The Female Criminal of the 19th Century
In discussing the trial of Lizzie Borden, we learn how women of the 19th century were viewed and how it was difficult to see them as “criminal”.
In the late 1800’s, when the police were searching for the perpetrator of a crime, they were actually searching for someone who looked like a criminal. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, had determined that criminals were born, not made. All nature, no nurture. The physical attributes of a person advertised their criminal nature — those who looked more like primates, or Neanderthals — with a sloping forehead, large ears, longer than normal arms, and asymmetry in the face to name a few. The police often first focused on immigrants because they were outsiders as people were majorly xenophobic at the time. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, a famed suffragist and temperance advocate, proclaimed: “They are discharged convicts, paupers, lunatics, imbeciles, people suffering from loathsome and contagious diseases, illiterates, defectives…” They were maniacs!
In reading the The Trial of Lizzie Borden, by Cara Robertson, Borden’s arrest unsettles an ethnically and class-determined model of criminality and, as her lawyer argued at the preliminary hearing, caused outrage over ‘the natural course of things.’ As a white…
