NCJ Number
187794
Date Published
2000
Length
42 pages
Annotation
This chapter examines the exclusion of women in criminology and discusses some ways in which feminist scholarship has challenged traditional assumptions about women and their role in criminology and the criminal justice system.
Abstract
The chapter first develops the argument that feminism, like multiculturalism, challenges the traditional knowledge base of criminology, but it also attempts to transform the pursuit of knowledge itself. Feminist scholarship, at its best, recognizes that oppressions of all kinds are interactive and additive; for example, women of color experience both racism and sexism. The remainder of the chapter reviews four broad areas of literature: gender and theories of criminality, gender and victimization, gender and the criminal justice system, and gender and occupations in the criminal justice system. In each of these areas, the chapter examines how feminist scholarship has pointed to the exclusion of women, and it discusses some feminist challenges to conventional wisdom that have the potential to transform "knowledge" in the particular subject area. Overall, the chapter argues that multiculturalism, like feminism, will experience resistance, because it challenges the very intellectual traditions that have contributed to the marginalization of disenfranchised groups in criminology in the first place. The chapter concludes by focusing on the need for future theoretical development, arguing that the links between multiculturalism and feminism must be made more explicit. 13 notes and 168 references