The History Behind the Study of Female Criminality

In 1895, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso and
Guglielmo Ferrero published a book titled The Female Offender, in which they discussed the theoretical biological and hereditary differences between women who committed crime and women who did not. However, the study of the criminal nature of women would not generate much interest until 1916 when Dr. Jean Weidensall published The Mentality of Criminal Women: A Comparative Study of the Criminal Woman, the Working Girl, and the Efficient Working Woman in a Series of Mental and Physical Tests. In 1912, Dr. Weidensall conducted an extensive experiment that studied the mental, physical, and social history and condition of criminal women in the New York State Reformatory for Women.

In her book, Dr. Weidensall explains that the New York State Reformatory for Women was opened in May of 1901 and was established by legislature to care for women between the ages of sixteen and thirty who were convicted of felonies, misdemeanors, or petty offenses. Women were punished with an indeterminate sentence that carried a maximum penalty of three years. During this study, Dr. Weidensall used mental and physical tests to determine whether each woman could be reformed and become a functional member of society.

Unfortunately, little attention would be paid to the study of female criminality until the late 1960s when the Feminist School of Criminology was created. The Feminist School was developed in reaction to the gender bias and stereotypes produced by traditional criminological perspectives. The concept of cultural relativism states that every society has a different moral code that describes what acts are permitted or not permitted, as explained by author Cyndi Banks. Cultural relativism affects the way we view the world and in the early stages of criminological study, women were not expected to commit crime.

http://www.crimeboss.com/