252 Psychology of Women and Gender
The Second Wave (c. 1970–the Present)
The second wave of feminism sparked strong challenges to
psychology’s ideas about women. Feminists in psychology
openly challenged psychology’s choice of research topics,
its theoretical constructs and research methods, and its theo-
ries about women’s mental health, its modes of diagnosis,
and its therapeutic interventions. From a feminist perspec-
tive, many aspects of psychological knowledge have been
androcentric (that is, male-centered). Historically, men have
been studied much more often than women have. For exam-
ple, classic studies of personality by Murray (1938) and
Allport (1954), as well as McClelland’s landmark study of
achievement motivation (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, &
Lowell, 1953), excluded women. Moreover, psychological
theories about many aspects of cognition, social behavior,
emotion, and motivation have been influenced by cultural
biases against women (Crawford & Unger, 1994). Women’s
behavior has often been judged against an unacknowledged
norm based on white, middle-class men. Women’s behavior,
more often than men’s, has been seen as biologically deter-
mined, with researchers overlooking the different social situ-
ations of women and men.
Feminist psychologists quickly moved beyond critique to
focus on generating new knowledge about women and gen-
der. The psychology of women and gender is now a varied
enterprise that encompasses virtually every specialty area
and intellectual framework within psychology, that spans
international boundaries, and that has produced a large body
of research and scholarship. Our goal in this chapter is to
describe and evaluate representative approaches to research
in the field.
Recovering the Past
One early approach was to find the “great women” of the
past, that is, women who had made early contributions to
psychology that had gone unrecognized or been forgotten
(Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). In addition to Helen
Thompson Woolley and Leta Stetter Hollingworth, several
women made substantive contributions to psychology prior to
the present period. Among them are Louise Bates Ames, Mary
Whiton Calkins, Edna Heidbreder, Else Frenkel-Brunswik,
Marguerite Hertz, Karen Machover, Anne Roe, and Bluma
Zeigarnik. Historical studies began to correct the “woman-
less” image that psychology had maintained. However, study-
ing exceptional women, past and present, can be viewed as
tokenism. It has been criticized as an “add-women-and-stir”
approach that leaves male-centered norms and power struc-
tures unexamined. When notable women’s lives are examined
in their social context, however, this work can shed light not
just on individual ability and effort but also on the conditions
of work in the profession that govern women’s accomplish-
ments and lack thereof. For many decades, for example,
women psychologists faced structural obstacles that included
lack of employment opportunities, overtly sexist attitudes and
practices of gatekeepers to the profession, and social values
that made women responsible for family care.Woman as ProblemGiven psychology’s focus on the individual and its emphasis
on inner qualities and traits, psychologists, including feminist
psychologists, have been especially susceptible to the fallacy
of accounting for women’s social position solely in terms of
personal deficiencies. This approach has been called the
woman-as-problem framework (Crawford & Marecek,
1989). There are many examples: In the area of motivational
problems or conflicts, women have been said to suffer from
fear of success (Horner, 1970), the Cinderella complex, and
the impostor phenomenon (Clance, Dingman, Reviere, &
Stober, 1995). They were characterized as lacking crucial
skills such as assertiveness (Lakoff, 1975). And they were
urged to view therapy as a form of compensatory resocializa-
tion that would rectify their deficiencies. The problems faced
by women in corporate management have also been charac-
terized in terms of individual deficits. This individual-deficit
model represented women as lacking in business skills,
leadership ability, and appropriate interpersonal skills; it
neglected structural and institutional aspects of sex discrimi-
nation (Nieva & Gutek, 1981).
Research within the woman-as-problem framework has
sought to explain psychological problems or deficits of
women in terms of socialization or upbringing. Certainly,
gender-role socialization has been a useful explanatory
device. However, it emphasizes distal causes of gender dif-
ferences, such as early socialization; this may lead to ne-
glecting immediate causes. For example, women may speak
“unassertively” as an adaptive response to the immediate so-
cial situation, not because they lack the skills to speak more
assertively. Cues in that situation may indicate that assertive
behavior is unwelcome or will be penalized. Moreover, the
emphasis on early socialization fails to challenge the use of
men’s behavior as the norm against which women are mea-
sured. That is, women’s behavior is judged as problematic in
comparison to an idealized representation of men’s behavior.
For example, the “new assertive woman” who was held up as
the ideal speaker in assertiveness-training manuals of the
1970s exhibited the characteristics attributed to masculine
speakers in North American culture (Crawford, 1995).