Re/Claiming Pauline Tarnowsky: Pioneering Female Criminologist

ABSTRACT This article examines the relevance and impact of Pauline Tarnowsky, a pioneering and overlooked Russian criminologist, whose research on female criminality contributed to early criminological theory and provided insights into structural violence, gendered criminality, and justice. Her challenge to Lombroso's determinism emphasized the lived experiences of incarcerated women, mainly peasants, who were in prison due to prostitution, theft, and homicide, and the systemic factors (i.e., poverty, abuse, and lack of education) and centered the role of gender and inequality in criminological inquiry. Through her work using comparative groups and mixed methods, she created the foundation of criminology as an interdisciplinary and feminist field before these terms existed. Her contributions have since been overlooked, ignored, and claimed by male peers and contemporaries, leaving her unrecognized in dominant criminological narratives. By re/claiming Pauline Tarnowsky's lost contributions to criminology (intellectually and historiographically), this work seeks to situate her within the canon of criminology and assert the relevance of her scholarship to current debates on crime, justice, and social inequality, with “re/claiming” signaling not only a recovery of buried intellectual history but also a feminist epistemological stance against disciplinary erasure. Revisiting this scholarship helps reframe the historical development of criminology and the enduring importance of intersectional, gender conscious scholarship.