The strongest barrier of all against criminality in women is maternity. The proportion of criminals among young women with children is very small. Among men criminals the celibates are in a very large majority, but among women maternity acts as a still greater deterrent. Not only are young married women comparatively free from crime, but among married women, as Bertillon pointed out, those with children are distinctly less criminal than those without children. Of Marro’s 41 criminal women, although all but one (who was undeveloped and ugly) confessed to having had sexual relationships, 12 had never been married, 10 were widows, 14 were married, but of these 7 (50 per cent.) were separated from their husbands. There is some significance, doubtless, also in the fact that while in men the maximum of criminality falls at about the age of 25, in women this is not so. That is the age of maximum child-bearing; the age of maximum criminality in women is delayed until nearly the age of 35. In the 130 women condemned for premeditated murder, and studied by Salsotto, the average age was 34. Marro found that for nearly every class of criminals the average age of the women was much higher than that of the men. It is clear that the woman without children is heavily handicapped in the race of life; the stress that is upon her is written largely in these facts concerning criminality.[83] One might suspect this beforehand. Crime is simply a word to signify the extreme anti-social instincts of human beings; the life led most closely in harmony with the social ends of existence must be the most free from crime.

It may be said—to sum up our brief discussion of this large question of women’s criminality—that certain great barriers, partly artificial, partly natural, have everywhere served to protect women from crime. It is not possible absolutely to prove this conclusion, because women cannot be put strictly under the same conditions as men; a woman who lived under the same conditions as men, it need scarcely be said, would no longer be a woman. But it is made probable by the considerations here brought forward, and by statistics. Thus let us take the statistics for one year in a country where crime is so largely developed, and so carefully studied as Italy; an average year, 1886, may be selected. It will be found that a hundred condemned persons of each sex may be arranged according to age as follows:—

Men.Women.
Below 141.29per cent.1.41per cent.
From 14 to 186.04"6.02"
"18"2113.39"10.65"
"21"3546.91"39.38"
"35"5023.29"30.94"
"50"708.40"11.63"
Above 700.68"0.57"

Thus below puberty the relative criminality of girls is rather greater than that of boys, to become about equal at puberty; then during the earlier and chief period of child-bearing the criminality of women falls suddenly, becoming level with that of men at about the time of the cessation of the child-bearing period; after this the criminality of women becomes relatively much greater than that of men, becoming again about the same, and in some years exceeding it, at the age of 70.

(d) One is inclined on first approaching the subject to make the clear line of demarcation between crime and vice, which is necessary in practical life. From the anthropological point of view, however, it appears on closer examination impossible to draw this clear line.

In the course of Lombroso’s investigations he was surprised to find in the examination of supposed normal persons certain individuals who presented in a marked form those anthropologic signs of a low and degenerate type which he had usually found among criminals. On further inquiry it appeared that those individuals were of vicious character. Again, it is a remarkable fact that prostitutes exhibit the physical and psychic signs associated usually with criminality in more marked degree than even criminal women. While criminal women correspond on the whole to the class of occasional criminals, in whom the brand of criminality is but faintly seen, prostitutes correspond much more closely to the class of instinctive criminals. Thus their sensory obtuseness has been shown to be extreme, and it is scarcely necessary to show that their psychical sensitiveness is equally obtuse. Several valuable series of observations recently made on prostitutes in Italy and elsewhere have brought out interesting results in this respect. Thus, for example, Dr. Praskovia Tarnovskaia examined at St. Petersburg fifty prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and she also examined, for the sake of comparison, fifty peasant women of so far as possible the same age and intellectual development. She found (1) that the prostitutes presented a shortening, amounting to half a centimetre, of the anterior, posterior, and transverse diameters of skull; (2) 84 per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration—irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.; (3) 82 per cent. had parents who were habitual drunkards; (4) 18 per cent. were the last survivors of a large family of eight to thirteen children who had died early. Prostitutes may fairly be compared to the great class of vagabonds among men, who also live on the borderlands of criminality, and who also present a larger proportion of abnormalities than even criminals. Dugdale, in his valuable and thorough study of the “Jukes” family of criminals in America, shows that while the eldest sons in a criminal family carry on the criminal tradition, the younger sons become paupers or vagabonds, and the sisters become prostitutes. Of 250 recidivists condemned five times at Paris nearly all have begun by vagabondage. Mendel has examined 58 vagabonds in the workhouse at Berlin. He found 6 absolutely mad; 5 weak-minded; 8 epileptics; 14 with serious chronic disease; in the remaining 25 there was without exception pronounced mental weakness. We see here the organic root of the hopelessly idle, vicious character of the vagabond class. A philanthropic gentleman at Paris offered employment of various kinds, with payment at four francs a day, to all those who came to him complaining that they were dying of hunger and could get no work. 545, out of 727, did not even present themselves; some came and disappeared after the first half-day, having claimed their two francs; only 18, or 1 in 40, continued to work. It is not sufficiently known that these poor creatures, who form such an extensive recruiting field for crime, are already, by the facts of their physical organisation, cut off from the great body of humanity. They need much more intelligent treatment than the antiquated workhouse is able to supply.

We must be careful not to confuse vice and crime. At the same time we have to recognise that they both spring from the same root. The criminal is simply a person who is, by his organisation, directly anti-social; the vicious person is not directly anti-social, but he is indirectly so. The criminal directly injures the persons or property of the community to which he belongs; the vicious person (in any rational definition of vice) indirectly injures these. They are both anti-social because they are both more or less unfitted for harmonious social action, both, from organic reasons, more or less lazy. Criminals and prostitutes, as Féré remarks, have this common character, that they are both unproductive. This is true also of vagabonds, and of the vicious and idle generally, to whatever class they belong. They are all members of the same family.

(e) We saw in Chapter I. that there is a fairly well-marked class of professional criminals. They are the élite of the criminal groups; they present a comparatively small proportion of abnormalities; their crimes are skilfully laid plots, directed primarily against property and on a large scale; they never commit purposeless crimes, and in their private life are often of fairly estimable character. They flourish greatly in a civilisation of rapidly progressing material character, where wild and unprincipled speculation is rife, as in the United States; their own schemes have much of the character of speculations, with this difference, that they are not merely unprincipled but are against the letter of the law; notwithstanding the ability and daring they require, they are a relatively unskilled kind of speculation.

Tarde, and perhaps one or two writers following him, have endeavoured to show that all crime is professional, and that every physical and psychic characteristic of the criminal may be explained by the influence of profession. Tarde’s always alert and intelligent advocacy makes it necessary to take note of this position, although in this unqualified shape it has not met with much adhesion at the hands of scientific investigators. I am persuaded, he says, that every large social class has its own characteristics. “If one examined hundreds or thousands of judges, lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries, noting their different characters, craniometric, algometric, sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc., as Lombroso has examined hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we should ascertain facts not less surprising; thus, for instance, we might succeed in finding instinctive lawyers—born to defend instinctive criminals.... I should like to see the instinctive criminal opposed to the instinctive man of science, or the religious man, or the artist. It would be curious to see him compared to the moral man, and to learn if the latter is the antipodes of the criminal physically as well as morally.”[84]

Tarde has again more recently stated his position: “One knows that at the first glance at a woman a skilful observer infallibly divines her habits of prostitution.... Among the innumerable varieties of human nature which appear at the surface of a race and proceed perhaps from its lowest depths (for the variations of a theme are, I believe, its true raison d’être, and not vice versâ), every social or anti-social profession operates a selection to its own profit; it attracts the organisms most adapted to the kind of life which it leads, and to the end which it pursues, so that if one submitted to anthropometric measurement lawyers, doctors, priests, merchants, especially those who have the most decided vocation for their profession, we should not fail to find for each category the proportional preponderance of a certain number of peculiarities, morphologic or physiologic, elsewhere in less proportion. It must inevitably be so whether a career is open to every one or shut up as a caste, for in the latter case hereditary accumulation of acquired aptitudes from the use of the same functions transmitted from generation to generation produces an analogous effect, even with superior intensity.”[85] The recent investigations of Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police have shown that by large photographs of the hand it is possible to detect the worker at a large number of crafts. By such acquirement as this, as well as by a process of natural selection, the men of every class develop a special set of psychic and physical peculiarities; thus Tolstoï, in his Death of Ivan Ilyitch, has admirably described the special attitude and manner common to professional men generally, and in this general professional class there are subdivisions, so that every professional man instinctively recognises his fellows. It is so among criminals. Mr. Davitt sketches, for instance, the special class of “hooks,” or professional pickpockets, “so well outlined in gait, constant use of slang, furtive looks, almost total want of tact in their ordinary conduct, with an instinctively suspicious manner in almost all their actions, that they are as easily distinguishable from the other criminals of a prison as they are recognisable to their constant pursuers, the police, when abroad in the world.”