The Body in Law, The Law in Body: Understanding Feminist Criminology

Written By : Alifah Kahillah Almaira and Karenina Fernandya

The definition of Feminism and Feminist Criminology 

Feminism is a belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities in society, politics, and the law. Feminism works to end unfair treatment of women, it says that women’s experiences and voices matter just as much as men’s. 

Feminist Criminology is a critical school of thought that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It’s a criminological perspective that examines how gender and patriarchy shape crime, justice, and social control. 

Traditional criminology theories have mostly focused on male offenders and male victims, often ignoring women’s experience altogether. Feminist criminology emerged to fill this gap, there are several major schools of thought, the four most influential approaches are: 

1. Liberal Feminism 

Liberal feminism is a branch of feminism that fights for women’s equality through legal changes and social reforms within the existing system, not by overthrowing it. According to liberal feminists, women’s oppression comes from their lack of political and civil rights. The solution is to end discriminatory laws and push for equal rights through legislation. The two main principles in Liberal Feminism are: 

• Gender Equality, biological differences don’t justify unequal treatment.

• Equal Representation, women must have equal presence in the workplace, politics, and media. 

Today, some liberal feminists believe the main battles have been won, while others continue to work on issues like the gender pay gap and underrepresentation in politics and media. 

2. Radical Feminism 

Radical feminism is a strand of feminist theory that argues that the root cause of women’s oppression lies in patriarchy, a system of male dominance embedded in social, legal, and cultural institutions. According to Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex, gender inequality is fundamentally tied to biological reproduction, where women’s reproductive roles have historically been used to justify their subordination. Similarly, Kate Millett in Sexual Politics explains that patriarchy operates as a political system that structures power relations between men and women across all areas of life, including law and family. Radical feminists therefore seek to dismantle patriarchal structures entirely, arguing that true gender equality cannot be achieved without transforming the underlying systems that normalize male dominance.

3. Marxist Feminism 

Marxist feminism is a theoretical perspective that connects women’s oppression to the economic system of capitalism and class inequality. It argues that gender inequality cannot be separated from material conditions such as labor, property, and economic power. Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, asserts that women’s subordination began with the rise of private property and the patriarchal family, which served to maintain male control over economic resources. Expanding on this, Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch highlights how capitalism relies on women’s unpaid reproductive labor, such as caregiving and domestic work, to sustain the workforce. Marxist feminists therefore emphasize that achieving gender equality requires not only challenging patriarchy but also transforming capitalist structures that perpetuate class-based exploitation. 

4. Socialist Feminism 

Socialist Feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement, focusing on the interconnectivity of patriarchy and capitalism. It’s a two-pronged theory that broadens Marxist Feminism’s argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women and Radical Feminism’s theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women’s oppression. In criminology, socialist feminism provides a framework for understanding crime by analyzing the intersection of class and gender. It begins with a critique of the failure of Marxist criminology to accurately analyze gender relations and the origin of female oppression.

SOURCE

• Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin Books, 1884. 

• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. 

• Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970. 

• Guy-Evans, O. “Liberal Feminism” (SimplyPsychology, 2024).

  https://www.simplypsychology.org/liberal-feminism.html accessed on April 7th, 2026. 

• Messerschmidt, J. W., Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Crime: Toward a Socialist Feminist Criminology (Rowman & Littlefield, 1986). 

• Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970. 

• Mykitiuk R and Karpin I, 'Feminist Legal Theory as Embodied Justice' (2011) Articles & Book Chapters 2713, Osgoode Digital Commons. 

• Renzetti, C. M., Feminist Criminology (Routledge, 2013).