Our conversations with young people today suggest that they often do not really appreciate how much, and how recently, feminism has transformed women's positions in many western societies. We saw in Chapter 4 how Eleanor Maccoby was obliged to take a rear entrance to her university's faculty club in the mid-twentieth century. Even though in many respects there is still a long way to go, many young women today seem to take for granted the position they now have. At this point, therefore, one of us (RS), as the female half of our writing team, would like to provide a per- sonal story to illustrate some gendered aspects of academic life in the final part of the twentieth century, and demonstrate the context within which academic women and developmental psychology operated (in the UK and Australia) in the recent past. Readers are also referred to Wilkinson's (1990) account of a British Psychological Society working party report on gender representation in psychology; she noted that the report's suggestion that women may have different experiences of psychology from men was especially contentious.
We mentioned above the importance that feminists place on language.
Today, our professional organizations and universities have guidelines on gender-appropriate language, and it is accepted practice that one uses
gender-neutral language in academic writings. This has only been the case since the late 1980s. As an undergraduate and postgraduate, and earlier in my academic career, every hypothetical person was referred to as 'he' unless there was a very specific reason to state otherwise and, indeed, this can be observed in some of the quotations used in the present book, which originated prior to 1990. In about 1970,1 became aware that the accepted focus of psychological research was on males, noting in an undergraduate assignment that a particular published study only had male subjects, and that this might have affected the results; however, I felt very uncertain about whether it was proper to make such a comment, never having seen this issue raised anywhere during my studies.
Radical feminists would have approved of my education at an all-girls' school, followed by a university college that had formerly been all-female, and therefore still had a good representation of women academics. I had been so socialized to expect teachers to be of either gender that I received a shock on attending a staff meeting in my first university post in 1972, when I suddenly realized that I was the only woman in the room; I later understood that my earlier exposure to women academics was quite atypi- cal for the time. Today, I work in a department that has good gender bal- ance on its staff, including at senior levels of appointment, in contrast to the situation in the 1970s, when the first female staff member received an invitation for 'Dr K. and Mrs K'. to attend an official university function (she replied that, unfortunately, her mother-in-law was unable to attend!).
In a previous position during the 1980s I had discovered that the only woman on the staff of mature years lived in rented accommodation, unlike her male colleagues, who owned their homes; the reason was that women were not granted mortgages in those days.
During that decade, I was heavily involved in committees of the British Psychological Society, and once sent my apologies to a departmental staff meeting as I was attending a meeting of the Society's top executive com- mittee, several hours' journey away (where, incidentally, I was the only woman and the only non-professorial member). I later discovered how masculine social constructions could influence the lack of recognition of women's professional contributions when I discovered that the reason for my absence had not been reported to the staff meeting, and one of my male colleagues had assumed I must have been at home because 'one of the kids must have had a cold or something'.
I had previously taken several years out of paid employment in order to raise my young family, but when I later wished to mention this in the bio- graphical 'blurb' for a book, I was prevented from doing so on the grounds that it was irrelevant and would place my biography out of step with those of colleagues, thus forcing my personal story into the same mould as male and childless female academic colleagues, and preventing my attempt to close the public-private gap.
I faced a re-run of some earlier professional experiences in the early 1990s, when I served on a research funding body: I was the only woman (and the only non-medic) on the committee. As a university sexual harass- ment officer at the turn of the millennium, I was still observing (and inter- vening in) some worrying gender-related situations, but overall the position of women was improving.
A section such as this one in a book like this would have been out of the question until recently, yet the increasing (though far from universal) acceptance that female voices should be heard enables me to 'risk' such a personal note. I hope it serves to illustrate for our younger readers the male-dominated academic world that existed even quite late in the twenti- eth century. I hope it will enhance an appreciation of the social landscape in which developmental theorizing, research and practice were occurring at the time, and foster an appreciation of the changes that the feminist move- ment has brought about.
Conclusions
Feminists have argued that developmental psychology is, historically and currently, an overwhelmingly gendered, androcentric, undertaking, which we have sought to illustrate by examples from the literature and personal experience. In this chapter, we have outlined a variety of feminist theories, which have begun, in recent years, to influence theory, research and prac- tice in developmental and family psychology. Some, such as liberal femi- nism, are more easily accommodated by traditional developmental psychology than others, such as radical feminism. All, however, have some common aims and issues, such as promoting the use of non-gender-biased language and the taking of a social justice perspective. In the latter respect, links with sociocultural theories of development are especially apparent.
The field of developmental psychology has itself the potential to inform feminist theory. To date, however, such mutual exchange has barely begun.
towards theoretical integration
Introduction
When we convened a focus group of psychology students to seek their opinions about what they would like to see in a book such as this, one member said that learning developmental psychology was like going into a dark room with a torch (flashlight, for our US readers) - one only ever sees bits and pieces and cannot put the whole picture together. He hoped that a book of this sort might be able to act like a switch to illuminate the whole room. While it would be overambitious to claim that we have achieved this, we do see the present chapter as a particularly important one since it addresses recent attempts to provide more integrative approaches to understanding child and adolescent development. Theoretical approaches with claims to holism include family therapy theories, biopsychosocial theories (especially bioecological theory), dynamic systems theory and evolutionary developmental psychology. We have also provided a reminder about general systems theory as it has provided the theoretical basis for numbers of these approaches. We also consider whether a rapprochement between positivism and postmodernism is possible.