Tag Archives: feminist psychology

Special Issue: “Feminism and/in/as Psychology: The Public Sciences of Sex and Gender”

Journals, , , , , , , , ,
Feminists form Division 35 of the American Psychological Association in 1973, now the Society for the Psychology of Women.

The August issue of History of Psychology is now online. Guest edited by Alexandra Rutherford and Michael Pettit, this special issue explores “Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender.” As Rutherford and Pettit write in their abstract,

In our introduction to this special issue on the histories of feminism, gender, sexuality, and the psy-disciplines, we propose the tripartite framework of “feminism and/in/as psychology” to conceptualize the dynamics of their conjoined trajectories and relationship to gender and sexuality from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. “Feminism and psychology” highlights the tensions between a political movement and a scientific discipline and the efforts of participants in each to problematize the other. “Feminism in psychology” refers to those historical moments when self-identified feminists intervened in psychology to alter its content, methodologies, and populations. We propose, as have others, that these interventions predate the 1970s, the period most commonly associated with the “founding” of feminist psychology. Finally, “feminism as psychology/psychology as feminism” explores the shared ground between psychology and feminism—the conceptual, methodological, and (more rarely) epistemological moments when psychology and feminism made common cause. We suggest that the traffic between feminism and psychology has been persistent, continuous, and productive, despite taking different historically and geographically contingent forms.

Full titles, authors, and abstracts for articles in this special issue follow below.

“The personal is scientific: Women, gender, and the production of sexological knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900–1931,” Kirsten Leng. The abstract reads, Continue reading Special Issue: “Feminism and/in/as Psychology: The Public Sciences of Sex and Gender” →

Bibliography: History of Feminist Psychology

General, Resources, ,

This post is written by Alexandra Rutherford, York University and is part of a special series of bibliographies on topics in the history of psychology.

I have included four sections in this reading list. All are limited to the North American context. The first section includes works that review and/or historically analyze the history of feminist psychology, psychology of women, and psychology of gender in North America. The second brief section includes a few resources on the history of feminist organizing/organizations in North American psychology. The last two sections I have called Feminist Psychology Classics I and II to refer to primary works pre-second wave feminism, and second wave and beyond, respectively. I have intentionally refrained from including the body of work on psychoanalysis and feminism, and have used fairly internalist inclusion criteria, that is, I have included works written by psychologists, generated within the disciplinary framework of organized psychology. Clearly, there are many classic works of feminist psychology that fall outside these boundaries.

I. History of Feminist Psychology/Psychology of Women/Psychology of Gender:

Brodsky, A. M. (1980). A decade of feminist influence on psychotherapy. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 4, 331-344.

Crawford, M. & Marecek, J. (1989). Psychology reconstructs the female, 1968-1988. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, 147-165.

Denmark, F. L., & Fernandez, L. C. (1993). Historical development of the psychology of women. In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (pp. 4-22). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Harris, B. J. (1984). The power of the past: History and the psychology of women. In M. Lewin (Ed.), In the shadow of the past: Psychology portrays the sexes (pp. 1-25). New York: Columbia University Press. Continue reading Bibliography: History of Feminist Psychology →