ABSTRACT
This book develops a feminist critique of traditional psychology, implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly, because the book is about women, and their relationships with other women and men within patriarchal organisations. Gender relations are not characteristically the focal point of academic psychology (Woolett et al., 1995). Explicitly, because it challenges conventional psychological approaches to development in adulthood, gender identity and sex roles inasmuch as they retain the concept of the unitary individual as the focus. I argue, along with many social and feminist psychologists and sociologists, that this is unhelpful both in theorising gender-power relations and in understanding the organisational context in which these relationships are played out (Hollway, 1989).
