Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. Translated with new introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. xiv + 304 pp. 111. $74.95 (cloth, 0-8223-3207-8), $21.95 (paperbound, 0-8223-3246-9).

First published in Italian in 1893, La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale became a classic text in criminal anthropology and was in fact the only study of the causes of female crime for decades. The present work is the first English translation of the book since 1895, and, significantly, it is far more comprehensive than the earlier edition, which had omitted critical sections on prostitutes and "normal" women. Also translated into English for the first time are Cesare Lombroso's observations on the sexual characteristics of female criminals, which will be particularly interesting to historians in a number of fields.

At the heart of this work is Lombroso's effort to demonstrate that criminality has a genetic or biological component that can be documented and...