Contextualizing Tarnowsky’s Narratives: Russian Women’s Accounts for Committing Homicide

• In Event: Windows into Historical Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Purpose: We analyze narratives provided by women who committed homicide in Russia during the mid-to-late 1800s from Tarnowsky’s Les Femmes Homicides. Theory: Tarnowsky expands her theoretical explanations for women’s homicidal behavior from Lombroso’s born criminal theory to test for psychological and sociological aspects of their lives. Methods: Expanding Tarnowsky’s socio-cultural comparative analysis of women convicted of homicide and a peasant control group, we contextualize the historical data and selected women’s accounts of killing with Russian history and current criminological theory. Findings: Tarnowsky’s underexamined qualitative data collected from peasant women reveals gendered vocabularies of motive. Conclusions: Tarnowsky’s findings offer more reasonable motives for women convicted of homicide than Lombroso’s assertions of biological indicators of the “born criminal”. She calls upon what we now know as the Social Sciences to evaluate and explain homicides committed by the women she studied and denounces the explicit importance of Lombroso’s theory of born criminals.

Authors

• Lin K. Huff-Corzine, University of Central Florida

• Kylie Parrotta, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo

• Kayla Toohy, University of Tampa