With this dominant position of motherhood in woman he correlates also two facts of great importance in the anthropology of the female offender. The first of these is the much lesser variability of women,[[17]] owing to which women in general exhibit less marked special differentiation than men; consequently such deviations from type as do occur in women are far more significant than similar deviations occurring in men, and therefore in women very great importance must be attached even to isolated theromorphs. The second fundamental fact is the lesser general sensibility and lesser sensibility to pain of women as compared with men.
Both these phenomena of sexual differentiation are more strongly marked among civilized races than they are among savages. Thus, according to Lombroso’s investigations, the female skull, especially in the civilized races, resembles rather the skull of the child than that of the adult male, and this is especially the case as regards its frontal and facial portions.
Lombroso made an exhaustive study of the problem of the origin of the greater development of sympathy in the female sex, and discussed how, notwithstanding this fact, the frequent tendency to cruelty in women can be explained: he sees in this one of those contrasts which are common in the sphere of the emotional life, but which, with progress in civilization, tend to disappear, owing to the development of sympathetic feelings. The rest of the emotional life of woman is also adapted to her profession of motherhood; and this is true, above all, of the sexual feelings, which thus seem to be constructed almost entirely upon a “masochistic” basis. Strong erotic feelings, when they do occur in women, are, according to Lombroso, an approximation to the masculine type; they are, that is to say, abnormal in women. In respect to moral development, he regards woman as inferior to man. “We cannot, indeed, say that woman displays to the same degree as the child the lineaments of moral idiocy, for she is saved from this by her endowment with maternal love and with sympathy. Fundamentally, however, woman remains non-moral, and this often precisely in consequence of her sympathy. She exhibits numerous traits of character ... which prevent her from approaching to the same degree as man that balance between rights and duties, between egoism and altruism, which is the ultimate goal of moral development.”
By means of historical and ethnological data, the importance of which, notwithstanding the criticism of Westermarck, has not been shaken, Lombroso endeavours to prove that during the long ages of the life of prehistoric humanity certain conditions were generally dominant in the sexual life which are now regarded as constituting prostitution—that is to say, he considers that prostitution and prostitutes at the present day are reversionary or atavistic phenomena. The intimate description given by Lombroso of the psychical life of the prostitute has notably contributed to our interpretation of prostitution in the atavistic sense. This explains why it is that among prostitutes the criminal type is found more frequently and more markedly than it is even among female criminals.
Thus, for Lombroso, the prostitute, even more than the homicidal robber, is the genuine typical representative, the prototype, of criminality—the counterpart of the male major criminal; and in social co-operation with the latter, the prostitute gives rise to the institution of soutenage.[[18]]
The world of feminine crime, in so far as it is not allied to prostitution, is regarded by Lombroso as constituted only to a very slight extent of true criminal natures: “A small group of women, marked with very severe stigmata of degeneration, almost more numerous than such stigmata are in male criminal types, is sharply distinguished from the great majority of women criminals, who exhibit few and uncertain stigmata of degeneration; similarly, from the psychological standpoint, we have to distinguish from the great mass of female criminals a small group of women in whom we recognize more severe and more unnatural moral anomalies than are met with in male criminals. The ordinary woman criminal has usually been lured to crime, either by hetero-suggestion or by very powerful temptation, and her moral sense will often be found to be unimpaired, or, at any rate, not entirely destroyed.”
In other words, women criminals—who in civilized countries are only from one-fifth to one-tenth as numerous as men criminals[[19]]—are, as a rule, criminals by passion or occasional criminals. A woman of the genuinely criminal type is either at the same time a prostitute as well as a criminal, or else—if her social position has saved her from becoming a professional prostitute—she exhibits a marked anthropological and psychological similarity to a prostitute.
By reference to a large number of cases personally examined by himself, and with the aid of extensive statistical material, Lombroso endeavours to establish the thesis that, as a general rule, female delinquents come under the ban of the penal law, either from affective causes (criminals by passion) or else from the pressure of unfavourable economic circumstances or other external conditions (occasional criminals); that their offences are for the most part the outcome of a normal feminine psychical life, and are in no respect the product of emotional or moral abnormality; that alike in the general conduct of their life and in the particular offences for which they have been condemned we can trace the characteristic lineaments of the womanly nature; that above all, in the majority of them, the mother-sense is in no way diminished, or if diminished, only to a very trifling degree, and that an increase of the sexual impulse is in them hardly ever demonstrable.
He then goes on to prove, by the examination of an extensive material, which he has subjected to a most careful analysis, that prostitutes and genuinely criminal feminine types (“rea nata”) are characterized by an utter lack of the mother-sense; that in women condemned for major crimes an increased sexual impulse is almost invariably present, and that this fact notably contributes to their criminal development; whereas prostitutes are, as a rule, conspicuous for sexual frigidity, and from childhood onwards are characterized by a lack of the sense of shame.
The case-histories, of which the book contains an abundance, show, indeed, that genuine women criminals are endowed with the same fundamental peculiarities which Lombroso has so fully described in male criminals, and the prostitute is exhibited no more than as a slightly divergent variety of the woman criminal; but the peculiar part which the female sexual life and the endowment of the woman criminal with the attributes of motherhood play in her psychology, give to the general picture of the female criminal certain peculiarities which justify a separate treatment of feminine criminal psychology.