Journal of Women's History

On the Insensittvity of Women: Science and the Woman Question in Liberal Italy, 1890-1910 Mary Gibson During the last decade of the nineteenth century, several hundred Italian women were hooked up to electrodes as subjects of scientific experiments on physical sensitivity. The experimenters were criminologists interested in gathering concrete, empirical data on the physiological differences not only between female offenders and "normal" women but also between women and men in general. With algometers, these criminologists measured both the level at which each woman could first feel the sensation of the electric current and the level at which this current became painful. They attached electrodes most often to the hands but also to other parts of the body, including the tongue, nose, forehead, thighs, stomach, breasts, and even the clitoris.1 According to their scientific theory, levels of physical sensitivity were correlated to emotional, moral, and intellectual sensitivity. Based on these tests, criminologists concluded that women were inferior to men in all types of sensitivity. Sandra Harding, the feminist philosopher of science, has noted the "curious coincidence" that "the emergence of severe threats to the existing gender order are often followed by new scientific definitions of women's inferiority and deviance."2 Indeed, the sensitivity testing conducted by Italian criminologists in the 1890s coincided with the consolidation of the Italian women's movement into a series of organizations promoting equal rights in education, work, the family, and politics. This movement for female emancipation , which would be called feminism after the turn of the century, was a response to the changes in women's roles that accompanied the slow but steady industrialization and urbanization of late nineteenth-century Italy. The criminologists who conducted the sensitivity experiments were aware of the relationship between their research and larger social issues. Salvatore Ottolenghi , for example, explained in his book The Sensitivity of Women why he and his colleagues posed the question "Do women feel more or less than men?" He said: 'It is not simply out of curiosity that renowned authorities are © 1990 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 2 No. 2 (Fall)___________________ A summer seminar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported part of the research for this article. I want to thank the directors of the seminar, Karen Offen and Susan Groag Bell, as well as the other participants for their comments on an earlier version of this paper and for the intelligence and enthusiasm of our discussions about the history of the woman question in Western thought. 12 Journal of Women's History Fall addressing themselves to this question; it is intimately related to the difficult problem of the position of women in society and anthropology."3 Thus, at the turn of the century as today, the debate over the "woman question," or the proper role and status of women, prompted new empirical studies of female physiology and psychology. This paper analyzes the sensitivity experiments and other research of Italian criminologists on sex differences within the context of the late nineteenth-century debate about the "woman question." According to these criminologists, the sensitivity tests and other empirical measurements finally offered an objective, scientific evaluation of women's nature. Enrico Ferri boasted, for example, that the statistical nature of the new criminological studies differentiated them from "the usual rhapsodies and more or less romantic ramblings that, for a long time, many have written about women."4 Yet science, Harding has reminded us, is a "social activity, a historically varying set of social practices" rather than a purely objective activity separate from human politics, prejudices, and emotions.5 From this vantage point, the first section of this essay will examine the findings of Italian criminologists and argue that these men were unable to construct scientific hypotheses, gather evidence, or draw conclusions without recourse to their preconceptions about women's nature. The second section will analyze the problems that the new scientific evidence of women's inferiority, like the sensitivity tests, posed for the Italian women's movement. Often sharing their era's confidence in the promise of science to solve social problems, many feminists initially expected that new, objective data would provide them with ammunition to tear down traditional barriers...