ABSTRACT
In 1893 Cesare Lombroso published Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman, his companion piece to Criminal Man and the founding text in the criminology of women. True to the principles of his internationally-renowned theory of criminal anthropology, he detailed the many physical anomalies that distinguished the female born criminal from the ‘normal’ woman. One of these was an excess of ‘exaggerated wrinkles,’ and he supported this conclusion with both quantitative and qualitative data.1 The former were organized into a table comparing 158 normal women with 70 female criminals in terms of the severity of wrinkles on eight different parts of their faces. Although his statistics showed that female offenders were ‘in general’ no more wrinkled than normal women, his table did identify certain types of wrinkles as more frequent among older criminal women: vertical wrinkles on the forehead, creases on the cheeks, lines around the lips, and crow’s feet at the edges of the eyes.2
