142 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
And yet, developmental psychology continues to saturate the field of
psychology and operate as a powerful colonial construct distributed
worldwide. While development is often presented and taught as a natural
accounting of phenomena, it is without a doubt a culturally and socially
determined way of describing the structures of living things. As Burman
(1994/2016) points out, developmental frameworks are powerful
deployments of social force that are, “often imperceptible, taken for
granted features about our expectations of ourselves, others, parents,
children and families, informing the structure of popular and consumer
culture as well as technical and official policies” (p. 2). The adoption of
developmental concepts and ideas, as simply a given, can make them
seemingly inaccessible to significant critique. They become naturalized
and as such, begin to permeate all aspects of our lives in powerful ways.
This paper will propose an extension of the analyses by Gilligan and
Burman. It will explicate alternative frameworks to masculinist theories of
moral development and offer alternatives based on contemporary feminist
theory.
FEMINISM AND DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
The relation of feminism to developmental psychology might be seen
as tenuous at best. Most developmental psychologists have little or no
understanding of feminist theory or its relationship to psychological
theories of development (Miller & Scholnik, 2014). One might go further
and say that psychology’s relation to its founding mothers and the interests
of women, both theoretically and practically is fraught with tension and
elision (Burman, 1994/2016; Collins, Dunlap, & Chrisler, 2002). While
there has been a significant rise in the number of women psychologists, the
theoretical and methodological orientation of the discipline as a whole is
still heavily reliant on psychology’s founding fathers (Clay, 2017). This
reliance on theoretical and methodological masculinist foundations has
profound and problematic implications for the way psychology has come
to understand itself within the broader frameworks of the prevailing social