ABSTRACT
Radical feminism narrowed the feminist gaze to gendered power relations and structures and the analysis of female oppression and male patriarchy. Like much of criminology, radical feminists confined their analysis to the treatment of domestic issues by local criminal justice agencies. Femininity became a universal construct abstracted from the specificity and variability of women's real and ethnically diverse experiences across time, class, space, history, religion, economics, culture and geo-politics. This kind of radical feminism was accused of being theoretically isolationist, reformist and obsessed with white 'middle-class concerns'. At the time of the demise of radical feminism and rise of black feminism and intersectionality, Carol Smart noted that 'Feminism had to abandon its early frame-work and to start to look for other ways to think which did not subjugate other subjectivities'. Radical feminism questioned the separation of objectivity from subjectivity and rejected criminology's claims to be scientific, value free and completely devoid of interpretation.
