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Feminist Psychology

Article in Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society · December 2006

DOI: 10.1086/491683

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 Abigail J. Stewart
Andrea L. Dottolo

Feminist Psychology

T he invention of feminist psychology began in the 1970s.1 Its begin-

nings were memorably noted and analyzed in Signs in 1975 by Mary
Parlee, on the occasion of the first inclusion of the psychology of
women as a special topic in the Annual Review of Psychology and the
formation of a new American Psychological Association (APA) division
on the psychology of women. In her article, Parlee focused particularly
on the impact of feminism on psychology, noting with approval that these
developments meant that “women, at least as a topic of research, are
unlikely to be excluded with the same efficient thoroughness as they have
in the past” (1975, 119). At the same time, she registered some reser-
vations about the concept of a psychology of women: “Considered as a
subfield of psychology . . . the notion of a ‘psychology of women’ seems
to me to be a conceptual monstrosity . . . an institutionally sanctioned
distinction between ‘psychology’ . . . and ‘psychology of women’” (120).
In 1976, also in Signs, Reesa Vaughter reviewed the contributions fem-
inist researchers had made to empirical research in many areas. However,
she concluded that the important challenges coming from feminist psy-
chologists were methodological and epistemological: “There is nothing
new about women being psychologists. What is revolutionary is the force
of women in psychology and in the psychology of women to change the
structure of the belief system of science to construct a psychology of
human behavior” (1976, 146). Vaughter’s emphasis, like Parlee’s, was on
the changes to be wrought in psychology by the impact of feminism.

We would like to thank our colleagues in Women’s Studies and in the Gender and
Personality in Context Group for lively discussions of many of these texts.
1
Of course there were important precursors before then—occasional studies of women,
or of sex differences, or of issues particularly affecting women by psychologists sympathetic
to women, who often (though not always) were themselves women. We are focusing here,
though, on the creation of a relatively organized subfield within the discipline of psychology,
one marked by the creation of courses, textbooks, journals, and a division within the American
Psychological Association (APA).

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 2]
䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3102-0008$10.00
494 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

In 1979 Parlee largely maintained this focus; she discussed four kinds
of work that concerned “the relationship between feminist psychology
and the field as a whole” (1979, 123). Here she considered the vigor of
feminist psychologists’ critiques of methodological practices in the field,
as well as their empirical research. Her article was much less hopeful than
Vaughter’s earlier one, however, as she noted “the strength of psychology’s
resistance to feminist insights” (133).
In 1985 Nancy Henley again reviewed “patterns of development within
feminist psychology and its relation to mainstream psychology” (1985,
101) but also enlarged the focus of consideration. She noted that although
there were important empirical developments in feminist psychology, “psy-
chologists of women and gender have seldom brought broader feminist
theory into their work. Discussions that have occupied the feminist schol-
arly community—for example, discussions of [Nancy] Chodorow’s or
Michel Foucault’s theories, topics that should be of interest to psychol-
ogists—get little if any attention in feminist psychological writings” (119).
In short, Henley emphasized the impact—or lack of it—of interdisciplinary
women’s studies on feminist psychologists. In fact, the relative absence
of psychology from Signs over the subsequent decades suggests a rather
distant relationship between the two. Apart from narrower essays on par-
ticular topics (Rochelle Semmel Albin [1977] on rape, Richard C. Fried-
man et al. [1980] on the menstrual cycle, Janet Hyde [1990] on meta-
analysis and the psychology of gender differences), Henley’s is the last
review essay focused on the discipline as a whole by psychologists in Signs
until this one.2
Twenty years have passed since that review, years during which psy-
chology has played a minor—sometimes invisible—role in interdisciplinary
women’s studies. Despite that fact, we believe there is evidence of a deep
transformation in feminist psychology from the beginnings reviewed by
Parlee, Vaughter, and Henley, even as many themes still persist. That
transformation can be understood both by looking back at the earlier
work from the perspective of feminist psychologists who have contributed
throughout this period and by looking directly at the scholarship a new
generation of feminist psychologists is producing today. We therefore focus
our inevitably selective review on work by feminist scholars who were
“there at the creation” (that is, who published feminist scholarship in the

2
Some humanists have reviewed psychologically significant topics (e.g., Marianne Hirsch
[1981], on mothers and daughters, and Judith Kegan Gardiner [1992] and Michele Barrett
[1992], on psychoanalysis and feminism). These are, of course, different from psychologists’
own reflections on the work being produced in psychology.
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 495

1970s) and work by feminist scholars at the beginning of their careers

now. This generational lens reveals both how things have changed over
time and what is common among contemporary feminist psychologists of
different generations.

Looking back: Seventies feminist psychologists reflect on the field

In the past few years, some of the feminist psychologists who made early
contributions have engaged in a public process of stocktaking of their
own roles in the field and of the field itself. The resulting work provides
a collective reflection on the creation and development of a field within
psychology and is therefore the focus of our own; it also provides evidence
of a real conversation with interdisciplinary women’s studies.3
One of the most influential figures in the seventies, Sandra Bem, also
produced in 1998 one of those more recent reflections. Bem, whose
work was discussed in all of the Signs reviews on psychology in the
seventies and eighties, began from inside experimental psychology and
pressed hard for a rethinking of psychologists’ use of categories of mas-
culinity and femininity both as descriptors of personality and as nor-
mative prescriptions for individuals. Her work critiqued narrow defini-
tions of sex roles and argued in favor of psychological androgyny. In
the beginning she articulated a largely behavioral notion of gender
(which would now be considered in terms of gender performance). She
increasingly became interested, though, in the different ways people
think about gender, contributing the notion that people vary in the
degree to which they organize the social world in terms of gender (or
are “gender-schematic”). Over time, and at least partly in response to
a lively debate with other scholars in psychology and in women’s studies,
she developed a much more radical theory of the psychology of gender,
one that argues for keeping androcentrism, biological essentialism, and
gender polarization quite separate and for recognizing the separate im-
portance of normative heterosexuality (Bem 1994). As Bem commented
in her subsequent memoir, “If The Lenses of Gender is the statement of
my theory, An Unconventional Family is the statement of my practice”

3
We have focused on works published in the past few years by psychologists who also
made important contributions in the 1970s. Our focus forced us to omit some important
exemplars who had published reflections earlier (e.g., Michelle Fine [1992], Jeanne Marecek
[1995], Jill G. Morawski [1994]). It is also worth noting that Blythe McVicker Clinchy and
Julie K. Norem published a major Gender and Psychology Reader (1998), and Rhoda K.
Unger published a Handbook of the Psychology of Women and Gender (2001), another kind
of marker of the institutionalization of the subfield.
496 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

(1998, x). For the most part, then, the book is not a reflection on Bem’s
personal history of feminist psychology; it is instead a reflection on her
attempt to live out her commitments to a feminist psychology in her
personal life, both in an egalitarian marriage and in raising children.
Along the way, though, Bem does comment on what it felt like to
develop feminist psychology as well as on the reception of feminist psy-
chology in the field.
Early on, Bem struggled with her own indifference to the research
questions around her; she describes her transformation into a passionate
researcher:

Then the idea occurred to me. . . . I could do empirical research

on the question of whether so-called androgynous people might be
healthier in some way than more conventionally gendered people.
And by doing this, I could also introduce the concept of androgyny
into the psychological literature and thereby begin to challenge the
traditional assumption of the mental health establishment that a
mature, healthy identity necessarily requires women to be feminine
and men to be masculine.
From that moment on, my political, personal and professional
passions fed one other [sic] during every moment of the day. I had
not just a job; I had a mission. (1998, 142)

This sense of mission and purpose was not, however, validated in her
actual job: “My research interests and goals did not fit into the Stanford
psychology department’s intellectual structure” (1998, 148). Bem was
rewarded with many early successes, including the APA’s Early Career
Award in 1976. But despite her accomplishments, Bem, like many other
early casualties among feminist psychologists, was denied tenure.
Creating an interesting turning point for Bem, Cornell’s women’s stud-
ies program recruited her as director at the time of her tenure denial at
Stanford. In that role Bem went on to hire seven other feminist scholars,
all of whom ultimately were tenured, and she worked hard and successfully
to bring an adequate analysis of gender and sexuality to bear on the
potential tensions within women’s studies between lesbian and hetero-
sexual feminists. After her long leadership of women’s studies (from 1978
to 1985), Bem produced her theoretical book, The Lenses of Gender
(1994)—a book that is quite remarkable within psychology for its forth-
right politics and its radical rethinking of the importance, and possibility,
of transforming the cognitive structures that hold gender in place. It is a
book that Bem describes as her effort to “tame a whole menagerie of
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 497

ideas on gender and sexuality from disciplines as diverse as anthropology,

biology, history, philosophy, and law” (1998, 160).
Bem’s trajectory is surely individual—beginning with an effort to
blend a critique of mental health paradigms with experimental research
that appeared successful within mainstream psychology by many indi-
cators but was ultimately unacceptable, at least for Bem’s tenure review
at Stanford; developing into an interdisciplinary exile in women’s studies;
and then resulting in a transformative theory of the psychology of gen-
der. Her story is, importantly, not merely a cautionary tale about the
dangers of doing feminist psychology; it is also a tale of the possibilities
for invention and integration that interdisciplinary women’s studies pro-
vided for one psychologist.
Writing from two faculty appointments—one in women’s studies at San
Diego State University and one in psychology at the California School of
Professional Psychology—Oliva Espin offers an account of a very different
career path in her late 1990s collection of her own previously published
essays, Latina Realities: Essays on Healing, Migration, and Sexuality
(1997). She comments on the “basic threads” that “run throughout the
essays” (xiii): “Although I did not intentionally focus on women immi-
grants in some of my early projects, the studies highlighted them none-
theless. For example, the Latina lesbians and the Latina healers of my
early research all ‘happened’ to be immigrants. Similarly, I see in retrospect
that in the articles focused on feminist therapy with women of color I
used two clinical examples of Latin American immigrant women. Likewise,
during my years as a practicing feminist therapist my clientele consisted
almost exclusively of women of color, immigrant and refugee women, and
many Latinas” (xiv). In the book’s essays, Espin presents theoretical ar-
guments, methodological critique, and empirical evidence in an unusual
mix for psychology. She points out that “feminist psychologist researchers,
practitioners, and writers have proffered a new vision of gender studies
in psychology. My contribution to that process, alongside the work of
many others, has been to distill the significance of gender in the psycho-
logical development of women who are twice or sometimes three times
‘othered’ by ‘mainstream’ psychology” (xiv). This focus on immigration,
ethnicity, and sexuality in Espin’s work reflects not only her own expe-
riences (on which she draws explicitly in some of the essays, e.g., “Giving
Voice to Silence: The Psychologist as Witness”) but also the experiences
of those she studied, experiences mostly absent from mainstream psy-
chology when Espin began her research.
In an even more recent book, Women Crossing Boundaries (1999),
Espin examines the same issues—immigration, sexuality, and ethnicity—
498 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

in interviews with a sample of forty-three women who immigrated to the

United States from all over the world. She continues in this work to
illuminate how developmental processes (most of the women immigrated
as young adolescents)—and social and historical events and circumstances
associated both with departure from one country and with arrival in an-
other—construct and reflect women’s experiences and identities.
Stephanie Riger’s book, Transforming Psychology (2000), also brings
together essays written over an extended period, and in the process she
engages in reflection on what is and is not “transformed” about psychology
along the way. Interestingly, Riger too writes from a joint appointment
in psychology and women’s studies, and she served as a director of
women’s studies for ten years. The book is divided in two. The first part
focuses mainly on epistemological issues; here Riger provides crisp analyses
of most of the important issues taken up by feminist critics of psychology
both from within psychology and from women’s studies: bias in psy-
chology and the goal of objectivity, the (contested) distinction between
sex and gender, the adequacy of individualism to construct our social
behavior, the adequacy of psychology’s methods for studying contexts of
lives, and the importance of contextualizing agency within an understand-
ing of social construction and even of postmodernism.
In the second section of the book, Riger examines a number of social
and organizational contexts of women’s experience, including sexual ha-
rassment at work, efforts at empowerment, management, low-paying jobs,
feminist organizations, and violent men. Here Riger provides thoughtful
critiques not only of psychology’s limited view of women (and that of
many organizations) but also of some feminist efforts. For example, she
unpacks some feminist community psychologists’ well-intentioned but
misguided efforts to “empower” women in highly individualistic ways that
actually might undermine community connections.
Riger comments that for her “writing is a means of channeling emotion,
of pouring my anger into a form that would broadcast it widely” (6). She
says, further, that “writing is a vehicle for protest, a way to make others
see the world my way and in so doing, to challenge their views” (6).
Riger’s contributions to feminist psychology are explicitly oriented toward
social change. They come from the perspective of community psychology,
with a serious focus on the ways that policies—from sexual harassment
policies in particular organizations to national welfare policies—reflect and
create our gendered relations, increasing or decreasing human suffering
along the way.
In 2001, Mary Gergen published Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology:
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 499

Narrative, Gender, and Performance. She uses the volume to explore what
would happen “if one did psychology in that empty space of possibility
beyond the domain of the everyday and taken for granted” (2001, 1).
She provides an overview of feminist critiques of psychology and then
offers some methodological experiments in doing new kinds of psychol-
ogy, projects “presented not as prototypes but rather as intimations of
future possibilities” (5). She examines a variety of aspects of gendered
experiences of the life course, social interactions, and (especially) the body
in a series of chapters recounting studies with features of the new psy-
chology. These include studies of popular autobiographies written by men
and women and a group of women’s discussion of their experience of
menopause. She turns then to a study of “social ghosts” or imaginary
interlocutors in adult life, an analysis of the discourse surrounding a con-
troversial incident on a college campus, and scripts associated with per-
formance psychology. Though Gergen is probably the scholar most willing
to take up new methods among those we are reviewing here, she com-
ments that “I discovered along the way to practicing a new psychology
that it is very difficult and not altogether wise to bypass traditional so-
lutions to research problems at all times. Overall, in these chapters, some
more than others, there is a melding of more traditional approaches with
more unconventional ones” (5).
Gergen notes that she was generally uncomfortable with an awareness
that her work was not wholly outside the traditional discipline: “When I
found myself not at the margins of the discipline but directly in the middle,
I became rather disconcerted. I could not imagine any alternatives to
traditional practices, or I was unaware that I had replicated them. Even-
tually I concluded that the notion of margin versus middle is an over-
worked polarity in itself. The borders between insider and outsider are
not so clear and clean as one might wish or pretend. The suspicions that
I have developed concerning binary oppositions have also been a post-
modern gift” (2001, 5–6). The book is conceived as “addressed to feminist
scholars” (6), both within psychology and outside it. It provides feminist
psychologists with some exemplary and innovative examples, and it offers
interdisciplinary women’s studies scholars a purchase on the ways in which
psychologists are using narrative and performance methods in their re-
search (and some of the troubles they have when they do). In her con-
clusion, Gergen invokes interdisciplinary women’s studies scholars Kum-
Kum Bhavani, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler to help articulate her
vision of feminist psychology.
Finally, the most recent book we will consider is by Stephanie Shields
500 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

(2002) and concerns the always important issue of gender and emotion.4
Shields, like Bem and Riger, holds a joint appointment in psychology and
women’s studies and has directed two different women’s studies programs.
Her earliest research included groundbreaking articles about the history
of psychology and gender, including one published in Signs (Shields 1975,
1982). In her latest book, Speaking from the Heart (2002), Shields reviews
ways in which gender stereotypes create a paradox in our interpretations
of emotions (e.g., by construing men as both more angry and less emo-
tional than women). Shields explains that her book grew out of her frus-
tration that “questions relevant to gender and emotion, questions that
seemed urgent to students and friends in real life, and that were becoming
increasingly central to my own reading of the field, figured as insignificant
in mainstream emotions research” (xi). She explores how this situation
arose as a result of the narrow way in which emotion theorists concep-
tualized both emotions and gender: “Giving priority to the pursuit of
‘true’ emotion and defining essential emotion in terms other than social
meaning ensure that gender, race, class, and historical era are set aside as
peripheral to the main objectives of theory. This state of things has not
been helped by the tendency to view gender effects from the rather the-
oretically impoverished perspective of empirically identified sex-related dif-
ferences (and similarities). . . . Psychologists who study emotion, rightly
or wrongly, have tended to conclude that gender is not particularly im-
portant to explaining emotion” (2002, 13).
Shields argues, in the remainder of the book, that in mainstream re-
search similarities between men and women in the experience of emotion
are exaggerated, while differences in the way in which “gender matters
in very particular conditions” (16) are underexamined. She provides evi-
dence drawn from different historical periods and different social contexts
(including, for example, fatherhood), in terms of different norms about
emotional responses, and concludes that it is our beliefs about emotions
that are particularly gendered and that those beliefs are consequential.
Shields summarizes: “Judgments about the presence and meaning of emo-
tion in oneself and others are not made casually or lightly. Who gets called
‘emotional’ depends on who is doing the naming, who is named, and the
circumstances in which emotion occurs. The relationship between gender
and emotion is not just a subject of academic inquiry, but one that pro-
foundly affects every aspect of lives in ways that we often do not even
suspect” (2002, 185).

4
Several other feminist psychologists, including Francesca Cancian (1999) and Leslie
Brody (1999), have published significant integrative books focusing on gender and emotion.
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 501

Each of these five scholars offers a perspective on domains within fem-

inist psychology that she helped to create. The specific domains are in-
evitably accidental, given that the selection of these particular scholars to
review depended in part on the timing of publication. But the issues central
to their work—cognitive schemas; immigration, sexuality, and identity;
epistemology and methodology; gender and organizations; the body; and
gender and emotions—are also a sensible sampling of issues with persistent
importance in feminist psychology. All of these scholars have been con-
tributing to the field since the seventies, and what is striking and different
from the earlier reviews in Signs is that it is clear they have been deeply
influenced by interdisciplinary women’s studies. All of them write with
an explicit recognition that psychology and psychologists can contribute
to an analysis and critique of the status quo or to an endorsement of it;
they cannot in fact avoid doing one or the other. All of them aim to
contribute to a different and better social world. Finally, they all write
with some degree of frustration but also with some amazement at what
they, along with many others, have accomplished in creating a feminist
psychology.

Looking ahead: New hands building feminist psychology

We would have a very limited picture of the state of contemporary feminist
psychology based solely on the reflections of one generation. We hope to
balance this picture with accounts of some of the cutting-edge work in
feminist psychology being carried out by colleagues who have joined this
effort more recently. Their work builds in some direct ways on the work
of the generation of scholars we have just discussed, but it is also different.
Much of their work is on topics such as the body, sexuality, and transgender
and intersex studies—topics that are both familiar to interdisciplinary
women’s studies scholars and deeply shaped by postmodern and Fou-
cauldian notions about agency, identity, power, and institutions. These
foundational ideas in women’s studies and feminist discourses are ap-
pearing in some specialty areas in psychology, in particular disciplinary
forms. Some of the features of this work—though published in mainstream
psychology journals—in fact derive from theories and discourses quite
unfamiliar to most psychologists. It is a new and exciting development
for feminist psychologists to be grounding their work in feminist theory
and bending psychological methods to study those theories.
It could be argued that the topics studied are somewhat old news in
feminist circles; equally, many of the studies could be viewed as vulnerable
to one or another of the core critiques of traditional disciplinary conven-
502 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

tions of psychology that have preoccupied feminist psychologists from the

beginning (see, e.g., Gergen’s 2001 review of facets of traditional psy-
chology especially in need of reform).5 In contrast to the prior generation,
the younger scholars we have identified are less focused on directly dis-
cussing these issues; they use a range of methods familiar to psychologists
quite flexibly, sometimes unorthodoxly, and sometimes with direct chal-
lenges to the various epistemological and methodological articles of faith
that feminist psychologists have attacked persistently and without much
obvious impact on the field.
These younger scholars seem to be engaged, then, in three important
tasks. First, they conduct research that directly builds on some of the work
of feminist predecessors in the field. Second, they continue to confront
biased and exclusive assumptions of the field that are still relevant in their
current form. For example, they are still making arguments to justify mixed
or alternative research methods and interdisciplinarity, and they are often
challenging universal laws and applications of human behavior. As will be
seen below, Katy Day, Brandon Gough, and Majella McFadden (2003)
analyze their data on working-class women’s aggression with somewhat
unconventional methods for traditonal psychology, including a “Foucaul-
dian style of discourse analysis” (146), and Peter Hegarty’s (2002) research
tackles biologically essentialist attributions about sexuality, linking such over-
arching beliefs to politics rather than to “nature.” Finally, all of these schol-
ars’ work reflects full and deep familiarity with both interdisciplinary
women’s studies and mainstream psychology—and is framed within the
terms of both. It is creating new fusions and integrations that look different
from much of the work generated by the previous generation.
In reviewing current exemplars of feminist psychology, we could not
hope to be exhaustive, so we needed criteria for selection. We were in-
terested in recent research conducted by promising scholars who directly
build on the work of feminist psychologists who came before them. We
required, then, in choosing our exemplars, that they demonstrate a con-
sciousness of this legacy by citing earlier feminist psychologists in their
work. We focused on psychologists who obtained their PhDs in 1995 or

5
The first is that “the scientist is or should be an uninvolved and unbiased spectator
who simply collects the data from subjects” (Gergen 2001, 2). Another assumption in need
of reform is that “general laws of human behavior can be established through experimental
methods” (3). Gergen’s third tenet, that “traditional science had made claims to a stance of
value neutrality” (3), is closely connected to the fourth, that “facts are independent of the
scientist who establishes them” (4). The last is that scientific methods are superior techniques
for establishing “truth” (4).
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 503

after to ensure that they could reasonably have been exposed to the work
of feminist psychologists. We restricted ourselves to psychologists who
had published at least some of their work in mainstream psychology jour-
nals because this kind of work was the focus of earlier Signs reviews and
also because we were genuinely interested in examining the kind of work
that appears in these disciplinary locations. Many of these young feminist
psychologists aim explicitly to address race, class, gender, and sexuality as
social identities and constructions, just as the exemplars from the seventies
also do in their current work (but often did not in their earlier work).
These issues preoccupy virtually all feminist psychologists today, but the
specific approaches they use to study them differ.
Jessica Morris was trained in clinical psychology at the University of
Vermont. In 1997, while a doctoral candidate, she published an article
in the Journal of Homosexuality titled “Lesbian Coming Out as a Multi-
dimensional Process” (Morris 1997). She offers a theoretical approach to
studying lesbian coming out characterized by four dimensions: sexual
identity formation, disclosure of sexual orientation to others, sexual ex-
pression and behavior, and lesbian consciousness. This research is explicitly
feminist and innovative in a variety of ways. She complicates both the
traditional linear narrative of developmental stage models of sexuality and
generalizations between gay men and lesbians; historicizes general research
on sexuality and, more specifically, “outness”; and considers multiple iden-
tities and social contexts that include age, race, ethnicity, religion, geo-
graphic location, income, employment, and education. Morris cites influ-
ential feminist interdisciplinary scholars such as Carla Goldin, Beverly
Greene, Celia Kitzinger, Audre Lorde, Cherrı́e Moraga, Adrienne Rich,
Esther Rothblum, and Paula Rust, to name a few.
In 1999 Morris collaborated with Rothblum in a study titled “Who
Fills Out a ‘Lesbian’ Questionnaire? The Interrelationship of Sexual Ori-
entation, Years ‘Out,’ Disclosure of Sexual Orientation, Sexual Experience
with Women, and Participation in the Lesbian Community.” Here they
implemented a version of Morris’s multidimensional frame in an empirical
analysis and provided an interventionist interpretation: “Researchers who
are studying one aspect of the lesbian experience (e.g., outness to others)
need to ensure that they are not assuming such behavior based on other
dimensions (such as frequent participation in lesbian community activities
or years being out), especially among White and Asian American lesbians”
(1999, 538). Morris and Rothblum differentiated and clarified aspects of
experience and behavior, and they warned against generalizations based
on ideas about lesbian and racial-ethnic identities. This research uses main-
504 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

stream psychology approaches to measurement to develop a research strat-

egy that incorporates some of the complex understanding of sexuality that
has emerged in women’s studies.
Lisa Diamond, who received her PhD from Cornell University in 1999,
has published studies of the romantic relationships of sexual minority and
heterosexual youth (Diamond 2000a; Diamond and Lucas 2004), as well
as a longitudinal study of lesbians’ sexual identity, attractions, and behavior
(Diamond 2000b, 2003a). Like Morris, Diamond carefully differentiates
separate elements of lesbian experience and demonstrates the remarkable
fluidity of different elements of sexuality, at least among young women,
over time. In this research Diamond has documented some young
women’s relinquishment of lesbian and bisexual identities and has devel-
oped a “biobehavioral model” of sexual orientation (2003b). Her re-
search, like Morris’s, incorporates references to and aspects of the schol-
arship on sexuality in women’s studies (including, e.g., the work of Estelle
Freedman and of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg) while drawing heavily on
mainstream psychology theories and methods and the work of feminist
psychologists (including Janet Hyde, Kitzinger, Sue Wilkinson, Pauline
Bart, Anne Peplau, and Rothblum).
Kimberly King received her PhD in clinical psychology from the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles in 1998. In an article titled “Do You
See What I See? Effects of Group Consciousness on African American
Women’s Attributions to Prejudice” (2003), King conducted the first em-
pirical study of womanist consciousness, or of “the integration of ethnic
and feminist consciousness among women of color” (19). She distinguished
between feminist consciousness, ethnic consciousness, and womanist con-
sciousness, providing “empirical support for the long-standing theoretical
assertion by feminist scholars of color that women of color do not con-
ceptualize their (our) gender status independently of ethnic status” (25).
By integrating and operationalizing the concept of intersectionality, King
advances the dialogue in psychology toward feminist aims. She cites im-
portant feminist predecessors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Lillian Comas-
Diaz, Faye Crosby, Susan Fiske, Paula Giddings, Pat Gurin, bell hooks,
Hope Landrine, M. Brinton Lykes, and Peggy McIntosh. In her exami-
nation of group consciousness, King makes active and intentional claims
against antifeminist research that aims to show that marginalized groups
exaggerate experiences of discrimination: “It seems important to clarify that
the approach of the current study emphasizes individual differences in social
perception as a means of better understanding the process of experiencing
prejudice but does not support the proposition that members of low status
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 505

groups are motivated to perceive more prejudice than is objectively accurate

in order to protect their self-esteem” (King 2003, 21).
The work of Eileen Zurbriggen (Zurbriggen 2000; Zurbriggen and
Yost 2004), who received her PhD from the University of Michigan in
1997, serves as an example of scholarship that has emerged out of feminist
theory and is served to psychologists in the language of science. One of
Zurbriggen’s experiments explores the relationship between power-sex
associations and aggressive sexual behavior. She implements traditional
experimental research methods to investigate hypotheses that are
grounded in the work of feminist theorists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine
MacKinnon. Through implicit measures, Zurbriggen found that “social
motives and cognitive power-sex associations are able to predict part of
the variance in self-reported aggressive sexual behavior” (2000, 577). By
operationalizing and measuring feminist arguments—in this case, that the
linkage between power and sex is not essential or universal in men but
when present is destructive to women—both women’s studies and psy-
chology can claim and make use of this research. In another study, Zur-
briggen and Megan R. Yost (2004) examine relations among power, dom-
inance, desire, and pleasure in men’s and women’s sexual fantasies, in part
explicitly examining some of the claims made by Carol Vance (1989) and
others about women’s sexuality. In addition to grounding her research in
the work of interdisciplinary women’s studies scholars such as Tania Mod-
leski, Ann Snitow, and those already named, Zurbriggen also cites many
feminist psychologists, among others Martha Burt, Mary Koss, Barbara
Gutek, Elene Haavio-Manila, Janet Spence, and Jan Yoder.
Emerging feminist psychologists have built on women’s studies’ em-
phasis on all power hierarchies, not just gender. For example, Joan Ostrove
(who received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1996) and
Elizabeth Cole (whose degree was a bit earlier, in 1993) edited a special
edition of the Journal of Social Issues (2003) on social class and education.
One paper (Bullock and Limbert 2003), by Heather Bullock (who com-
pleted her PhD at the University of Rhode Island in 1996) and Wendy
Limbert (currently a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa
Cruz), explores low-income women’s perceptions of status and oppor-
tunity, while in a related one Ostrove (2003) shows the different meanings
of social-class background among college-educated women. In a third,
Ram Mahalingam (2003; he completed his degree at the University of
Pittsburgh in 1998) examines essentialism in beliefs about social class and
caste. All of these authors (and others in the volume) cite feminist psy-
chologists, as well as interdisciplinary women’s studies scholars, in their
articles.
506 ❙ Stewart and Dottolo

In related research, Day (who completed her doctorate at Sheffield

Hallam University in 1997), Gough, and McFadden studied “Women
Who Drink and Fight: A Discourse Analysis of Working-Class Women’s
Talk” (2003). As the title suggests, the study is a qualitative exploration
(through focus groups discussions) centered on working-class femininities
and aggression. The researchers explicitly challenge the essentialist notion
that women are “the non-aggressive sex” and “moves beyond a reading
of female-female aggression that is reduced to competition for men”
(153). In addition, the authors attempt to incorporate a geographical and
poststructuralist perspective into their method and analyses.
Another recent development in the field is the investigation of justi-
fication ideologies. Hegarty, who completed his dissertation at Stanford
University in 1999, has published several articles examining how people
explain or rationalize their opinions about gays and lesbians. In one study
(Hegarty 2002), he explores the relationship between beliefs about the
immutability of sexuality and stigmatization, complicating the reasoning
and politics of connecting biologically essentialist explanations of sexuality
to tolerance. Hegarty cites interdisciplinary and feminist scholars such as
Butler, Erving Goffman, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Greg Herek, Kitzinger,
and Shane Phelan. He also compares U.S. and British samples, drawing
attention to U.S. ideologies as culturally bound. Hegarty’s research is
both politically interventionist and critical of the relationship between
politics and science. He unapologetically asserts, “Yoking tolerance to
biological determinism undermines pedagogical practices aimed at de-
veloping students’ skills at detecting and critiquing masculinist and het-
erosexist ideological assumptions in biological science. The present studies
are consistent with the proposition that heterosexual-identified people may
be constructing their beliefs about brain nuclei, genes and hormones to
fit their sexual politics rather than the reverse” (2002, 163).

What does this generational perspective on feminist psychology

offer?
The work of feminist psychologists from these two generations seems to
us to look both similar and quite different now than it did when Parlee,
Vaughter, and Henley surveyed it. Some issues—such as persistent resis-
tances from mainstream psychology—remain thorns in the sides of fem-
inist psychologists. At the same time, both seventies and emerging feminist
psychologists are producing new work that is deeply influenced by inter-
disciplinary women’s studies scholarship. In this sense it is clear that both
groups are working in the same field at the same time.
 S I G N S Winter 2006 ❙ 507

The generational difference, we think, is that the scholarship by emerg-

ing feminist psychologists is less preoccupied with staking out claims about
the nature of their enterprise than that by the earlier ones. Is this a sign
that some arguments have actually and at last become unnecessary, at least
some of the time? This new research also seems to us to draw unapolo-
getically, freely, and readily from a wide range of disciplines and ideas,
especially from interdisciplinary women’s studies, while being published
in mainstream psychology journals. Finally, it seems to us that it offers
examples of feminist psychologists using conventional psychological meth-
ods to confirm feminist theories (as Zurbriggen does), to challenge them
(as King does), and to develop them (as Morris does).
It is clear from both their accounts and their recent work that the
seventies psychologists have worked hard to develop their own work into
truly integrated feminist psychology; the result was hard-won. The emerg-
ing scholars seem more easily able to begin from there, and they are
moving on to develop exciting new feminist psychologies—work that we
hope will influence both psychology and women’s studies, as it is fully
grounded in both.

Department of Psychology and Program in Women’s Studies

University of Michigan

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