III. Historical significance of Shields’ 1975 essay: A brief commentary on four major contributions

Abstract

This article argues that Shields’ work demonstrated that it is impossible to practice value-free science. And, despite the efforts of many feminist psychologists who have argued that the question of sex differences is someone else’s question, biological theories about the differences between women and men are still popular and influential today. This paper will call attention to four areas of scholarship produced by second-wave feminist psychologists who were inspired by Shields’ work: (1) rediscovery of the work of first-wave feminist psychologists, (2) discussion of the impossibility of value-free research on sex differences, (3) introduction of new categories of analysis such as “gender” and reframing research based on these new categories, and (4) addition of more value-laden categories to sex such as race, social class, and sexuality and using intersectionality theory to design new avenues of research.

Keywords

Stephanie Shields power science value free second-wave feminism

The focus of this special issue is on the contribution of Stephanie Shields’ groundbreaking article (1975a), “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women”, and the subsequent study of supposedly biologically-based sex differences. This brief paper offers some reflections on how some of the key issues raised by Shields are webbed through our own engagement with sex/gender “differences” as well as tapping into concerns we have raised in our own work. More specifically, we discuss the historically significant influence of Shields’ 1975 paper by drawing attention to four areas of scholarship produced by feminist psychologists in the last four decades: (1) documenting the existence of and the work by the early forebearers of psychology; (2) challenging the presumed value-free nature of psychology; (3) the attempts to change the conversation by troubling the relationship between sex and gender and the reframing of research questions accordingly based on these analyses; and (4) problematizing the independence of categories such as gender, race, social class, and sexuality, and opening up new avenues for research through the theorization and utilization of the theory of intersectionality.

Documenting the existence of and work by the early forebearers of psychology

In her 1975 article, Shields wrote “If the maxim ‘A nation without a history is like a man without a memory’ can be applied, then it would behoove the amnesiacs interested in female psychology to investigate its pre-Freudian past” (p. 739). This quote points to the ways in which past experiences may be relevant or, indeed, have contributed to the shaping of future battles and associated challenges. Psychology’s preferred mode of publication – the research article – makes the discipline particularly vulnerable to the loss of institutional memory. Such articles mandate a short introduction with only the most recent and relevant scholarship cited. Since there were few women psychologists in the USA prior to the 1970s and most of these women taught at women’s colleges with few resources and even fewer graduate students to carry on their research, their research was easily lost (Unger, 2001). Moreover, the relationship between citations and the quality of an article is not a straightforward one. An early finding by researchers in the sociology of science, for example, was that the work of individuals who had won a Nobel Prize was cited more often after they received this honor than before the award (Merton, 1968). Citation is often a way of conferring status on an article rather than being integral to the article’s content and, of course, few women had the stature to confer this status (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987).

Shields (1975a) was not the first to call attention to the work of forgotten feminist psychologists. Her article was not even the first of its kind published in the American Psychologist: ‘A Reminder of Lost History’ by Bernstein and Russo appeared in 1974. However, that paper was in the form of an historical quiz and did not provide the wealth of detail about hypothesis-testing that Shields’ article did. Shields’ 1975 paper was followed in the next issue of the same journal by another that focused on the contributions of Leta Stetter Hollingworth as well as on the “arbitrary social restrictions” placed on women’s achievement at the time (Shields, 1975b). Starting with Shields, there has been groundbreaking work by feminist psychologists who have not only documented the work of early women psychologists, but who have also examined the conditions and the social relations of the discipline that those women experienced.

Shields’ call for attention to the work of the early forebearers of psychology was to be followed five years later by an entire issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly containing biographical articles on women (Russo & O’ Connell, 1980) and several other compilations of the works by early women psychologists (Furumoto, 1979, 1992; O’Connell & Russo, 1991). Many such historical accounts draw attention to the way in which efforts of early feminist work were constrained by historical conditions, particularly the prevailing work opportunities and societal attitudes toward women (see, for example, Furumoto, 1979, 1992; Morawski & Agronick, 1991). More recently, one contemporary historian of feminist psychology, Alexandra Rutherford, has led the development of an online project entitled “Psychology’s feminist voices” which was launched in 2010. It is an invaluable, and growing, resource for students of feminist psychology which documents the lives and academic contributions of, at the moment primarily North American, feminists. We see in these efforts a way to challenge, if not overcome, the invisibility of women from psychology’s history that Shields as well as others have pointed to.

Challenging the value-free nature of psychology

The implicit acceptance and/or justification of the invisibility of women in psychology’s history was inextricably tied to the ways in which psychology has been positioned as value free. As such, the male-dominated version of history that was customarily reported in textbooks could be understood as a reflection of the different levels of contribution made by male and female scholars in the infancy of the discipline rather than as an expression of androcentric bias. As we consider this history of women in psychology, it is difficult not to return to the power of Shields’ (1975a) assertion that it was undeniable that “science has played handmaiden to social values” (p. 753). This classic summary of the situation in psychology has undoubtedly been a shaping force in our own work. This is not to say that Shields was the first psychologist to challenge the value-free nature of psychology and the impact claims to value-free scientific “truth” have had on women. It was Naomi Weisstein (1968), most historians agree, who first published a paper problematizing the value-laden construction of “woman” in the discipline. It is worth noting that while Weisstein and Shields often sit in close proximity to each other when discussed in the history books, they have arguably had a somewhat different impact on feminist work during the period of these particular publications as well as sometime after.

We would argue that Weisstein’s (1968/1993) paper, while a hugely important contribution to feminist theorization in psychology, had less initial impact than ‘Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women’ for several reasons. First, Shields’ paper appeared in a very prestigious professional journal. However, we would argue, the differential impact of Weisstein’s and Shields’ work was probably primarily due to the nature of the evidence they used. Weisstein argued passionately and eloquently that psychology could say nothing about women because there had been no unbiased work to support what the field taught. Shields, in contrast, used careful analyses of the operation of androcentric bias in several areas of research on sex differences, popular during the 19th century and early 20th century. Her work focused specifically on the ways in which these areas of sex difference research derived their hypotheses from a series of biological assumptions about brain structure and function as well as evolutionary theory.

Shields’ focus on science resonated with concerns of many feminist empiricists working in psychology during the 1970s who recognized androcentric biases of the mainstream. Feminist challenges at this point in time were often characterized by what Wilkinson (1997) called “the poor science argument.” As its name suggests, this challenge is rooted in the idea that predominant beliefs around female inferiority/male superiority could change if it could be demonstrated that the evidence used by the discipline to support these ideas were theoretically and methodology flawed (see, for example, Hyde, 2005). An example of this challenge can be seen in the classic work of Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin (1974). They identified which areas of children’s traits and behaviors had sufficient studies of sex differences (by different researchers) to determine whether or not one could argue that a sex difference had been definitively shown. Out of 122 behavioral areas identified, they found only four where the evidence was well supported. Hyde (2005) has since examined textbooks in child development and general psychology and found that the four areas that showed supposed sex differences were mentioned with much greater frequency than the much more numerous sex similarities.

As the very popular (but unsupported) book Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus (Gray, 1992) evidences, people prefer to believe in sex differences. Biological explanations for sex differences remain enshrined in the culture, and such explanations are used in maintaining the unequal distribution of power and status between groups. When Carol Tavris’ The Mismeasure of Women (1992) was published, many feminist psychologists believed it would be a great popular success because Tavris had a PhD in psychology, was an excellent writer who had been part of the editorial team of Psychology Today and had a wide network of media contacts that gave her a great deal of radio and television coverage. The book was never a bestseller, however, and although it has been cited often by other feminist psychologists, it has not had much, if any, impact on the public’s views about the differences between women and men.

As has been argued elsewhere (see, for example, Unger, 2007), the limits of the “poor science” challenge was pointed to in Shields’ 1975 paper. As Shields noted, the early work of, for example, Helen Thompson Woolley and Leta Stetter Hollingworth – who challenged androcentric-biased science by refuting problematic sex difference hypotheses – had limited success in producing change in the ways in which such differences were predominantly understood. Indeed, it was Shields’ article that led at least one of the authors here to move away from the poor science challenge because it seemed clear that it wasn’t quite enough to demonstrate that sex difference hypotheses were incorrect (Unger, 2007). A different point of challenge was needed to undermine the gender bias operating in psychology’s construction of knowledge about women.

Attempting to change the conversation

Alternative challenges to the “poor science” argument were rooted in the sex/gender distinction itself. In her 1975 article, Shields notes the conflation between the “categories” of biological “sex” “and the social” meaning of “gender” (Deaux, 1985) which gave rise to deterministic arguments around female inferiority/male superiority. It was conflations such as this that led some early generation feminist psychologists to give up on the word “sex” entirely. For example, Unger (1979) argued that the use of the word should be limited to the reproductive characteristics of men and women and argued for the substitution of a new term, “gender” – borrowed from linguistics – to refer to the qualities of women and men that were constructed by society. By way of illustration, “sex” can be attributed to cartoon animals through the simple use of a gender-identified item, such as the placing of a string of pearls or a tie around their necks. The idea behind this change in nomenclature was to remove stereotypic beliefs from supposedly neutral scholarship. Unfortunately, instead of forcing psychology to abandon its stereotypes, the field simply abandoned the word “sex.” Analyses of the use of “sex” versus “gender” in the academic literature have shown an increasing pattern of the replacement of sex with gender over the years (Haig, 2004). Even animal researchers have been found to talk about the gender of their rats (Sershen, Hashim, & Lajtha, 1998).

The difficulties around the conflation of sex/gender are reflected in not only the research itself but various levels of routine academic practices. Despite the issue of conflation of the conjoining of a “social” term “roles” with a biologically-based term “sex,” one of most widely read journals devoted to the study of sex/gender differences is still titled Sex Roles (Chrisler, 2007). A brief examination of search engine links for sex difference research illustrates the same problem. PsycINFO, the discipline’s major database for scholarly sources, has categorized its taxonomy of search terms in interesting ways. If searching for “gender differences,” the thesaurus instructs users to use the term “human sex differences” instead. To find studies about “women,” PsycINFO classifies these as “human females.” This is surprising, given that the APA style manual that comes from the same publisher as the database says not to refer to humans as “females” (or “males”). And to echo the name of the above-mentioned journal, a PsycINFO search for “gender” receives the instruction to use the term “sex roles” for a more productive result. This illustration points to the ways in which the disruptive power of the challenge offered by the vocabulary of “gender” has been somewhat curtailed by the sex/gender amalgamation as well as recent arguments that suggest “gender” functions as a shorthand for describing women and women’s issues. These uses of “gender” reinscribe the kind of androcentric biases that the introduction of the term sought to counter (Capdevila & Lazard, 2015).

While sex and gender tend to refer to what appear to be separate constructs – the biological and social, respectively – it is important to remember that both are socially constructed, as scholars of the continually emerging fields of intersexuality, transgender, and genderqueer movements tell us (Baird, 2007; Davis, 2014; Tauches, 2006).

Intersectionality, gender, and power

Despite the ways in which some challenges have been curtailed as they have played out, we find it instructive to return to the roots of these earlier challenges as we begin to conceptualize challenges for the future. We are reminded of the importance of this as we revisit Shields’ work and see how radical her ideas were, how relevant they still are, and the work we still need to do. The idea that gender cannot be separated from race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, or other domains of power and privilege, also known as intersectionality by feminist theorists, is gaining attention in the field of psychology. Shields brought this principle to our attention in her article by weaving her analysis about responses to “the woman question,” as dictated not only by men, but by white, middle-upper class, educated, (mostly) heterosexual men. In fact, Shields herself later edited a special issue of Sex Roles (2008) on the topic of intersectionality, bringing together many voices on this long overdue subject. Lately, exciting work on intersectionality has been published in different journals including Feminism and Psychology (e.g. Barker & Landridge, 2008; Fine, 2012; Haines, Ajayi, & Boyd, 2014; Søndergaard, 2005; Staunæs, 2005; Taylor, 2011; Walsh, 2015). Shields’ more recent emphasis on intersectionality has its roots in her long-standing interest in sex differences research, and we can see the seeds of this interest in ‘Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women’. Shields in her classic paper talks of both gender and race but at this point they were not fully conceived as intersecting, although it is clear that Shields saw these subordinated “differences” as related.

Shields’ explication of systematic bias and privilege has paved the road for critical psychology, critical race studies, and interrogating whiteness and masculinities as academic and political endeavors (Dottolo & Stewart, 2013; Fine et al., 2004). As discussed earlier, she was a pioneer in investigating the use of biology in maintaining the unequal distribution of power and status between groups. From this point of departure, feminist psychologists have continued to explore the role of biology in maintaining beliefs about inequality. For example, Brescoll and LaFrance (2004) found a connection between the conservatism of news media and the number of stories involving biological determinism they published. They also found that readers of such stories were more likely to agree with sex stereotypes than those who read the stories where no biologically-based sex stereotypes were included. We also know that people who are given information that their own group does less well on tests of academic achievement, do less well than comparable individuals who do not receive such information, a consistent finding among marginalized groups including blacks compared to whites (Steele & Aronson, 1995) and women compared to men (Brown & Josephs, 1999).

As Unger argued in 2007, “feminists need to continue to ask questions about what promotes biologically essentialist views and how such views are linked to support for inequality and social justice” (p. 489). Theorists working within the system justification perspective, for example, offer a discussion of the attitudinal and behavioral correlates of various system justifying ideologies (Jost & Hunyady, 2005, p. 205). We would argue that we need to understand the relationship between covert values and the behavior of “real people” in addition to scientists. This allows us to explore the ways in which psychology has and continues to play “handmaiden to social values” (p. 753).

The future of feminist psychology

In this brief reflection, Shields’ classic paper has allowed us to trace a path around the history of women in psychology and how her critique inspired and shaped our own conceptualizations of sex “differences” and relatedly of the developments around the vocabulary of sex/gender. As we have discussed, feminist psychologies have seen some interesting challenges to many of the issues that Shields discusses in her 1975 paper. For example, as mentioned at the beginning of our reflection, the “psychology’s feminist voices” project harnesses the power of contemporary technologies to disperse our histories to a wider audience, increasing the visibility of the history of feminist contributions to the field, and allowing the generations to follow a bedrock on which to potentially legitimize feminist identities and associated work in psychology.

Collections like this special issue are very valuable because they remind younger scholars at the beginning of their career that they do not have to reinvent the wheel. The impact of such feminist resources, particularly on mainstream psychology, remains to be seen, however. History is not highly regarded by psychology because of the field’s traditional commitment to the positivistic model centering around “just the facts.” At the same time, history also teaches us what has not worked, and it is important for fostering dialogs between generations. This is particularly critical in an era where engagement with feminism, particularly for younger women, has become increasingly complex. A reluctance to identify as feminist has had a history – this reluctance was evident among those who nevertheless agreed that feminist ideas had become “mainstream” (e.g. pay equity, reproductive rights) (Zucker, 2004). However, we would like to argue that mainstreaming of feminist ideas also produces disappointment among a generation of women that have grown to expect equality but nevertheless often do not experience it as a reality in the course of their everyday lives. Therein lies some potentially interesting possibilities for the future of feminist challenges, and to realize those challenges, as we have argued, it will become necessary to look to our feminist past.

This is perhaps no better demonstrated than by the process of developing the observations, reflections, and commentary we offer in this paper, which are a result of many enjoyable conversations between two feminist psychologists. One of us (RU) helped to shape the burgeoning field of feminist psychology in the 1970s, while the other (AD) was trained by a few of these pioneers, as mentee and student. When I (AD) teach psychology of gender, and we discuss the “generations” of the women’s movement, I always ask the students to brainstorm about how the current generation of feminists might be remembered in the future. They typically respond with some contemporary issues such as marriage equality or transgender civil rights. At the same time, they also always respond with what they imagine to be “newer” struggles, only to learn that we are not just standing on the shoulders of the activists that came before us, but still standing alongside them in many ways. These hungry, enthusiastic, often idealistic minds still hope for reproductive freedom, pay equity, and better access to institutional structures with a diversity of representations of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and able-bodiedness, to name a few. With a newly critical feminist lens, they can almost conceive of a responsible, situated, science that does not uphold the myth of objectivity. As Unger (2007) urged us, “Feminist theory needs to be practiced” (p. 492). Shields’ pioneering work continues to serve as a touchstone, motivator, and inspiration to do just that.

Footnotes

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.

Author Biographies

Rhoda Unger is Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and Professor Emerita of Psychology at Montclair State University. She has written/ edited nine books on the psychology of women and gender and more than 85 articles and book chapters in this field. Unger has received many awards including the first Carolyn Sherif memorial lectureship from the Society for the Psychology of Women and distinguished career awards from the Committee on the Psychology of Women and the Association for Women in Psychology.

Andrea L Dottolo is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rhode Island College and Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Her scholarship explores how social identities are constructed and maintained and the ways in which they are shaped by social and political structures. She is interested in the relationships between histories, cultures, social movements, immigration and social identities.

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