Abstract
Important turning points in the history of feminist psychology can sometimes be traced to particular moments—specific publications or situations in which an individual or group sparked advancement of the field. Just as there are national milestones (e.g., formation of the American Psychological Association’s Division 35, the Society for the Psychology of Women and formation of the Association for Women in Psychology), there are also transformational moments with a local flavor, that is, events specific to a city, college/university, or specialization within psychology that play a role in the development of our field. In this article, I report the initial findings of a project aimed at collecting feminist psychologists’ first-person accounts of local events or activities (late 1960s to the present) that contributors believe have influenced, or are influencing, the development of feminist psychology, especially the scholarship of feminist psychology. Thus, this ongoing project focuses on the experiences of psychologists who organized, participated in, or benefited from the development of feminist psychology. Feminist psychologists in all phases of their careers in the United States and internationally are invited to participate by visiting the Division 35 website. The archive comprising these accounts complements existing archives of the history of psychology and individual biographies and autobiographies.
Important turning points in feminist psychology can sometimes be traced to particular moments—specific publications or situations in which an individual or group sparked advancement of the field. Some of these moments are acknowledged in our collective understanding of our history. For example, Naomi Weisstein’s (1968) “Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female” often marks the beginning of contemporary feminist psychology (Herman, 1995). Just as there are widely acknowledged milestones, such as the founding of the American Psychological Association’s Division 35 (APA; Society for the Psychology of Women [SPW]), the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), APA’s Committee on Women in Psychology (Chrisler et al., 2013), feminist psychological organizations in other countries, and many feminist journals in psychology, there are also local transformational moments deeply woven into the fabric of our history. These may be geographically specific, as in the history of a particular region or university, or they may be local events that we now realize were moments in a larger pattern that has shaped feminist psychology.
The history of women in psychology has been a concern of feminist psychologists since the 1970s. A then-new generation of feminists realized that women were missing from the history of American psychology and worked to collect biographies and autobiographies to ensure that women’s role in the history of psychology could be there as a model for the women coming up in the ranks and would never again be lost (Bernstein & Russo, 1974; Furumoto & Scarborough, 1986; Johnston & Johnson, 2008; Russo & Denmark, 1987; Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). Thanks to Alexandra Rutherford’s “Feminist Voices Project” (Rutherford, 2014)—a digital archive of biographies and oral history interviews—the body of information on women psychologists has continued to grow, revealing the complexity of feminist psychology’s history.
Now is an ideal time to find and share unsung transformational moments. There are many reasons to do so; here I mention only three. First, we need to model a new way to keep our stories alive in the digital environment. Back in the day, when people depended on snail mail through the postal service, the evolution of transformational moments generated a paper trail. Today, we would need to track a mountain of e-mail and texts to put together the stories of feminist psychology’s continuing development, and much of this electronic communication will not survive ever-changing data storage formats.
Second, we already know much about the obstacles that women have historically faced professionally in psychology, both from published first-person accounts and from biographies of feminist psychologists. Gathering stories of transformational moments fills out the history by revealing what inspired and motivated individuals. By reading across individual experiences, it is possible to discern what was “in the air” that made individual transformational moments part of a larger historical movement.
Finally, we need to know about these transformative moments because they can serve as inspiration for positive social change in our presently regressive political and economic environment. We are seeing a serious pushback against many of the achievements that modern feminism, including feminist psychology, has advanced and made possible. Reproductive rights is at the center of the storm in the United States, but equal pay, the continued feminization of poverty, and violence against women (at home and in areas of international conflict) all demand our focused attention in our teaching, scholarship, practice, and activism. Unsung transformational moments not only can inspire us but can also sketch/suggest/inform strategies and actions to bring about effective responses to these crises.
In this article, I draw on individual feminist psychologists’ recollections to highlight unsung transformational moments in the scholarship of feminist psychology. I conclude by relating this rich history to transformations still to come. First, however, a brief detour on how I came to appreciate the significance of transformational moments.
A Personal Transformational Moment
Carolyn Sherif, in whose name this award was created, was a founding member of Division 35/The SPW and was division president from 1979 to 1980 (Shields & Signorella, 2014). Carolyn was an important figure in my graduate training as a model and mentor. When I began graduate study at Penn State in 1971, ours was the first class to include more than a few token women. In fact, half of our 20-person class was women. Several of us already identified as feminists so it felt like we were living in the hugely exciting here-and-now of women’s liberation, as the feminist movement was then popularly called. The psychology faculty, however, reflected the past. There were only two women (Carolyn Sherif and child clinical psychologist Ellen V. Piers) among a tenure-line faculty of nearly 30 White men. There were only three Black graduate students that I recall among the sea of White faces. The comparatively small numbers of non-White and nonmale department members seemed both wrong and “natural.” It felt wrong to be outnumbered and to be constantly reminded of one’s outsider–insider position. It felt natural because that was simply the way it was, and it was clear that to think that it could be different, big changes needed to happen. The imbalances were not something that could be easily and quietly “fixed.”
Like many women graduate students at other universities, the message was clear that we were not expected to succeed. I recall the first week of class when another female graduate student (Pamela Cooper) and I met with the professor with whom we had a teaching assistantship. While he puffed sagely on his pipe (I cannot recall whether he had his feet up on the desk or not), he informed us that “females” did not finish graduate school. After the meeting, we went directly to the staff assistant for the graduate program to get the data. Alas, Dr. Whaley was correct. Women were somewhat less likely to finish than men, although men were also highly likely to drop out. However, when you lose one or two of the three or four women, the effect is more noticeable than losing three or four of a larger number of men. Pam and I also felt that something must be going on that made the environment unwelcoming to women, but we did not have a name for it. The construct of chilly climate (Sandler, Silverberg, & Hall, 1996) and information on the effects of tokenism (Niemann, 2003; Yoder, 2002) were still years away.
This was a common occurrence at the time. We knew things were not as they should be, but it was hard to name the problem and it was unclear what to do about it. What made a difference for us was not only the youthful energy of a cadre of feminist graduate students, but also people above us in the food chain who helped us focus that energy. And we needed help—Penn State is at the geographic center of Pennsylvania, and at that time the local airport was at the top of a foggy mountain and “civilization” (i.e., a major city) was a four or more hour drive away.
Phyllis W. Berman, a developmental psychologist and one of the three women lecturers in the department, was the spark that we needed. Her husband was a tenured professor in the theatre department, but she was a lecturer because Penn State was loath to hire both members of a couple into tenured positions—even in different departments in different colleges. (Carolyn and Muzafer Sherif were the exceptions that proved the rule, and Carolyn was not welcomed.) Phyllis and I invited all women faculty, lecturers, and graduate students to meet at Phyllis’ home to discuss our “mutual interests as women psychologists.” The turnout for the meeting was terrific—although I cannot recall exactly how many women came. Best, however, was that Dr. Sherif attended. That was huge.
To us she was Dr. Sherif, but Carolyn’s actual experience was far more difficult than what we graduate students saw (Shields & Signorella, 2014). In her autobiography (Sherif, 1983), she recounts, for example, how resistant the department was to promoting her to Professor despite her substantial research record and international visibility in social psychology.
That first meeting of women graduate students, lecturers, and Dr. Sherif, along with the meetings that followed, galvanized our feminist community. We cajoled Carolyn into running a seminar on the psychology of women the following academic year. The seminar was a personally and intellectually transformative moment for nearly all of us who participated, including Carolyn. All participants shared more personal information than was usual for seminars, and graduate students had far more voice in the direction of the seminar than was typical for that era. The seminar led to the creation of an undergraduate course on the psychology of women and helped to launch women’s studies at Penn State.
Our organizing was productive, but it did nothing to make a dent in departmental business as usual. The same year that we were organizing (1971–1972), the department conducted searches for six tenure-line positions. Every one of the six was filled by a White man. Had that search taken place the following year, once women in the department were actively connected, I believe the outcome would have been different.
Working against us in pressing for change was the low proportion of White women and miniscule proportion of Women and Men of Color in the pool of potential faculty applicants. In 1971–1972, the proportions of PhDs going to Women and Men of Color and to White women were only beginning to rise above token levels. In 1970, just over 20% of the PhDs awarded in psychology went to women (Cynkar, 2007). Since then, women have made tremendous strides in psychology and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields in the United States. In 2011, women earned 20% of all PhDs in computer science, 31% in the physical sciences, and 22% across engineering fields (National Science Foundation [NSF], 2014). The change in psychology has been even more dramatic. In 2012, 71% of the PhDs in psychology were awarded to women (Women of Color and White women U.S. citizens and permanent residents), and over 25% to Women and Men of Color (NSF, 2012). (I cannot find psychology data broken down by gender and racial ethnicity, from either APA or NSF and even for recent years, which ensures the invisibility of Women of Color.) It is still the case, however, that across academic fields within the United States, the proportion of women tenured faculty remains well below the proportion of women PhDs available, and the proportion of women dramatically decreases as a function of increasing professorial rank and institutional prestige (West & Curtis, 2006).
The Broader Landscape of Transformational Moments
Given the power of our experience at Penn State, I realized that there are probably many more unsung transformational moments that, with their local character, could easily be overlooked when telling the grander history of feminist psychology. Furthermore, we know that if you do not write your history, that history will be lost. Therefore, I decided to begin to collect those stories. My goal was to collect feminist psychologists’ narrative recollections of personally meaningful events from the late 1960s to the present that they believe have shaped, or are shaping, current scholarship in feminist psychology. I sent an invitation to share stories of transformational moments to our major online listservs. If you have not seen this request or have not had an opportunity to respond, have no worries; the online address to submit your story is included in the Author’s Note at the end of this article. Once I began the project, I realized that it must continue.
Before continuing, I want to thank everyone who has contributed so far. Every respondent has shared with candor and with an appreciation of the importance of these unsung transformational moments to our larger historical project. I cannot do justice to all of their stories, and I can share only a few in this article. As this project continues, many more stories will be added to the archive, and there will be more opportunities to identify the threads and themes that weave our stories together. Furthermore, there are limitations to what I have collected to this point, that is, responses are almost exclusively from feminist psychologists who received their PhDs before 1980, and most transformational moments collected are from the 1960s and 1970s. Women of Color are underrepresented in proportion to their presence in the field and their role in feminist psychology. I have received few international contributions so far. These limitations will be addressed as the project continues.
Here, I will cover only the following three themes that have emerged from these individual accounts to date: (a) the critical role that teaching psychology of women has played in the development of our field, (b) the significance of personal moments in seeing and understanding the larger sociocultural context of sexism (the personal is historical), and (c) the way in which small projects—through personal commitment and coalition-building—move from being an individual transformational moment (a “ripple”) toward having a broader impact (becoming a “wave”).
The Critical Role of Teaching Psychology of Women
I start here because this theme links so beautifully with my story of our graduate seminar at Penn State. It illustrates how fortuitous timing can be and, when the right combination of people, need, and opportunity come together, a wide-ranging movement can develop over a relatively short span of time.
Michele (Garskof) Hoffnung recalls that when she was hired as a new assistant professor by Mary Washington College in 1969, she was asked to teach psychology of women: I didn’t know of any such course, but I knew it was needed. I was deeply involved in the women’s movement and I wanted my professional life to reflect my political understanding. At the same time, I began editing a reader, “Roles Women Play: Readings in Women’s Liberation” (1971), to be used in such a course … When I was hired at Quinnipiac College in 1970, I again requested to teach psychology of women … Mine was the very first gender course at QC, but it inspired women in other departments to propose and teach related courses: Women’s Literature; Women’s History, etc. At the same time, several of us collaborated to team-teach Introduction to Women’s Studies … I realize this is not an event in a singular sense, but a development that had enormous impact upon me, my colleagues, and our students. When I say colleagues, I do not mean only the feminists who worked so hard to establish the courses and the program. I also mean the non-feminist men and women, who were pushed to understand sexism in more personal ways. When I was hired at Quinnipiac, I was the only woman in my department. I will be retiring from a department that has 7 women and 8 men. Although I still teach the psych of women course, others could.
Bernice Lott tells a similar story: I was working at the University of Rhode Island as a sabbatical replacement in psychology (what we now call an adjunct). It was (probably) spring of 1970. Psychology did not yet have a building so we were in quonset huts. I received a visit from a young faculty member in Art History (Natalie Kampen) who came to my door with about 3 young women. You can picture their 70s hippy clothes and demeanor. They said they knew about me and that I was the one who HAD to do a course on feminist psychology or women or gender. We talked; they were insistent and persuasive. There was clearly no such course, so I promised to develop one, and I did! I called it “The Female Experience.”
Like Michele, Bernice’s search for the right textbook led her to write her own, Becoming a Woman: The Socialization of Gender, which was published in 1981. (Also see Unger’s, 2010, account of the evolution textbooks on the psychology of women since the first were published in 1971.)
Courses on the psychology of women were not always welcomed institutionally. In 1971, Florence Denmark was asked by a large group of students to teach a psychology of women course, and she agreed to do so. However, “the students went to the program head who turned them down. Then they went to the Dean who also rejected the course. Finally, they went to the President, psychologist and social activist, Harold Proshansky, who approved the course.” Florence observes: “For me the transformational part of this experience was that I learned not only about student power, but how to be a feminist instructor, sharing with the students the organization and operation of the course rather than utilizing more traditional instructive methods. It transformed my whole way of running a class.”
Within a few years, the psychology of women course went from novel experiment to established fact. Maureen McHugh recalls returning a call from Irene Frieze at University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1974 (from a phone booth!). Irene wanted to invite her to the graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh, specifically to be Irene’s teaching assistant for the Psychology of Women course. The lasting impact of those early courses is amazing for the books and articles that teaching inspired, as well as for their early and lasting impact on undergraduate (and in many cases, graduate) education. Maureen, for example, estimates that over the past 40 years she has taught psychology of women to over 5,000 students.
The Personal Is Historical
“The personal is political” is a phrase that for many of us summed up a major insight of the feminist movement of 40 plus years ago, namely, awakening to the realization that one’s personal experiences were not simply “stuff happens,” but were instantiations of a broader and complex political story played out in individual lives. Fran Trotman, for example, remembers being in a “supervision group that consisted of mainly White women psychologists (I was the first and only African American woman psychologist in my state). We investigated our own issues as they related to our patients. It became a ‘Consciousness Raising Group’ and our perceptions were broadened.” This experience was important for her in part because “at the time (late 60’s-early ‘70’s), ‘feminists’ were often seen as whiny White women who were complaining about issues that were specific to middle-class White women, not [African American women].” She goes on to say that women she met at APA at that time were: concerned about sexism and racism in APA and were struggling with APA about the sexism, racism, and other ‘isms’ in the organization. These women were warm and welcoming and seemed genuinely interested in my experiences as a Black woman. I also saw the courage in these “feminists” as we struggled to improve APA and form AWP and Division 35.
Many respondents pointed out how their own personal lives were bound up in wider political and cultural changes. Some of these stories are intensely personal, like Irene Nielsen’s years’ long struggle to be free of an abusive husband at a time when marital rape was not a concept and it was nearly impossible for a married woman to get financial credit in her own name. Christine Griffin recalled sexual harassment by a major figure in social identity theory at professional conferences in the late 70s “before there was really a feminist concept of sexual harassment in circulation.” Ellyn Uram Kaschak began her clinical internship at the Palo Alto VA Hospital in 1970. She remembers that: the new interns were met with a barrage of sexist training ideas and again no female supervisors. One of my male supervisors, in the spirit of equality, had me go out and buy child pornography in order to “treat” the several child molesters who were hospitalized at the time. I did not yet see anything wrong with this gesture and wondered at why I felt so squeamish.
For many feminist psychologists, early recollections of a feminist consciousness as a psychologist came from moments such as these—vague unease that something was not right, but not yet having a fully formed awareness of the structural sexism that propped up and kept systemic inequities in place, an unease magnified by uncertainty about what one could concretely do to make things right. Alice Eagly captures the intensity of this awakening: The year was around 1970, when I attended a meeting of social psychologists held in Massachusetts, I think at Smith College … At that point I was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst specializing in the study of attitudes and social influence. It was a small conference, with approximately 40 people (faculty and graduate students) present. I attended a session that included a talk on gender stereotypes, my first exposure to any research on this topic. The speaker, if I remember correctly, was Paul Rosenkrantz. He presented findings similar to those that he and others published in 1972 in the Journal of Social Issues pertaining to stereotypes of women and men. I was surprised by the display and remember feeling shocked and blinking back tears. I didn’t understand why I reacted so emotionally. At any rate, that event triggered my interest in gender roles and stereotypes. I had no idea of the implications of gender stereotypes at that point. I merely knew that they were somehow important and limiting to women. At that moment, I could not have begun to articulate the how or why.
Today, in our teaching and through our research we hope to inspire awareness of the pervasive and damaging effects of stereotypes and sexism, but now with an appreciation of gender as a sociostructural system of power relations that intersects with and cocreates other axes of oppression/dominance. I wish I could say that an intersectional sensibility informed our thinking (not to mention the discipline of psychology) at that time, but for many of us intersectionality was more an inchoate apprehending than a theorized understanding. Theory came later. At that time, the first, often sudden awareness was what we called a click! moment—when the light comes on; when you “get it,” that is, get the presence and implications of sexism happening at that precise moment.
The click! moment inspires development of feminist consciousness, but that is just the first step. Sexism (and related other ugly “isms”) always lurk. But with the benefit of those earlier years of trying to name sexism, we can now come to a sooner, clearer understanding of how sexism operates and what we are prepared to do to challenge it. The click! moment has evolved into the whoa! moment.
Leonore Tiefer describes whoa! moments in relating how she came to see that the language of feminist values was being taken up and used to further pharmaceutical industry interests: By 1998 I had been trying in every way I could think to be a feminist sexologist—research, teaching, clinical practice, organizational work. I worked hard, was very prolific and enjoyed the years, but it seemed kind of insular … And then Viagra was approved in March, 1998, and a piece appeared in The New York Times asking “where was the Viagra for women?” I thought, WHOA! I must do something about this, but what, what, what?
Leonore goes on to describe a lunch later that year with a colleague who had worked with Pfizer on the psychophysiological aspects of Viagra and who met with her to recruit her to Pfizer: He thought a feminist hook (“They’re going to make drugs for women, Leonore, don’t you want to make sure they’re as good as possible?”) would induce me for sure. Pfizer cares about women, he kept saying, I know these people personally … [After lunch] I realized that I had been given an extraordinary opportunity by this conversation and Ray’s naïve intention to sign me up for the new sexuopharmaceutical venture … I realized that feminist sexology could no longer be conducted on the previous landscape of clinical practice, teaching and research … I would have to better understand how the rhetoric of “feminism” is used by corporate interests … [and] I would have to undertake a new life chapter as an activist, not just academic, feminist psychologist.
Leonore is still fighting the fight against pink Viagra today through her New View campaign challenging the medicalization of sex (Tiefer, 2014).
From Ripples to Waves
Sometimes a reaction to an event or situation can turn into a generative movement with its own life. Another set of transformational moments began as projects with fairly circumscribed goals, often responding to something that needed correction or bringing in voices that had been excluded or overlooked. Sometimes general goals were quite clear from the beginning, but it was not clear how to realize them or how to give them shape. For example, Christine Griffin, a member of the first editorial group of Feminism & Psychology, the first international journal in feminist psychology, describes how in the late 1980s it took 2 years of meetings “to imagine the space into being.” Too often progress toward goals met opposition. Sue Wilkinson, for example, recalls that feminist academic psychology in Britain arguably began with two symposia she had organized for the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Social Psychology Section conferences in 1983 and 1984—fully 10 years after Division 35’s first program at APA convention. Following a 2-year struggle, including being turned down by the BPS Council, the Psychology of Women Section was formed in 1988 (Wilkinson, 1990; Wilkinson & Burns, 1990). Sue also notes that in 1998, a BPS Lesbian and Gay Psychology Section was founded, but only “after a long struggle, including homophobic abuse, and being turned down three times by the BPS Scientific Affairs Board and/or Council as ‘too narrow’ and ‘too political’” (see Wilkinson, 1999, for the full story).
What might have started as a reaction against something could quickly evolve into an assertion for something, and a new vision of what psychology could be. For example, Ellyn Uram Kaschak points to the importance of Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (1972) and Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women (first published in 1976; 1987) in sparking awareness of the sexism then rampant in clinical training and clinical practice. Ellyn wrote: Finally a group of us decided to form a group to develop an alternative to what we were being fed at this and other internships. We named it the Women’s Counseling Service of San Francisco. We began to develop theory and practice and, in 1972, began to actually offer what we called “Sociotherapy: A Feminist Alternative” (Kaschak, 1976). Several other groups were forming at the same time in cities such as New York, Boston and Los Angeles. This turned out to be the beginning of feminist therapy. FYI we are currently producing a special issue of the journal Women and Therapy on this very topic.
Lenore Harmon tells a similar story about bringing a feminist perspective to counseling psychology. She recalls that the editor of The Counseling Psychologist (TCP) would have an open meeting with the editorial board at APA each year. She and a few other women had been discussing what Division 17 could do to make its members more aware of issues in counseling women. She continues: We hit upon the idea of suggesting an issue of [TCP] devoted to [the process of counseling women] and took ourselves off to the meeting that [the editor] John Whiteley had scheduled. Several members of the all male editorial board were there. The discussion was almost comical. They thought we were talking about affirmative action within Counseling Psychology to benefit ourselves. It took a while to delineate the problem as one involving how Counseling Psychologists look at the process of counseling our women clients and the assumptions involved. Luckily, John Whiteley understood and encouraged us to submit our ideas as a proposal.
The resulting issue in 1973 covered a range of topics from gender bias in personality theory to career counseling; a second issue on counseling women appeared in 1976. The two were later published as an edited volume in 1978. In these and other instances of transformational moments, “making it happen” required readiness to question the status quo and willingness to go out on a limb—sometimes using authorized channels, sometimes striking out in a new direction.
The Nag’s Heart conferences story embodies how a transformational moment can have a cumulative impact over decades. It also reveals the power of feminist community. Here is a bit of background. For years, social psychologist Bibb Latané held weeklong thematic conferences (The Nags Head Conference Center) at his beach home in Nag’s Head, NC (and later in Highland Beach, FL). In the 1980s, one conference theme was “Sex and Gender.” Nag’s Head was a wonderful professional venue for focused, intensive discussion of feminist research in psychology outside the Division 35 and AWP meetings, so the conference was a magnet for feminist psychologists. Occasionally, it also brought participants who were exclusively interested in biologically driven sex-related differences and who had no interest in problematizing gender as a social construct or discussing the real-life implications of our research.
After one Nag’s Head meeting which had a fractious edge because of one openly sexist participant, several people suggested that Latané change the name of the session from “Sex and Gender” to “Feminist Scholarship” to draw participants who wanted to engage with gender issues seriously. Faye Crosby continues the story: Bibb Latané did not embrace the suggestion. [Then] in 1991, three of the women who [had attended the Nag’s Head “Sex and Gender” conference] found themselves together at a conference and realized that they did not have to rely on Bibb or anyone else to make changes but rather just needed to organize some meetings themselves. Janice [Steil] thought that a good spot for the conferences might be the [Martha’s Vineyard] home of Faye Crosby’s family. All three women contacted Faye who then asked her parents if they would be willing for the island house to be put into service for a “sort of sleep-over party for some middle-age women scholars.” Faye’s parents asked “Would you be one of those scholars, dear?” and agreed to the house being used for the conferences when Faye said yes.
All invited were told that the limit was 12 conferees and that spaces would be filled on a first-come/first-served basis. Almost instantly, 13 people were signed up for the weekend gathering, which had been advertised as a “conference cum slumber party.”
The first meetings were organized around feminist dilemmas, with the goal of the conference to come together to discuss issues that had proved puzzling so that many heads together might find solutions to common problems. The interest in this format and the community it engendered was so great that Faye then organized a series—first on Martha’s Vineyard and later in Amherst. The first year Faye hosted two, the following year, five conferences. Here is Faye again “At one of the meetings, Louise Kidder opined that the organization needed a name and proposed that we call the conferences Nag’s Heart … Ellen Kimmel and Stacy Blake-Beard helped keep the enterprise afloat.” From its ambitious beginnings, Nag’s Heart has grown in its impact in a way that none of us would have predicted. Since the first meetings in 1993, Nag’s Heart has hosted nearly 80 conferences.
Conclusion
There is much we can take away from even this tip-of-the-iceberg sample of unsung transformational moments, that is, the importance of critical mass and coalitions, how quickly a change can be effected once initial barriers are broken, and how much we rely on one another as exemplars, goads, cheerleaders, coconspirators, and visionaries—not only peer-to-peer, but across professional status, work location, and age. Although I have focused on transformational moments from what seems like the distant past, transformational moments are not just a ‘70s or ‘80s thing. That said, the geographies of communication, popular culture, and the field of psychology are vastly different today than in the narratives I have shared. Younger colleagues probably are traveling a different path to feminist consciousness than my cohort did. Still, the political tensions in the United States and abroad resonate as vividly now as they did then—as does the joy of feminist collaboration.
Leeat Granek, a more junior scholar who responded, for example, prefaced her account with the observation that: For my generation of women, things were very different. I don’t need to explain to you what feminism looked like in the eighties and nineties, but I think you need to take into consideration that the answers we will give to you about these turning points will differ radically by age and era, and that “turning points” as a paradigm means different things to different generations which makes understanding and answering your question challenging.
Leeat went on to describe a transformative moment at the 2004 “March for Women’s Lives” in Washington, DC, which she attended with her advisor, Alexandra Rutherford: Covered in face glitter and protest stickers, we marched among one million other people holding our own banner that said “Psychologists For Social Justice.” As we walked, we overheard two young women behind us remarking excitedly about the visibility of Psychologists at the march. This moment was transformative for me … I believe my experience at this March shaped much of my (and perhaps those young women behind us) thinking as a feminist psychologist/academic. Certainly, it influenced the way I teach the next generation of students who I am nurturing to become feminist psychologists themselves.
Although “transformational moment” is to some degree a culture-bound, time-sensitive construct, at its core—at least in my view—transformation is about finding and using social spaces where we can be disruptive and constructive simultaneously. Most respondents described experiences that not only challenged the status quo but also reshaped what would be considered the “typical” way of doing things. For example, the psychology of women course often arose from student pressure, challenged how institutional approval for courses was granted, and confronted college or department culture with the force of this upstart scholarship.
The theme that connects all the transformational moment stories I have recounted here is the exquisite connection between personal transformational moments and larger cultural shifts. Individually and collectively, stories reveal the circulation between one’s own local, personal (and often private) transformations, and larger cultural processes. These moments both reflect and feed seismic moments of change, whether in the field of psychology or in the larger culture, and those grand-scale shifts, in turn, impel our creation of local transformations.
Since feminist psychology was revitalized in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist psychologists have worried about whether our research was having a sufficient impact on the larger field, and whether “mainstream” (dead center?) research conventions are compatible with a feminist agenda (e.g., Kahn & Yoder, 1989; Marecek, 1995; see also Rutherford, Vaughn-Blount, & Ball, 2010; Remer, 2013, for recent examples). Indeed, in her 1979 chapter “Bias in Psychology,” Carolyn Sherif critiqued the hierarchy of methods that drives what does and does not qualify as valuable scientific science. At the same time, however, a generative and vital feminist psychology has become broadly and less apologetically interdisciplinary and action-oriented in perspective, theory, and method (Morawski, 1994; Stewart & Dottolo, 2006), especially over the past two decades. It is not possible to predict precisely what and where transformational moments of the future will emerge, but it is clear that the hunger to use psychology’s capacity to promote positive social change continues and takes heart from Naomi Weisstein’s (1993, p. 244) call for a revitalized “activist, challenging, badass feminist psychology.”
Footnotes
Author’s Note
All respondents quoted here agreed to be named and had an opportunity to review the article before it was submitted. To contribute your story to the Transformational Moments project, go to 
. This project was approved by the Penn State Institutional Review Board (IRB #45699). Thank you to all respondents and to Heather MacArthur, Kaitlin McCormick, and Elaine Dicicco for their comments on early drafts. Thanks also to Jan Yoder for helping me hatch the idea for this project and to reviewer Alexandra Rutherford for her excellent suggestions for improving the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.