Female crime
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gender is a factor that plays a role in both human and animal aggression. Males are generally more aggressive than females (Coi & Dodge 1997, Maccoby & Jacklin 1974), and men commit the vast majority of murders (Buss 2005). This is one of the most robust and reliable behavioral sex differences, and it has been found across many different age groups and cultures. There is evidence that males are quicker to aggression (Frey et al 2003) and more likely than females to express their aggression physically (Bjorkqvist et al. 1994). However, some researchers have suggested that females are not necessarily less aggressive, but that they tend to show their aggression in less overt, less physical ways (Bjorkqvist et al. 1994, Hines and Saudino 2003). For example, females may display more verbal and relational aggression, such as social rejection.
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In fiction: the femme fatale trope
A femme fatale (plural: femmes fatales) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous and deadly situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art.
Archetypes of bad women
- Bad women of the bible
- Valeria Messalina
- Lucrezia Borgia (1480 - 1519)
- Catherine de' Medici (1519 - 1589)
- Giulia Tofana (died in Rome, July 1659)
Female murderes
- Mary I of England (1516 – 1558), the so-called "Bloody Mary"
- Elizabeth Bathory (1560 – 1614)
- Christine and Lea Papin (1905 - 1937) and (1911 - 2001), two French maids who brutally murdered their employer's wife and daughter in Le Mans, France in 1933.
- Ilse Koch (1906 – 1967), and other female guards in Nazi concentration camps
- Myra Hindley (1942- 2002), mass murderer
Women and poison
- Vish Kanjas, Lucrezia Borgia, [[Catherine de Medici], Aqua Tofana, Affair of the Poisons
It was the trial of the century. Madeline Smith, a 22-year-old Glasgow deb, had been arrested for the murder of her somewhat unpresentable lover, Pierre Emile L'Anglier. The evidence was stacked against her - L'Anglier had some incriminating letters he was threatening to show her father and she had purchased poison. A diary L'Anglier had kept linked his terrible bouts of stomach cramps to visits from Madeline. Even her own lawyer thought she was guilty. The trial lasted from July 4 to 13, 1857, only 9 days, and the verdict was...
Not proven. 'Not proven' was an old Scottish verdict and the Madeline Smith trial was one of its final appearances. The argument for the defense was that anyone suspecting their lover of poisoning them as L'Anglier did, would scarcely have continued to accept food and drink from her hands. Madeline changed her name and married twice, ending her days in New York City in 1926. Recent and persuasive evidence shows that L'Anglier was a highly unstable young man who very likely planned an elaborate suicide in hopes it would send his ex-sweetheart to the gallows.
He was an American president facing iminent ruin and she was his highly intelligent, effective, and unconventional first lady. When he died suddenly in San Francisco, the whispers started... Who was he?
The shift from home to hospital care for the sick.. Poisoning is certainly not exclusively a women's crime, but it seems to have been an overwhelmingly domestic one. The lack of open access to relatives in the hospital and the presence of the hospital staff seem to have cut deaths by poison dramatically.
References
See also
- Male crime
- Dark Lady (character)
- Feminist school of criminology
- Gender and crime
- Black widow
- List of women who have murdered their husbands
- Mariticide
- Female serial killer
- Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (1893) - Cesare Lombroso, Guglielmo Ferrero
- Women in prison
- Warrior woman
