The Truth Machine (17 page)

In 1898, Frances Kellor of the University of Chicago expressed similarly skeptical views about the differential rate of criminality among women compared to men, dismissing those anthropologists who considered woman to be “midway between child and man in her development.”
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The information on female criminality that had been gathered up to that point was inadequate, because there were “numerous conditions and acts indicating a low morality and a criminal nature, acts which are injurious to the community and state, of which the law takes no cognizance, but which would be indispensable factors in an accurate study of comparative crime in the sexes.” Once such factors had been taken into account, the variation in the statistical rate of crime for the two sexes would be eliminated: “Were the determination of the criminal and non-criminal classes less legal and more sociologic; less based upon the crime and more upon the criminal, and upon the amount and nature of crime rather than upon the number of convictions, which are less than one-third of the actual number of crimes committed, the proportionate rate of the crime in the two sexes would be much more uniform.”
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Dugdale's study of the Jukes family had recently demonstrated that criminal tendencies were inherited equally by the two sexes.
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To a considerable extent, the apparent difference in criminal statistics was an artifact of the “unequal political privileges” enjoyed by men. Because of their social standing, women simply did not have the opportunity to commit offences against the government, “including violations of the election and postal laws; of the revenue laws; against public health, as adulteration of foods.” As they entered vocations hitherto open only to men, their rates of offending went up.
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In 1900, Kellor published the results of a meticulous investigation, “Psychological and Environmental Study of Women Criminals.”
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The assiduous researcher had interviewed inmates at five institutions: the reform school at Geneva, the penitentiary at Joliet, the workhouse at Cincinnati, the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus, and the workhouse and penitentiary at Blackwell's Island, New York City. She had also performed numerous psychological tests on her subjects: sixty-one female offenders and fifty-five students for comparison. Most previous investigations among criminals had been “upon the anatomy,” Kellor explained, to the neglect of “the functioning in society, the
mental, moral, and emotional nature.” As a result, the criminal had come to be regarded as “a finished product” rather than an individual “in a state of evolution.”
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The researches of the European criminologists such as Lombroso, Ferri, and Tarnowsky had been largely accepted, but their findings were questionable Kellor maintained, because this work had ignored “the mental and emotional impulses [and] the tremendous forces of social and economic environment.”

Kellor implied that the data collected by criminal anthropology was inaccurate, and that it promoted an illiberal and overly theoretical agenda. What was required was a “criminal sociology”: a sociology informed by psychology. “Psychology makes possible a quantitative sociology.” Such a project would have to study the noncriminal class, something that criminal anthropology had failed to do.
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According to Kellor, one advantage of psychological testing was that it led inevitably toward explanations in terms of social factors. The ascertainment of a condition “such as defective hearing or taste,” for example, “revealed methods of living, habits, disease, etc.” The extensive anthropometric measurements Kellor took included “weight, height, sitting height, strength of chest, hand grasp, cephalic index, distance between arches, between orbits, corners of eyes, crown to chin, nasal index, length of ears, of hands, of middle fingers, of thumbs, width and thickness of mouth, height of forehead, anterior and posterior diameters.”
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The measurements sought a knowledge of the five senses and the capacity for perception, coordination, and adjustment. Because anatomical differences between people “depended upon race, climate, soil [and] nutrition,” it was important to make comparisons within racial groups, not between them. To Kellor, it was evident “that we cannot accept the statements that criminals are more brachycephalic than normals, when one has measured only Italians or Russians, and that this is an ethnic characteristic. It is just here that Lombroso's results are untrustworthy when applied to various races and countries.”
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Kellor disputed Lombroso's proposals that prostitutes were heavier, longer-lived, and more likely to be left-handed than other women. She criticized his methods of data collection, presented data in opposition to his, and questioned his interpretations: “He asserts that prostitutes possess, more frequently than normals, enormous lower jaws, projecting cheekbones, projecting ears, virile and Mongolian physiognomy, prehensile feet, masculine voices and handwriting. I am unable to verify these, and think that, especially in the first-named, racial influences again operate. I found faces with hard expressions, and voices harsh and cynical, but they did not possess the peculiar masculine quality, and I do not believe that harshness, cynicism, coarseness make them masculine.”
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In opposition to Mantegazza's claim that women criminals were “almost always homely, if not repulsive,” Kellor asserted that “the effect of clothing, cleanliness, etc., must be considered, as deficiency in these particulars renders even a normal individual unattractive.”
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Having secured her subjects' confidence and consent—“for they were extremely suspicious and superstitious of any investigation, especially where instruments were used”—Kellor set about measuring their psychological capacities. Her psychological tests included those for memory, color blindness and color preference, sensibility of the skin, the five senses, fatigue, pain, respiration, and the association of ideas. Kellor suggested that her study was “the first attempt to secure a series of such measurements from female delinquents, and to compare the results with those from a different educational and social stratum of society.”
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Arthur MacDonald's back, chest, and leg dynamometer, a device for measuring muscular power (1898). From Arthur MacDonald, “Psycho-physical and Anthropometrical Instruments of Precision in the Laboratory of the Bureau of Education” (1898), chap. 5, p. 1186, fig. 78. In:
The Experimental Study of Children
, 1141–1204 (United States of America, Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1897–98).

Differences in memory were explained by noting the differential effects of education, the difference in color preferences to economic and social factors. The qualities of women she discreetly referred to as “courtesans” she ascribed to what was “current coin within their community.” Although Kellor confirmed Lombroso's finding that criminals had greater insensibility compared to normal women, she attributed the difference to the nature of the occupation, poor diet, and inadequate care of the body, all of which were bad habits that tended “to render the sensibilities less acute.” She also pointed out that it was difficult to maintain her subjects' concentration on this particular task— poor concentration tended to render the results inaccurate—and she found that flabby skin confounded the results. The tests on taste and smell resulted in greater differences between delinquents and students than in any of the other tests: “Instead of proving one of the current theories, that the criminal is allied to the savage, and is more dependent upon physical senses than upon his intellect, and thus has these more acutely developed, I found them to disprove it. In taste the delinquents were only about two-thirds as accurate as the students, in smell only about one-half.”
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Kellor put the difference down to the use of snuff, alcohol, and tobacco, “coarse, strong foods,” poor sanitary conditions, “unsavory odors,” and disease. She patiently offered an alternative sociological explanation for every criminal anthropological claim that she examined. For example, the assertion that “when women are criminal they are more degraded and more abandoned than men” could be attributed “to the difference in the standards which we set for the two sexes.” “We say woman is worse, but we judge her so by comparison with the ideal of woman,
not with a common ideal. For instance, I have included swearing and use of tobacco as bad habits among women; among men we should not consider them in the same light. These make a deeper impression by reason of the requirements of
our
ideal, not in the light of plain fact.”
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From a social point of view, an intoxicated woman merely appeared more degraded than a man in the same state; she wasn't inherently so. Because standards of licentiousness, manners, and cleanliness varied across the social classes, it was illegitimate to regard women in general as more degraded than men. Criminal anthropology had also ignored the economic conditions that rendered women more “liable to immorality.” Kellor gave a stark illustration of one such pressure that gentle readers of academic periodicals might not have been aware of: “Clipping from the newspaper some thirty advertisements for clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers, etc., I had an assistant answer them. Although she visited only a little more than half the places, almost every one of them was a snare for immoral purposes, and the proposals were so bluntly made that she declined answering more.”
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It was difficult for a woman seeking economic independence to resist considerable pressures from numerous quarters.

At the heart of Kellor's critique of criminal anthropology lay a conviction—by then shared by many novelists and scientists alike—that it was no longer legitimate to conceive of the criminal as a separate sort of human being. She had failed to replicate almost all of criminal anthropology's claims in this respect. But there was one final test in Kellor's psychological and anthropometric arsenal that pointed toward a new way of thinking about the relationship between the human body and crime: “The last, and perhaps most interesting, test was that made with the kymograph, an instrument designed to register the respiration curve upon smoked paper.” The instrument consisted of a clockwork base and a drum, around which was a roll of smoked paper. Resting lightly against the smoked paper was a pointer connected by rubber tubing to a respirator fastened onto the subject's chest: “When the subject inspires and expires, the air is forced down and back the tube, the pointer making a curved line upon the paper as the drum revolves. Every change in the amplitude and the rate of the breathing is thus graphically portrayed.” The test was given to determine the amount of emotional reactions to stimuli, as shown by changes in breathing.
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Five breathing curves were recorded for each subject. Considering the humanitarian impetus of Kellor's investigations, it was surprising that this final experiment involved inflicting emotional and physical pain on her participants.
For the first curve, the subjects were asked to sit quietly and think of anything except the experiment. They were asked to explain what they were thinking about when the curve exhibited a marked depression or rise. Toward the end of this phase, “suddenly a block was dropped, or a hammer struck,” and the resultant effect was noted. The second phase was designed to produce a normal curve, the subject being asked to read a newspaper clipping designed “not to excite undue interest.” Toward the end of this stage, the subject experienced an unexpected “sharp pinprick in the back of the neck.” The third curve investigated “the difference between the various methods of reading,” while the fourth “was related to the effect of interest.” Here the subject was required to read a dull agricultural newspaper report followed by a graphic account of a prison rebellion. In the final part of the test, Kellor furnished her subjects with two ideas to think about. The first suggestion— concerning the joy of imminent release—almost always produced “deeper and wider” curves. The second suggestion reminded the inmate of her shame, “the fact of her being in such an institution and its effect upon relatives and friends.” At least three of her subjects wept at this point.
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Finally, to induce fear in her subjects, Kellor deployed what she called “a simple device”: “Placing a plethysmograph near the temple, I said I intended applying an electric current; that if they would not move or speak the pain would be slight. The fear of electricity is very great, and this never failed. My great difficulty was in keeping them quiet, so excessive was this fear. Two marked changes were observable: either the curve became almost a straight line, as when they held their breath, or it became ragged and of varying amplitude, as when they became nervous through fear.”
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