ABSTRACT
Few topics are currently more controversial than gender differences and the ‘Psychology of Women’. It is a telling fact that until R. Miles (1991) the idea of an explicit ‘Psychology of Men’ had never been seriously broached, and has, since then, been but fitfully pursued any further except in some areas of Evolutionary Psychology. I cannot do justice here to recent feminist scholarship but hope, in focusing primarily on the earlier period, to provide a complementary historical perspective. Traditionally Psychology saw no need to differentiate between the sexes regarding basic processes such as perception, memory and learning (although the existence of sex differences in performance was always asserted), otherwise the white male was considered as the norm and primary focus of interest. With a few notable exceptions, attitudes towards women found in mainstream Psychology between 1850 and 1950 are mostly little more than restatements of prevailing stereotypes and assumptions given an authoritative ‘scientific’ gloss. L.M. Terman and C.C. Miles’s (1936) ‘M-F’ (masculinefeminine) Scale for instance still took stereotypical gender-trait linkages as unproblematic. Gender issues largely remained a side issue until the 1950s but expanded rapidly with the 1960s’ revival of feminism, also a period when larger numbers of women were entering the discipline. In 1969 the ratio among Psychology students in Britain was c. 60 : 40 in favour of males; by 2001 it was at least 80 : 20 in favour of females. Thus the rise in concern reflects the cultural preoccupation with the position of women and their influx into the discipline – one aspect of their changing position and aspirations associated with that preoccupation.
