Thirty Years of Scholarship in the Women and Criminal Justice Journal: Gender, Feminism, and Intersectionality

Abstract

Thirty years ago the Women and Criminal Justice (WCJ) journal was founded to provide a venue for the publication of articles by and about women as they interacted with the criminal justice system. A particular focus was given to how patriarchy defined that experience for women caught up in the system as the victimized, accused and convicted, women professionals who worked in the system and women (and men) academics who studied both groups. In our research we reviewed nearly 30 years of articles with special attention to their treatment of gender, feminism, and intersectionality. We found that from the first WCJ was open to the “intersectional” lives of women, and that race, class, and gender influenced the experiences of women as offenders, victims, and practitioners. The analysis of this intersectionality of women’s lives remains a focus of the journal.

Keywords:

• feminist criminology
• intersectionality
• author
• research
• citation

Notes

Notes

1 This is essentially a Liberal Feminist perspective (see Daly and Chesney-Lind, 1988).

2 For the purposes of the present study, “gender” is limited to cis conceptions/meanings of the term.

3 Although each article was included, the WCJ has also published book reviews. These publications were not included in the current analyses.

4 These are not studies but rather literature reviews, biographies, autobiographies, legal reviews, and thought pieces.

5 This portion of data collection was done all at one time (mid July 2019) to ensure that each article was fairly measured when determining the number of times it had been cited.