This translation of Pauline Tarnowsky’s Les Femmes Homicides presents an important historical work in English for the first time. Tarnowsky, a neuropathologist and one of the first women permitted to attend medical school in Russia, has often been referred to as the “first female criminologist.” In Les Femmes Homicides, she analyzes data collected from a sample primarily composed of Russian rural peasant women convicted of homicide. Included are160 homicide offenders and a control group of 150 non-criminal women, to examine the relative influences of the “born criminal” theory often associated with Cesare Lombroso, heredity, and the social contexts experienced by the convicted women.

Pauline Tarnowsky’s Les Femmes Homicides, Part 1, published in 2024 outlines Tarnowsky’s methodology and introduces some of the first motivational categories she assigns for the women’s homicidal behavior. Part 2 contained herein expands on the categories and further explores the relative importance of causal factors related to biology and social conditions. Her meticulous methodological attention to the intersections of race, environment, time, place, unity, and other social conditions makes this one of the earliest, and still one of the most comprehensive, studies of female homicide offenders.

Tarnowsky draws comparisons between carefully matched criminal and non-criminal populations and employs what we would now recognize as social-scientific reasoning to study and explain homicides committed by women. Ultimately, she challenges and rejects the importance of Lombroso’s theory of “born criminals.” This historical work, and its influence on the development of criminological theory, remains essential reading for scholars and students of criminology, homicide studies, social history, gender studies, theory development, the history of ideas, law and criminology, and the social study of science.

Lin Huff-Corzine is Emerita Professor in Sociology at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is active in the American Society of Criminology, where she serves as the Secretary-Treasurer for the Division of Historical Criminology. She is also a founding member of the Homicide Research Working Group, which recently honored her and colleagues Jay Corzine and John Jarvis with an award that will be given annually in their names for outstanding research related to homicide. Her publications on homicide, domestic violence, and human trafficking appear in a variety of criminology and criminal justice journals. Directly related to this book is a piece with Dr. Kayla Toohy about Tarnowsky’s life and scholarship that appeared in the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Kayla Toohy is Assistant Professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Tampa, Florida, USA. Her research areas primarily focus on studies of lethal violence, taking into consideration macro-level economic and social factors and the geographic distribution of individual crimes using geographic information systems (GIS). Additionally, she has conducted research in the areas of intimate partner violence, family mass murder, historical contributions to criminological literature, and environmental predictors of crime. Her recent publications appear in journals such as the Journal of Criminal Justice, Violence Against Women, the Journal of Mass Violence Research, Security Journal, and Victims & Offenders. Publications that reference information related to Pauline Tarnowsky and her historical contributions to the discipline of criminology include “The Life and Scholarship of Pauline Tarnowsky: Criminology’s Mother,” with Dr. Lin Huff-Corzine, in the Journal of Criminal Justice. The work she has conducted, translating Pauline Tarnowsky’s Les Femmes Homicides, brought together her two loves of French literature and criminology.

Boniface Noyongoyo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, USA. While he was a graduate student at the University of Central Florida, USA, Dr. Noyongoyo translated selected sections of Tarnowsky’s Les Femmes Homicides for an earlier stage of the project. His current research interests are aging, life course and health, consumption and consumerism, international migration, race and ethnicity, sociology of food, and social inequality. He has researched international students’ eating habits as part of his interest in food and social inequalities. He teaches Introduction to Sociology, Research Methods, and Statistics for Social Sciences.