To understand if the feminist movement in Brazil perceives criminal justice as an effective tool to prevent and punish violence against women, this paper proposes a reconstruction of what has been addressed by feminist activists on the matter from the foundations of Brazilian feminism at the beginning of the 20th century to the current days. To analyze all the data collected, the first section presents the theoretical approach that guides the paper, the historical dialectical materialism, followed by a section on methodological considerations about the empirical material collected that was organized into different categories of feminist discourse about criminal law: “punitivist”, “garantist” and “abolitionist”. In the final and main section, three distinct periods are identified in the Movement´s history: in the first, there are no discussions about gender violence, followed by a second, in which domestic violence becomes a feminist issue without a clear desire for specific criminalization of gender violence. In the last and current period, activists portray themselves as victims and ask for the insertion of new (specific) kinds of criminal offenses related to gender violence. Also, the debates between punitivists and
abolitionists intensify with the isolation of garantists to academia, showing the need for penalists to work alongside feminists to ensure theoretical advances with a gender aware perspective without endangering material and procedural guarantees.