Women's groups and feminists in the United States have a long and conflicted history on issues related to crime, punishment, and law and order. Periodically, they have played central roles in defining violence as a threat to the social order and uncritically pushing for more enhanced policing powers to address law-and-order concerns. If one looks back at the history of penal policy and reform, it is striking what an uncritical stance earlier women reformers took toward the state. The women's reform movements and waves of feminist agitation that have appeared off and on since the nineteenth century in the United States helped to construct institutions and identities and establish practices that bolstered conservative tendencies in penal policy.

The contemporary women's movement in the United States helped facilitate the carceral state. Demands by the U.S. women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s to address the issues of rape and domestic violence had more far-reaching penal consequences in the United States than in other countries where burgeoning women's movements also identified these two issues as central concerns. Ironically, some of the very historical and institutional factors that made the U.S. women's movement relatively more successful in gaining public acceptance and achieving its goals for women were important building blocks for the carceral state that emerged simultaneously in the 1970s.