Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson have masterfully translated Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s classic study Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman which was first published in Italian in 1893. Although they have heavily edited the original text, shrinking it from 640 pages to just over 300, they retain the book’s structure and key ideas. In contrast to the previous English translation that was published in 1895 as The Female Offender and dealt with only “one part and bits of another” of Lombroso’s original (p. 4), Rafter and Gibson include the main points from each of the four sections of the original volume. In this way, despite making significant cuts, they present a more comprehensive version of Lombroso’s work than has hitherto been available.

In their introduction, Rafter and Gibson summarize Lombroso’s argument and contextualize his work. They also explain why they decided to write a new translation of this text. Although today he is generally mentioned only in passing as a founding father of criminology, in his lifetime Lombroso influenced a range of disciplines and helped establish the scientific method as a whole. Criminal Woman, in particular, set the scene for all subsequent studies of female crime well into the 20th century. That he is often overlooked, according to Rafter and Gibson, stems as much from the difficulty of finding his work in English translation as it does from any limitations to his research.

Of course, many if not most of Lombroso’s ideas have been thoroughly discredited. His is not a useful text for anyone seriously interested in the causes or nature of women’s crime. Lombroso believed that “woman is a male of arrested development” (p. 37), that she “feels less just as she thinks less” (p. 64), and “that lying is habitual and almost physiological” (p. 77) in the female of the species. His views on “savage people” (p. 97) are to be expected (violent, animalistic, irrational, sexual), as are his assumptions that black women and southern Italians reveal more atavistic traits than white women.

For those interested in research methods and the historical origins of ideas about female criminality, the book is more rewarding. Lombroso pioneered many research techniques that remain central to the social sciences. Some, such as his emphasis on phrenology, are, thankfully, no longer in use, even though criminologists and forensic scientists have returned, in recent years, to examining the body and its parts for evidence of criminality and guilt. Others, like interviewing and use of control groups, are more widely accepted.

Methodological issues are raised by the process of translation itself. Despite essentially reducing the original by half, Rafter and Gibson claim their excisions “involved nothing substantive” (p. 30). Instead, they only cut “repetitions and examples” (p. 30). This strategy led them to delete not only words from nearly every sentence but also wholesale examples and case studies. The result is an affordable, elegant, easy to read volume. Yet, as they acknowledge in their introduction, this accessibility does come at a price:

“Our cuts created two translation effects. First, they minimize Lombroso’s long-windedness. In this respect our translation somewhat distorts the original. Second, by cutting some of the book’s outlandish examples, our translation may, ironically, make the text seem more rational and scientifically sound than it in fact was” (p. 30).

Nineteenth-century scholars like Lombroso were, for the most part, verbose, complex, multifaceted, multilingual, and interdisciplinary. Anyone who has read Max Weber or even Karl Marx knows this to be true. I was relieved, therefore, that the translation retains some of this flavor. In building his argument that prostitutes were born criminals and that all women were atavistic throwbacks to earlier evolutionary forms, for example, Lombroso skips from one kind of text to another; statues, Dante, folk tales, religious allegories, photographs, statistics, head shape, brain size, tattoos, stories gathered through prison visiting, physical attributes, and so on, are all presented as equally legitimate and useful data.

This new translation of Criminal Woman provides an excellent and accessible version of Lombroso’s text. Although Lombroso scholars and historians will want to read the Italian original, this volume would be usefully assigned in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. Later this year, Rafter and Gibson are publishing the accompanying volume, Criminal Man, which I, for one, cannot wait to read.