ld him that there were
only these two kinds of women in the world bad and good
but he seemed haunted by the fear that an apparently good
woman might, at any unexpected moment, turn out to be bad.
Thus, he devoted a large part of his career to marking once
and for all the difference between them. For the good woman,
Lombroso said, love was "a species of slavery." She gladly
sacrificed her "entire personality for her loved one, and if
she lost him to death or to another, she nobly killed
herself. Criminal women, on the other hand, were scarcely
women at all: "female criminals approximate more to males .
. . than to normal women, especially in the superciliary
arches in the seam of the sutures, in the lower jaw bones,
and in peculiarities of the occipital region" (Jones, 1980,
Balkan and Berger (1979) say that social sex roles, which are grounded in social structure rather than biological factors, affect the kinds of violence and crimes that women and men, respectively, become involved in. They cite male violence as far outpacing that of women, adding, however, that the observed increase in female crime and violence remains to be explained. In this regard, they report conflicting theories of the sociology of female crime and violence.
According to Balkan and Berger, one view is that the Women's Liberation Movement has had the effect of making women more masculine and therefore more prone to violent crime. This can lead to an assumption that masculine characteristics are somehow naturally more violent than feminine ones. Based on interviews with offenders, the next of kin of offenders' victims, and other research, Wolfgang (1958) paves the way for this view by suggesting that behavior can be influenced by social change. That means that to the degree the Women's Liberation Movement might influence the structure of socie...