Lack of Originality/Monotony

While woman is barred from creating great things by her lack of genius, she is also less adapted than man to the minor productions at which average men succeed. This is due to her lack of originality, which is overdeveloped in the man of genius and found in more modest proportions in the average man. In fact, women have no particular talent for any art, science, or profession. They write, paint, embroider, sing; they move from dressmaking to millinery to being florists, good at everything and at nothing; but only rarely do they carry the stamp of true origi nality in any branch of work. This is the effect of a lesser differentiation in their brain functioning.

Automatic Types of Intelligence

Woman’s lack of creative power is definitively demonstrated by the distinctly automatic nature of her most typical form of intelligence. This is her intuition, which is specifically adapted to discovering the feelings and thoughts of people. “Women,” writes Spencer, “have another ability that is susceptible to cultivation and development: that of quickly perceiving the mental state of the people who surround them. Generally this particular gift consists of a true intuition which is not based on any specific logic” (op. cit.).52 Intuition is psychological and a type of instinct; it also appears, though less strongly, in children and in animals such as the dog. It calls up from the well of hereditary unconsciousness images that are pleasing or repulsive according to their associations with the experiences of her ancestors.

Logical Sentiments

All this demonstrates that female intelligence is deficient in creative power. This phenomenon can be clarified by studying what Wundt calls the logical sentiments: those which accompany the processes of thinking and knowing, agreement and contradiction.53

The criterion for truth is different in women and men. Because women are more suggestible, they often believe things simply through their own suggestion or that of others, and thus they have little need to see and touch before believing. From this follows their quickness to believe in miracles and their openness to religious proselytizing.

In the American West, women were admitted to juries, but the law allowing this had to be abrogated since the jurors judged on the basis of feeling rather than evidence (A. Barine, Revue des Deux Mondes, giugno 1883).54In girls’ boarding schools intellectual tasks that are too demanding and abstract produce amenorrhea, hysteria, and nervousness (Dujardin-Beaumetz). “Women in general,” writes Lafitte, “seem more struck by facts than by rules and more by specific ideas than by general concepts. A book by a woman, even by DeStael [sic] or Eliot,55 will always be more beautiful in its details than its totality. The female intelligence is concrete, that of man abstract.”i

This explains why women have acquired farne as travel writers and students of manners, topics for which the first requirement is to give specific and telling details; we see this in the works of Pfeiffer, DeStael [sic], Montaigue, Madame Adam, and so on, and so on. It is a sign of inferiority because abstraction is the highest grade of mental development. Animals, as Romanes observes, think in images.56

Diligence

Woman has more patience than man, as the types of work in which she engages demonstrates. Since the dawn of civilization weaving has been almost exclusively (except in Egypt) women’s work; and it is well known how much patience weaving required before the invention of the automated loom. Work with pearls and diamonds, as well as the manufacture of certain musical and surgical instruments which require a great deal of patience and delicacy, is completely in the hands of women (A. Kuliscioff, Il monopolio dell’uomo, Milano, 1890)57 Lace making and embroidery, highly painstaking forms of work, have become symbols of femininity. Only women are employed in the production of lace and in the French Gobelins tapestry factory.

That women are more patient explains their great numbers in modern industry, where we now have machines that require little from their operators in terms of muscular strength but rather continuous surveillance and patience. For the same reason women often do better than men in factory work; where work is piecework, the wife and daughters often carry home more earnings than the father and brothers (Kuliscioff, op. cit.). The professions in which woman does better than man are also those that require great patience, for example, elementary school teaching, for which women have been found preferable to men in Milan, England, and America.

Savage women manifest this same superiority in patience, sometimes even more clearly.

These observations might seem to contradict Darwin, who claims that men have more patience than women. But women’s patience is an effect of her lesser sensibility and lower degree of cortical excitability, which lower her need for stimulation. Hers is not the type of patience that flows from great potency in the inhibitory centers, a power that enabled Darwin, for example, to spend years accumulating proofs for his miraculous discovery. In this respect man is superior. In fact, Vogt observed that his female students were attentive in class but highly incompetent at homework. Man has perseverance, woman has patience; and her patience is more that of the camel than of the man of genius.

Causes

It is indisputable that the inferior development of women’s intelligence is partially caused by the physical inertia that men have imposed on her. But it would be an error to label this a man-made cause because the inferiority is also natural and because it reflects a general tendency among all animals on the evolutionary scale for males to participate more fully in the struggle for existence. It is mainly the male that fights to defend the species. Furthermore, he must fight other males to conquer the female, even more in the human than the animal world, because the variable of female choice has been almost eliminated. He is now free to select a woman as long as he has absolutely subdued his rivals. Among animals, on the other hand, it sometimes happens that while two males fight, the female flees with a third male who is weaker but more agreeable.

It is not so much work itself as the need to surpass rivals in the same activity that has developed the intelligence of man. This is demonstrated by the fact that among many savages, it is the woman who works (pitching tents, weaving, and so on) while the man fights wars and hunts. Yet that does not make the woman more intelligent.

And to the explanations for men’s intellectual superiority one must add another natural cause—the way men continually change their types of activities and life circumstances. Rarely does the son enter the same profession and under the same conditions as the father. On the other hand, the woman must devote a precious part of her time to the duties of motherhood, which are always the same and therefore do not awaken and nurture the intelligence as does the constant mobility of men. In antiquity as at the present time, most of those who emigrate are men.

Underlying all these other causes is a biological one that serves as the foundation. The intelligence of the male, like his organic structure, has a primitive potentiality greater than that of the female thanks to his lesser role in the reproduction of the species. As I have demonstrated, intelligence varies inversely to fecundity in the entire animal kingdom; there is an antagonism between the reproductive and intellectual functions. Today, the work of reproduction has for the most part devolved onto the woman, and for this biological reason she has been left behind in intellectual development.

In fact, certain female bees, termites, and ants have acquired a superiority of intelligence over other females of the species by giving up sex. The queen, in contrast, is fecund and stupid. Moreover, as savages step by step become civilized, their females grow less fecund. Women of high intelligence, as Wirey noted, are often sterile.

It is amazing, then, that woman is not even less intelligent than she is. One can explain this only by agreeing with Darwin that a part of the male’s acquired intelligence must be transmitted to women. Otherwise, the gap would be even greater.

Certainly greater participation in the collective life of society would raise woman’s intelligence. In fact, such participation is already the case in the most evolved races, as in England and North America, where most literary and artistic journalism is now entrusted solely to women.

From: Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

by Cesare Lombroso