The Invisible Woman. Joanne Belknap
the ongoing discrimination, assuming crime is biologically inherent to every race but white (Delgado, 1994; Hernández, 2017; Russell-Brown, 2009), including Black/African Americans (Hernández, 2017; Muhammad, 2010), Indigenous/Native Americans (Hernández, 2017; Ross, 1998), Latinx Americans (Flores, 2018; Hernández, 2017), and Asian Americans (Hernández, 2017). Notably, racial criminalization is even more heightened for immigrants of Color, regardless of whether they have become citizens (Flores, 2018; Hernández, 2017), and President Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric and practices regarding Latinx immigrants have increased equating Latinx people with crime (Flores, 2018), an association that is highly inaccurate. More specifically, research on the percentage of Latinx immigrants (and sometimes total number of Latinx residents regardless of citizen status) in an area is unrelated to the crime rate, or is actually a protective factor, with more Latinx residents related to lower crime rates (Light & Miller, 2018; Ramos & Wenger, 2019; Tosh, 2019; Wadsworth, 2010).
Similarly, before the 1970s it was customary practice in countries of the Global North (colonizers) to equate what we now refer to as LGBTQI+ with “criminal” and “deviant” (see Woods, 2015). The deviancy and criminal labels were applied to queer people for being gender nonconforming (if they were women/girls who presented as masculine or men/boys who were feminine) and for being sexual deviants for being attracted to their same sex (Woods, 2015). Queer criminology scholar Woods (2015) found that although the 1970s were key in the beginning of LGBTQI+ pride, LGBTQI+ people became invisible, disappearing from mainstream criminology and delinquency theories (p. 133).
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909)
Lombroso, a physician, psychiatrist, and criminal anthropologist who studied incarcerated men and women in 19th-century Italy, is often referred to as the “father” of criminology. In forging a legacy of scientific studies of crime, however, his positivist method set the stage for sexist, racist, heterosexist, and classist approaches to studying the causes of crime and responding to alleged criminals. He published the first edition of Criminal Man in Italian in 1876, and with his son-in-law, Guglielmo Ferrero, Lombroso published Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (also referred to in English as Criminal Woman and The Female Offender) in Italian in 1893. Although Criminal Woman was first published in English two years later (in 1895), it was a far briefer version of the original Criminal Woman and retitled The Female Offender (Vyleta, 2006). Moreover, despite a total of five editions of Criminal Man published between 1876 and 1897, it was not published in English until 1911 (also a briefer version of the original but not as significantly cut as Criminal Woman) (Beccalossi, 2008). The late feminist criminologist Nicole Hahn Rafter, with historian Mary Gibson, provided far more detailed and comprehensive English translations of Criminal Woman in 2004 (Lombroso & Ferrero, 1895/2004) and material from all five editions of Criminal Man in 2006 (Lombroso 1876–1897/2006), which also includes Rafter and Gibson’s commentary on inconsistencies and troubling assumptions and positions.
Central to Lombroso’s work over time was his identification of atavism, a “throwback” to an earlier evolutionary human development stage, to explain criminal behavior. “Lombroso firmly maintained that deviants are less highly evolved than ‘normal’ law abiding citizens” (Smart, 1976, p. 31). In Criminal Man, Lombroso first proposed a racial hierarchy with Black Africans at the bottom and white Europeans at the top, identifying people of Color as “savages” with physiological and psychological anomalies (Lombroso, 1876–1897/2006). In the 1984 edition, Lombroso added the category of “born criminal” and added “degeneration to atavism to explain physical and biological malformation….rather than inherited weakness” (Beccalossi, 2008, p. 130). In their search for degeneration and atavism, and assuming criminal behavior was a biological trait, Lombroso and Ferrero measured and documented incarcerated women’s craniums, heights, weights, hair color (and baldness), moles, tattoos, and genitalia. Racism surfaces here in their description of how women of Color “resemble men in their strength, intelligence, and sexual promiscuity” (Lombroso & Ferrero, 1895/2004, p. 18). Another troubling impact of Lombroso and Ferrero’s (1895/2004) work is their association between women and girls’ sexuality and their offending, whereby they viewed women criminals as having been born with “exaggerated eroticism,” which was assumed to make them narcissistic (e.g., about their own sexual desires), more like men, and to make them prostitutes (p. 185). They state, “all those feelings of affection that bind woman to man are born not of sexual impulse, but from instincts of subjection and devotion acquired through adaptation” (p. 76). Oddly, Lombroso and Ferrero concluded that women offenders showed less degeneration (criminality and deviance) than men simply because women had not evolved as much as men, despite claiming that criminals were more atavistic (than noncriminals). That is, despite women’s perceived slower evolution, Lombroso and Ferrero viewed them as less likely than men to be criminal because they were “inferior” to men (Flood, 2007, p. 215).
Lombroso and Ferrero (1895/2004) provided two simplistic categories available to women, both of which they considered inferior to men: (1) bad, primitive, and masculine women; and (2) law-abiding, civilized, and feminine women (p. 10). Feinman (1986) identified this as a biologically driven Madonna/whore duality (p. 4). Madonnas were subservient, loyal, and submissive to their husbands who protected them, but the “whores” received men’s punishment for being evil and causing men pain and destroying them. Woods (2015) documents the legacy of Lombroso’s characterizations of queer women and men as inherently criminal, resulting in gender-nonconforming and queer people being “viewed through a lens of deviance” (p. 135).
Clearly, regardless of gender, by focusing on the physical and psychological makeup of the individual in determining criminal behavior, Lombroso and Ferrero dismissed both the effects of socialization or social-structural constraints as important determinants of criminal behavior, and the impact of sexist, racist, and/or classist labeling of behavior as criminal. Lombroso and Ferrero’s work had devastating effects on the Italian women’s movement at the time, providing “proof” that women are biologically inferior to men, thus unworthy of equality demands in education, work, and the home (Lombroso & Ferrero, 1895/2004). Notably, the “father” of criminology’s work had longer lasting and more negative impacts on the study of female crime than on male crime (Lombroso & Ferrero, 1895/2004, p. 4).
W. I. Thomas (1863–1947), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Otto Pollak (1908–1998)
Thomas, a U.S. sociologist heavily influenced by Lombroso, wrote the books Sex and Society (1907/1967a) and The Unadjusted Girl (1923/1967b), in which he constructed overly simplistic links between gender, sexuality, class, and crime. Considered more liberal than Lombroso, he defined criminality as “a socially induced pathology rather than a biological abnormality” (Smart, 1976, p. 37). Yet, his seeming obsession with women and girls’ sexuality and denial of sexist access to opportunity indicate he was not so different. For example, like Lombroso and Ferrero, Thomas viewed gender differences in the likelihood to become “politicians, great artists, and intellectual giants” as sex (biological) differences, overlooking the strong societal restrictions of women during that era (Smart, 1976, p. 37). An example of a sex difference Thomas promoted was that love varieties are inherent in nervous systems, and women have more love varieties, resulting in their disproportionate “and intense need to give and feel love,” which lead them into prostitution where they are “merely looking for the love and tenderness which all women need” (Smart, 1976, p. 39), discounting that most people who engage in sex work do so because access to legal or similarly lucrative work is not available to them. Similarly, Thomas equated girls and women’s sex-outside-of-marriage with delinquency/criminality, whereas this “promiscuity” was never mentioned regarding boys and men’s delinquency and criminality (Heidensohn, 1985, p. 117). He purported that middle-class women are less criminal due to their investment in protecting their chastity, while poor women long for crime in the manner of a new experience, and delinquent girls manipulate males into sex as a means of achieving their own goals.
Thomas favored psychological over economic motivations to explain female criminality; the disadvantaged position of women and girls in society held little importance to him in accounting for