Summing Up and Looking Ahead 263the range of questions has expanded. One significant trend has
been the shift away from studying women as if they constituted
a single, undifferentiated category. Researchers turn their
sights on specific groups of women and girls, situated in spe-
cific circumstances. Another trend is increased attention to the
lives of women beyond the borders of the United States and to
interconnections between women in the United States and
women worldwide. Issues include trafficking of women and
girls for prostitution, the systematic rape of women as part of
warfare, and the growing use of women as a pool of cheap and
mobile labor in the transnational economy. A third trend is a
focus on strength and resilience, that is, how women cope and
prevail despite hardship, discrimination, life crises, and phys-
ical illness or disability (Romero & Stewart, 1999; Johnson,
Roberts, & Worell, 1999).
The research methods employed in the psychology of
women and gender also continue to evolve. Many feminist
psychologists have moved beyond prevailing experimental
methodology. Their methods of inquiry include open-ended
interviewing and focus groups, textual analysis, field-based
research and participatory action research, and the family of
approaches called discourse analysis. These methods have
proven invaluable for studying how gendered power relations
are reproduced in everyday practice and talk. They also en-
able researchers to study the multivalent meanings of gender
that research participants hold. These methods are important
tools for understanding people not only as passive recipients
of social influences but also as effective agents. The use of al-
ternate research methods has brought increased attention to
questions about the relationship between methods of inquiry
and research outcomes. Although qualitative approaches are
not new to psychology, they have been long out of vogue in
the United States. As they are resurrected and refurbished, we
can expect to learn more about how they work. Moreover, the
powers and limits of all approaches will be thrown into
sharper relief.
Finally, the turn toward theory is another significant trend
in feminist psychology. Some feminists have found the crit-
ical psychology movement compatible with their stance
(Wilkinson, 1997). They are alert to the ways in which
psychology, even feminist psychology, may share in and
legitimate the status quo. For example, critical feminist psy-
chologists have upbraided social psychology for failing to
incorporate social, cultural, historical, and even group con-
texts in its understanding of social processes (Apfelbaum,
1999). Others have noted that the uncritical use of psycho-
logical language shunts moral and political concerns to
the side. For example, when the psychological conse-
quences of horrific events are reformulated as the medical-
ized diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, they lose
their moral and political import. The social, cultural, and
historical forces that shaped the event (and perhaps al-
lowed perpetrators to go unpunished) are pushed into the
background.Feminist Clinical and Counseling PracticeAs we have noted, feminists have situated women’s problems
and strengths within the context of the larger social, political,
and cultural forces surrounding them. Today, clinicians work
under strong conservative pressures from pharmaceutical
companies, managed-care companies, and a biologically ori-
ented psychiatric profession. Among other things, they press
to redefine psychological disorders as biological aberrations
to be controlled by medication. Although feminists are not
against the use of medication, this medicalized framework is
diametrically opposed to the feminist emphasis on the social
context. Thus far, organized psychology’s responses to con-
servative pressures and corporate interests have fallen short
of what feminists would wish.Confronting the BacklashMany of the changes promoted by the women’s movement
have become accepted practice: equal pay for equal work;
women working outside the home; the repudiation of wife
beating. These changes are no longer identified with femi-
nism. At the same time, the term feminismhas come to be
disparaged, even vilified, by the mass media. By the 1990s,
the backlash against feminism in popular culture was intense
(Faludi, 1991). Moreover, the legal gains that women had
made in such areas as affirmative action and reproductive
rights have eroded. State support for poor women and their
families has been severely curtailed by the welfare reforms of
1996.
In popular culture, there has been an upsurge of claims
that masculinity and femininity, as well as sexual orientation,
are biologically determined and perhaps genetically encoded.
For example, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
(Gray, 1992) amounts to propaganda for male-female differ-
ence and an apologia for male privilege. Yet, many—even
some therapists—have accepted it as credible clinical theory.
Extreme and profligate claims about the evolutionary bases
of male dominance and sexual access have become the fad in
popular science. Media reports of sex differences in mathe-
matics achievement have announced a “math gene,” ignoring
the influence of social roles and differential opportunities and
expectations regarding boys’ and girls’ math performance
(Eccles & Jacobs, 1986). By now, feminists have amassed a
good deal of evidence to counter many such claims. The task