ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter considers the emergence, nature, and impact of feminist criminology. Like all the other perspectives we have considered in other chapters, it is very much a product of a particular time. Straightforwardly, the scholarship covered in the main sections of this chapter was a product of the re-emergence of feminism from the late 1960s onwards. In part, feminist criminology was a reaction to pre-existing ways of ‘doing’ criminology:
[T]he reaction was against an old, established male chauvinism in the academic discipline. Women were either invisible to conventional criminologists or present only as prostitutes or marginal or contingent fi gures. Further, when women were discussed it was in crude sexist stereotypes which were widely and thoughtlessly disseminated. Feminist criminology has been quite successful in developing and establishing this critique, although it has been much more diffi cult to get it taken into mainstream criminology.
