Prostitutes and the The change in the representation of deviance, which took place during the second half of the 19th century, is analysed in the writings of two groups of authors from German-speaking countries : criminalists police experts and detectives and criminologists scholars in the fields of law, medicine and anthropology. My analysis of the representation of prostitutes reconstructs two master-narratives, which structured the reflection and writing on crime and deviance.
Each of these created specific fears and anxieties related to prostitutes and affected the ways institutional responses to these fears were organized. I argue that the analysis of these narratives as part of a discursive practice provides a better understanding of the ways in which experts as well as lay people approached social problems, from both an intellectual and an institutional standpoint.
For criminals are an exception among civilized people, and women are an exception among criminals, the natural form of retrogression in women being prostitution and not crime. The primitive woman was impure rather than criminal » 2. Even though Lombroso - and after him scholars such as Otto Weininger 3 - were among the first to express the stereotypical description of women as mothers and whores in scientific terms, they also took up the long-existing notion that female deviance was closely related to sexuality.
Even though moral statistics made gender-specific criminality rates more visible, criminologists played down the relevance of the low rate of female criminality by citing the results of their own observations about the lifestyles of women. They suggested that different living conditions, levels of education, and women's lack of physical strength caused this low level of criminality without giving women a higher moral capability 5.
In doing so, Lombroso transmuted the practical knowledge of early criminalistic writers, i. This can be seen in the writings both of scholars from various disciplines and of authors with practical experience in dealing with criminals, such as magistrates, detectives, and criminologists.
