ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the differential potential of both feminism and left realist criminology to inform analyses of women's lawbreaking and criminalization and campaigns and policies aimed at redressing the discriminatory wrongs that women presently suffer in the criminal justice system. It discusses the limits to, and potential of, feminist and realist perspectives on women's crimes and women's penal regulation. The chapter argues that although feminist perspectives and left realist criminological approaches have much to offer in terms of political agenda-setting, neither can alone provide the open-ended conceptual system required to explain women's law-breaking and the social response to it. A major concern of left realism has been to counter the 'impossibilism' of left idealist theories which claim that nothing can be done about crime until there is a fundamental change in the present exploitative class relations constitutive of capitalism.
