Abstract
Nancy M. Henley was an original. We know this “officially” because in 1984 the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) named her a “foremother.” But we also know this because of several other early seminal contributions she made to the psychology of women. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nancy was one of the feminist psychologists who worked vigorously to change sexist practices and theories in the American Psychological Association (APA). Her efforts contributed in 1973 to the founding of APA’s Division 35, Psychology of Women.
In 1980, Nancy became the second editor of the Psychology of Women Quarterly, following the initial stewardship of Georgia Babladelis; Nancy served in that capacity from 1980 to 1984. As editor, she published special issues on feminist scholarship, diversity, and teaching the psychology of women. Also in 1980, Nancy joined the psychology department at University of California, Los Angeles, and from 1980 to 1986, she served as the first permanent director of its Program in Women’s Studies. She nurtured the direction and development of that program, which subsequently became the Department of Gender Studies.
Nancy was born in 1934 and received her BS and MA degrees from Johns Hopkins University as well as her PhD in 1968. Her doctoral dissertation showed her early interest in communication, specifically in the field of semantics. The dissertation title was “A Psychological Study of the Semantics of Animal Names.” But she soon turned to research for which she is widely known, namely, studies of human language and nonverbal communication with an emphasis on the intersection of power and gender. In 1971–1972, Nancy was a postdoc with Roger Brown at Harvard where she focused on how social power functions in the apparently benign world of human touch. In 1973, she published “Status and Sex: Some Touching Observations” in the Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, which documented the dual nature of touch. Besides being a sign of solidarity, Henley showed that touching is also a correlate of status. A few years later and 40 years ago, in 1977, Nancy published her influential book, Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication, which interjected the role of power into the debate about sex differences. Body Politics convincingly laid bare how a wide range of nonverbal behaviors reflected and reinforced power inequities between women and men. It won the Distinguished Publication Award from AWP in 1977.
Nancy Henley, PhD, died on June 4, 2016, but her legacy will survive. From the start, Nancy was a full-fledged feminist psychologist. She was an academic who extolled the importance of empirical research. Even after retirement, she authored with colleagues a quantitative content analysis of news reports that had the effect of minimizing incidents of antigay violence. She was also a constant activist who repeatedly worked to alter sexist practices. Consider her 1975 editorial in the APA Monitor titled, “Help Stamp Out Sexism: Change the Language.” Last but not least, Nancy coupled her feminism with humor. In 2000, she coauthored with Jacqueline D. Goodchilds a compilation of 500 irreverent quotations by women, which is titled The Curmudgeon Woman.
Nancy Henley was an original; she will be missed.