ABSTRACT
Jeffrie's research was an important contribution to the understanding of gender-related judicial processes in New Zealand. Society creates variations in male, female self-concepts in same way that structures gender differences elsewhere. It channels the identities and expectations of boys and girls in certain directions, opening and closing the doors of proclivity according to sex. At the same time, more radical approaches to the female crime issue also began appearing. In the 1970s and 1980s Meda Chesney-Lind politicised the gender-crime debate by arguing that female offending is a reaction to patriarchal authority which victimises women through the criminal justice system. This approach was added to by socialist and Marxist feminists who suggested that class oppression and ruling class ideologies doubly disadvantage women by subjecting them to patriarchal forms of oppression that often have their origins in family. Thus a number of feminist criminologists have called for an entirely separate criminology for women, while Smith and Paternoster have argued against it.
