250 Psychology of Women and Gender
led psychologists to relegate knowledge about women to the
margins and to regard questions about gender as having little
import or significance.
SETTING THE STAGE
In a later section, we describe work on women and gender
from earlier eras of psychology. As we note, there was a lack
of support for such work, and those who engaged in it found
their efforts difficult to sustain. The creation of a field of
study as it exists today had to await two developments: a crit-
ical mass of scholars devoted to questions of gender and the
political impetus of the second wave of feminism, which
emerged in the 1960s.
Until the late 1960s, graduate programs in psychology
admitted few women. Most were admitted to masters degree
programs but not to doctoral programs. The more selective the
school, the fewer women were granted access. The more pres-
tigious the specialty within psychology, the more obstacles to
women’s participation were created. Women were mostly
channeled into applied work in child psychology, school
psychology, and counseling. Training requirements and the
typical academic career trajectory suited men’s life pattern;
they were not readily compatible with the family and domes-
tic responsibilities that women were expected to shoulder.
For those women who managed to complete advanced
training in psychology, occupational barriers remained.
Women who entered academia were likely to be pigeonholed
in adjunct appointments and teaching positions, preserving
the prestigious and lucrative research positions for men.
Women were overrepresented in departments and institutions
where research was not possible. Women who entered applied
fields, such as clinical and counseling psychology, also faced
occupational discrimination and invidious stereotypes. In
clinical psychology, most doctoral-level therapists were men.
Women who were therapists had to confront the accepted wis-
dom that male therapists were more competent and more pre-
pared to deal with serious clinical disorders. Thus, a common
pattern was that of a male therapist assisted by a female
cotherapist. Also, many believed that female therapists lacked
the authority and stature to work effectively with male clients.
This stereotype limited women’s access to Veterans Adminis-
tration hospitals and thus to many internship opportunities for
clinical trainees. Ironically, a substantial number of women
had made important contributions to clinical theory and prac-
tice, as well as to the field of psychological assessment, dur-
ing the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, as documented in a
number of surveys, invidious judgments about women’s abil-
ities as clinicians persisted well into the 1970s.
SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM AND PSYCHOLOGYWomen in psychology who were committed to the ideals of
equality between the sexes and solidarity among women
started to mobilize near the end of the 1960s. Many had en-
gaged in social activism—in the civil-rights movement, the
antiwar movement, and the women’s liberation movement—
in addition to their work as researchers, therapists, and teach-
ers. Transformation of the structure of society and, more im-
mediately, of the structure of the profession was on their
horizon. For example, at the Employment Bureau of the 1970
American Psychological Association (APA) convention, a
group of women protested rampant sexism in interviewing
and hiring practices. Another early initiative of fledgling fem-
inist organizations in psychology was a push for blind review
of scholarly work. In a blind review, an author’s identity is
concealed from reviewers who are judging work submitted
for publication or presentation, a procedure that limits the
possibility that knowledge about the author’s identity will
bias the judgments of the work under review. The policy of
blind review was adopted by a number of journals; some
still maintain it. Moreover, scholarly work on the topics of
women and sexism was often regarded as trivial or “too po-
litical” by psychologists. In response, feminists engaged in a
number of projects aimed at challenging sexist ideology and
practices in psychology. They produced documents that of-
fered guidelines for nonsexist therapy, counseling, research,
and language usage. They also mounted a campaign for
amendments to the ethical code that would protect women
in therapy and women students from sexual abuse and
harassment.
At the same time as feminists were trying to change psy-
chology as a whole, feminist psychology was coalescing as
an independent field. One way that this can be charted is to
note the expansion of course offerings and textbooks. Before
1970, psychology departments offered virtually no courses
on women or gender. Two decades later, an APA survey
showed that 51 percent of U.S. psychology departments of-
fered undergraduate courses on women and gender; 172
departments offered graduate courses (Women’s Programs
Office, 1991). There were no textbooks in the field until- By the end of the century, there were dozens, repre-
senting varying points of view and emphases.
Although questions about sex differences and women’s
psychology have been posed throughout the history of psy-
chology, we argue that the study of women and gender as an
organized field of psychology extends back only to about - Thus, the history that we recount is short relative to that
of most other fields of psychology. The remainder of this
chapter is devoted to describing the new field of psychology