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By Root 1835 0

Amendment was ratified, South Carolina amended its jury law to excuse “female electors,” along with the governor and a list of others, including “licensed embalmers.”8 The Louisiana Constitution of 1921 specified that no woman could serve on a jury unless she filed with the clerk of the district court “a written declaration of her desire to be subject to such service.”9 Naturally, under a rule like this, women were exceedingly scarce on Louisiana juries. But the provision was in full force until the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck it down in 1975. The Constitution, said the Court, required every state to guarantee a “fair cross section” of the community, and this was impossible if no women were allowed to serve.10ea Today, women are as common as men on juries; and they have a reasonable chance of hearing women lawyers argue, or hear the gavel pounded by a woman judge.

“More Terrible Than Any Man”: Women in Crime

When the “science” of “criminal anthropology” reached its dubious heights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, quite a few thinkers were intoxicated with the idea of the “born criminal.” The Italian scholar Cesare Lombroso, leading light of the biological school, did the same number on women that he had already done on men when he published The Female Offender in 1894, in collaboration with Guglielmo Ferrero. Long passages in the book catalogued “facial and cephalic anomalies” or compared, for example, the skulls of female criminals with skulls of “normal” and “fallen” women.

Lombroso, of course, had to confront the obvious fact that women were sparse in the ranks of serious crime. Women, he thought, were “conservative ... in all questions of social order.” It was the “immobility of the ovule compared with the zoosperm” that brought about this conservatism. Sexual selection also operated to weed out potential women criminals. “Man not only refused to marry a deformed female, but ate her while preserving for his enjoyment the handsome woman.”13

Women were also more “primitive” than men, and more “sedentary,” less “subject to transformation and deformation.” They were basically childlike, with a “deficient” moral sense. Ordinarily, “piety, maternity, want of passion,... weakness and an undeveloped intelligence” kept their vices in check. But watch out: if these traits failed, or if powerful counterdrives overwhelmed them, then “the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.” The female “bom criminal,” then, though rarer than the male, was “often much more ferocious.”14

Ferocious or not, women were and are radically underrepresented among the ranks of those arrested, charged, and tried for crime. To this day, they make a rather feeble contribution to the criminal nation. Statistics can lie, or show bias, but the chasm between men and women in criminal statistics is so vast that no bias could possibly explain it away. No serious student of crime or criminal justice has the slightest doubt that women, in general, just do not go in for serious crimes, especially crimes of bodily harm, of violence, of bloodshed.

In the last generation or so, there has been considerable movement in gender relations. There has been a boom in women lawyers, doctors, politicians, accountants, even women clergy (in some religions)—nothing remotely approaching parity in most fields, but the trend is clear. Yet robbery, burglary, arson, and assault are still most definitely not equal-opportunity careers; and prison is still, by and large, a man’s world. In 1950, 3.5 percent of the adult prisoners in state and federal prisons were women. In 1975, the figure had risen—to 3.6 percent. Between 1930 and 1973, 3,827 men were put to death; the figure for women—exactly 32—is less than 1 percent of that.eb

Further down the scale of criminality, women do somewhat better—but only somewhat. In 1970, 5.7 percent of the prisoners in local jails were women. There is more balance among juveniles. In correctional facilities for young people, in 1950, there