Feminism: Legal Aspects

Even according to its critics, feminism has been one of the most important influences on the substantive criminal law in the past fifty years. Feminism has changed legal understandings of rape and battering as well as the law of homicide and self-defense. Indeed, there is a growing awareness and body of scholarship showing that feminist concerns are not simply limited to "women's" crimes—crimes either committed by female defendants (such as battered women who kill their husbands) or crimes disproportionately affecting women (such as rape and battering). Instead, the feminist critique emerges within the criminal law anywhere gender is found, namely anywhere the law reflects social norms about women, men, and their relationships. What follows considers four different feminist approaches: the call to equality, to subjectivity, to norms, and to civil rights.