Labelling Women Deviant: Heterosexual Women, Prostitutes and Lesbians in Early Criminological Discourse

Abstract

In 1893, the internationally-renowned psychiatrist, Cesare Lombroso, published the first criminological treatise on women. Entitled Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (hereafter Criminal Woman), it offered a plethora of examples from around the world to support Lombroso’s assertion that female ‘born criminals’ — that is, women who had inherited a biological and psychological propensity to deviancy — were more terrible and monstrous than their male counterparts. Bell Star represented one of his prime examples, an ‘outlaw [brigantessa] who had terrorised Texas until a few years ago’.1 By the age of ten, she had learned the use of the lasso, revolver and shot-gun from her father, an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War: Strong and brave like a man, her greatest pleasure was to ride horses that the most expert soldiers had failed to tame. One day she won two races, one dressed like a man and one like a woman, changing her clothes so quickly that no one realised that it was the same person.2 She was not only strong but lusty, having ‘as many lovers as there were desperados and outlaws in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and Nevada’.3 For 18 years she and her band fought government troops and committed a string of spectacular robberies. Preferring male attire, she even shared a hotel room one night with a sheriff whose mission it was to catch her.