Lombroso: A Feminist Analysis

Feminism is substantial topic in itself including many different types such as liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist. In the 1960s onwards the second wave of feminism and growth came forwards. Feminist theories are a group of related theories that share many principles that are in common and focuses on the analyzation of gender inequality. The basic principles of the feminist theory are the relationship between men and women has been unequal and oppressive, all known societies have been patriarchal and all major social institutions have been characterized by male dominance such as economy, political system, family and religion. In this essay, I will be assessing the impact of feminism has on criminology.

The Malestream theory consisted of

Lombroso and Ferrero were two of the main positivists that produced an explanation for feminist criminality. Lombroso was especially influenced by the biology. Lombroso and Ferrero’s work on female criminality concluded that there were more born female criminals than males, they believed this as they thought that women are less highly developed. Lombroso also believed if the criminal was a prostitute she is useful for satisfying males sexual demands and with having this opinion he had to try to fend off criticism from the feminist critics who attacked him for denigrating women. Anna Kuliscioff a socialist, feminist and physician dismissed his views even though she was a family friend, although some feminists see positivism as a valuable thing as it adds validity to feminist research projects and say that the practice of positivism can lead to “bad science”. Feminists empiricists urged scholars and researchers to be mindful of who is left out of research

Feminist methodology includes wide range of methods, approaches and research strategies. Feminist work was generally qualitative methodologies. Gelsthorpe (1990) identified 4 major themes in a debate around the nature of feminist methodology as following;

Choice of topic; Gelsthorpe suggests that generally meant selecting objects of study that are linked to women’s oppression and seek to identify topics of political and practical importance that have a potential to contribute to that ending oppression.

Process; the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative and qualitative approaches to research has been debated. As said above there has been a consistent view put forward that qualitative methods are in the bigger favour best suited to feminist research