Speaker
Dr. Alexandra Rutherford (York University, Psychology)
Title
Riding the Waves: Historical Reconstruction and Feminist Psychology
Abstract
Many conceptual and historical treatments have highlighted the importance of reflexivity in understanding and constructing both psychology and its history (e.g., Morawski, 2005; Richards, 2002; Smith, 2007). A number of historians have noted the ‘double consciousness’ experienced by women scientists when the pairing was deemed a contradiction in terms (Morawski & Agronick, 1991; Rossiter, 1982). As one aspect of the reflexivity project, I am interested in understanding how feminist psychologists (a distinct kind of woman-scientist), have related to, experienced, and influenced the epistemic assumptions, research practices, and knowledge products of a field strongly identified with the “androcentric ideology of contemporary science” (Harding, 1986). In this presentation I examine how the generation of feminist psychologists active during and since the second wave of the women’s movement in North America has experienced psychology. As prologue, I situate this project as an extension of the scholarship on women in the history of psychology which has drawn attention to the gendered practices and beliefs that have shaped women’s experience of and contributions to the discipline over time (e.g., Johnson & Johnston, 2008; Rosenberg, 1982; Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). As main event, I show that although forms of dissident science clearly imbued with feminist agendas have been enacted since the advent of Psychology in the late 1800s, the experience of being a feminist psychologist has changed dramatically during this time. These changes have been contingent on a number of intellectual, theoretical, social, political, and institutional factors that I will discuss. As epilogue, I outline some of the ongoing historiographic conversations among women’s/gender/feminist historians that have influenced (and continue to influence) my thinking about this project.