Theory

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries maleness theories and studies on female criminality were to become a topic of research conducted by well-known and established psychologists, including Cesare Lombroso, William Ferrero, W.I. Thomas, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Pollak.  Each of these men would establish their studies in the “grounded belief that biological determinisms accounts for female criminality: Whereas men are rational, women are driven by their biological constitutions.” (Belknap, pg. 26)

These men agreed that this classical way of thinking could be accounted for by four distinguishable characteristics:

1.      individual characteristics, not those of society, are responsible for criminal behavior

2.      Identifiable biological nature inherit to all women

3.      Offending women are “Masculine” which makes them non-feminine and more likely to break the law.

4.      Male and female criminality differs between sex, not gender.

Cesare Lombroso was a physician, psychiatrist, and criminal anthropologist in 19^th century Italy.  He spent his time studying the criminal minds and behaviors of both the convicted male and female; being referred to as the “Father” of criminology.  He delves first into the idea of maleness theory with his book, The Criminal Man, published in 1876, (originally in Italian and later translated into English by 1911, by his daughter.) with the idea of racial hierarchy, showing extreme separation of race, social class and intelligence between those with Black skin and those who were of White European descent.  Lombrosos was able to show that by “focusing exclusively on the physical and psychological makeup of the individual in determining criminal behavior, he dismissed the effects of socialization or social-structural constraints as important determinants of criminal behavior or the labeling of behavior as criminal.” (Belknap, pg. 27)

Lombroso delves once more into his theories with the female this time as his subject of one his books in 1893’s “The Female Offender.”  (This translated two years later into English print in 1895.)  Within this book we first encounter the theory of Atavism.  Atavism, as explained by Lombroso, is “a concept that views some deviant behavior as a “throwback” to an earlier evolutionary stage in human development. “ Belknap, pg. 27) 

With this train of thought and Lombroso’s theory in practice, criminals and deviants were less evolved along the evolutionary chain than your average human.    With today’s science we know men like Lombroso and his son-in-law, William Ferraro theories about women being less evolved than men, and yet in their time period their theories were not only accepted they were considered cutting edge research.  They used prostitutes to show women were not having less degeneration then men and therefore less evolution then men. 

W.I. Thomas used Lombroso’s work as a stepping stone for his own, though he personally was more of a liberal when it came to his own personal tone and point of view.  When it came to his own theories he chose to define criminology as “ a socially induced pathology, rather than a biological abnormality.” 
            Again he tended to agree with Lombroso when it came to the male vs female aspects of what made one a criminal: sex vs gender rather than society and the restrictions placed upon one by that time period you lived within.  “Thomas’s analyses of class and sexuality are overly simplistic concerning the links between gender, sexuality, class, and crime.  According to Thomas, middle-class women are invested in protecting their chastity and thus commit very few crimes; poor women, on the other hand, long for crime in the manner of a new experience.  In fact, he believed that delinquent girls manipulate males into sex as a means of achieving their own goals.  Thus, Thomas favors psychological over economic motivations to explain female criminality.  Given that Thomas was writing in an era of mass illness and starvation, the choice to ignore economic deprivation as a potential cause of female crime is rather remarkable.” (Belknap, pg. 29)

Our greatest psychiatrist on this list, and probably most well-known out of the bunch would be Sigmund Freud.  His theories are many and center on the ideas that women are inferior to men, though his most famous would be his infamous “penis envy” approach to explaining female behavior.  Within this concept a perfectly healthy women would experience a heterosexual response, only she is the receptor in this… and in doing so she is receiving pain and the male is aggressive and giving pain…

Thus in the end the female will only be truly satisfied if she can have a penis of her own to inflict the same kind of pain.  Freud’s theories are often found filled with classism, racism, and heterosexism, not to mention they help promote the deviant role of a woman and encourage perversion.  One thing Freud does not encourage is equality, whether amongst gender or sex.

Otto Pollak uses his study, The Criminality of Women, in order to repeat Thomas, Lombroso, and Ferraro’s ideas with his own about the biological and physiological make-up of the female criminal.  He also makes a point of emphasizing that the female criminal has managed to stay masked within the justice system due to “chivalrous or lenient treatment of women in the crime-processing system.  But Pollack’s main point is that women are better at hiding their crimes.  He emphasizes the “deceitful” nature of women, using as supporting evidence females’ ability to hide the fact that they are menstruating or having orgasms and their inactive role during sexual intercourse.” (Belknap, pg. 30) Unlike his previous researches, who based their studies on a great deal of facts gathered over time, Pollak’s were based upon a lot of assumptions in which he failed to take into account the imbalance between men and women, instead jumping in head first  and pushing forward with his own opinions.

Gisela Konopka, a more modern theorist from the 1960’s and 70’s, who wrote The Adolescent Girl in Conflict chose to base her theory upon the idea that girls become criminals out of loneliness and sexuality, leading to eventual other emotional problems.  Vedder and Sommerville use maladjustment to explain delinquency in their book The Delinquent Girl, but then Cowie, Cowie and Slater counter it with Delinquency in girls by tstating that to use masculinity, femininity, and chromosomes are what are needed to help explain criminality.  “In this perspective, the female offender is different physiologically and psychologically from the ‘normal’ girl,  in that she is too masculine; she is rebelling against her femininity.” (Belknap, pg 31)

Though these were only some of the theories to be attributed to criminality, many others can be attested to this to including Robert Merton’s Strain Theory, Cloward and Ohlin Opportunity Theory, or Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory, or otherwise known as DAT.    Though at the time each of these were well established and researched theories in criminality they would not hold up in today’s modern society or with today laws.  Today’s society is not a society based upon sex or a society in which women find themselves less evolved, even if they are convicted.