Carol Smart

Carol Smart is a British sociologist and criminologist who played a pioneering role in the development of feminist criminology and later in sociologies of family and intimacy. She began her academic career critiquing the patriarchal structures within criminal justice and criminological theory, before expanding her work to explore the social construction of law, motherhood, and kinship. She is currently Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester.

Smart’s 1976 book Women, Crime and Criminology was a groundbreaking feminist critique of mainstream criminology. She argued that traditional criminology ignored women’s experiences both as offenders and as victims, and that gendered power relations needed to be central to any analysis of crime. Smart challenged the supposed objectivity and neutrality of criminological knowledge and drew on critical theory, feminist epistemology, and social constructionism. Her later work in family sociology further developed the idea that law, identity, and kinship are socially constructed and shaped by gendered power dynamics. Smart remains one of the key intellectual figures bridging feminist criminology and critical sociology.