SCHOLAR INFORMATION
Name: Rhoda Unger
Brandeis WSRC Affiliation: Resident Scholar
E-mail: unger@brandeis.edu
Are there dates during the semester when you will be traveling/unreachable? Please
specify.
None
PROJECT INFORMATION
Title of Project: Men in second wave feminist psychology
Please circle one:
Is this project: Continuing from the Spring 2013 SSP program
Project?
This is a brand new project.
or
a brand-New
Describe your research project in three sentences for advertising purposes. (More detailed
description will be given later in this app.)
This study seeks to identify and examine the characteristics of men who participated in
the development of second wave feminist psychology during the 1970s. None of this
small number of men self identified as feminists at the time, but they participated in
feminist organizations and/or published work on gender inequality and have largely been
overlooked in historical accounts. One defining characteristic of their work was its
emphasis on societal factors although they took social and personal factors into account.
STUDENT PARTNER INFORMATION
Have you participated in the Student-Scholar Partnership in prior years?
No _____
(Please specify year and student’s name if yes)
Yes __X___
2012 Victoria Jonas (did not work out well
Previous years: Annie Levin, Autumn Wiley, Alexandra Main, Jacqueline
Gordon, Sophia Pintova, and others all of whom were satisfactory. Alex
coauthored a professional article with m that was published in 2010.
What is your timeline for work to commence on your research project this semester?
It can begin as soon as possible and will certainly need more than one semester if the
student would like to continue.
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meet with their student research assistants on a weekly basis for supervision.
Please explain how you will fulfill this commitment. Where do you plan to hold
supervision meetings? How will you manage time together when one of you is
traveling/vacationing?
I will meet with the student at the WSRC as often as possible, but much of the research
will be done on the web and communication can be done via email. This will be
especially useful because I am collaborating on this project with a colleague who is a
distinguished historian of psychology located in Toronto. Alexandra Rutherford has been
a visiting scholar at the WSRC and plans to be in Boston several times this year and I
would arrange for the partner to meet with her as well as me.
Hiring Criteria Reminder: The SSP is designed for Students and Scholars to work
together for 50 hours on a project in the Scholar’s area of expertise. All candidates who
apply must be considered. Final choices should be made based on student’s background,
skills and level of interest. Decisions may not be made based solely on academic year
standing.
Qualifications Needed for Student Partner: Please indicate below any Required or
Desired skills pertinent to your job description. NOTE: Year of Standing (i.e.
Sophomore, Junior, Senior) may NOT be used as a sole criterion. Please see
Coordinator if you have any questions.)
Related coursework: Courses in women’s studies, psychology, sociology, and/or
history
Technical Skills: Ability to search the internet using various engines; ability to
conduct library database searches for relevant literature.
Past Experience: Experience with qualitative methodology and the construction of
questionnaires.
Similar Professional Interests: Interest in feminist theory, cross-disciplinary
interests, and/or an interest in social history or the history of science are a plus.
Other (please indicate):
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Please submit a curriculum vitae and a detailed explanation of the following:
1. Please give a detailed description of your project.
2. What role will the student play in the project? Please be specific regarding
expected responsibilities.
3. How will your project benefit from the student's participation?
4. What specific knowledge or skills will the student acquire from carrying out
this work?
5. What do you foresee to be the mutual benefits of the mentoring relationship?
6. Please feel free to add any other information you feel relevant.
Any questions? Please direct them to the Student-Scholar Partnership Coordinator,
Kristen Mullin, Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, MS 079,
Waltham, MA. 02454-9110
Email: mullin@brandeis.edu
Men in second wave feminist psychology
This project was provoked by an invitation I received this past
winter to participate in a two day event at Princeton celebrating the
retirement of my thesis advisor at Harvard—Charlie Gross. Charlie is a
noted neuroscientist and although I did my doctoral work in this field, I
had long abandoned it for social psychology and the study of sex and
gender. When I explained to the organizers that I could not comment
on neuroscience, they told me that a memoir would be welcome. I had
very pleasant memories of Charlie’s support in contrast to the sexism
of the other men in Harvard’s program in experimental psychology
when I was a Ph.D. student there in the 1960s. But I also knew that
Charlie had written several papers on sexism in the 1970s as well as
mentoring other women. The result was a paper entitled: “It is hardly
news that women are oppressed: Sexism, activism, and Charlie” that I
presented in May, 2013 (copy included with proposal). The first phrase
in the title was the first line in the chapter he wrote in 1974.
My work on this paper has generated many questions. Charlie
was unusual because of his field (not many neuroscientists wrote
about sexism!), but he was not the only man I encountered during the
time that feminist psychology was being established as a legitimate
part of the discipline. None of these men identified themselves as
feminist, both because they thought the term was gender specific but
also because they did not want to intrude on their female colleagues.
Some paid a professional price for their deviation from male norms
and, interestingly, only one has been honored by feminist psychology
(see Arnie Kahn’s profile at the website Psychology’s Feminist Voices,
www.feministvoices.com).
The purpose of this project is to locate these invisible men and
document their lives and experiences. In order to do so, we will need
to establish some objective criteria for defining them as feminist (this
is a problem for feminist women as well and we hope to explore and
adapt some of this work). There is little work, however, on feminist
men and we believe exploration of their personal and professional
motives, involvement in the field, and its consequences will be a
valuable addition to feminist scholarship. The development of the field
of the psychology of women was unique and these few men should be
made more visible. Also, a few have already died and this may be the
final opportunity to learn from individuals who were simultaneously
inside and outside of feminist psychology; to make their contributions
to the field more visible; and to learn from those who are still alive
what motivated their identification with work on sexism and gender
equity.
Although this is primarily an historical project, establishing
definitional criteria is particularly important in an area whose political
nature creates strong passions. It is also difficult because the meaning
of feminism has changed over time. In order to incorporate an
historical perspective, I will be working on this project with Alexandra
Rutherford—a noted historian of psychology on the faculty of York
University in Toronto who has developed the oral history and digital
archive project, Psychology’s Feminist Voices. Some of the issues we
have encountered in our preliminary discussions of the project are:
How much attention should we pay to self-identification as a feminist?
What kind of evidence do we use to identify someone as a feminist?
Has the nature of feminism changed over time (for example, in terms
of the availability of journals in which to publish feminist work or the
penalties in academia for doing such work), and what is the
relationship between feminism and more generally progressive
attitudes about race, social class, and women as an oppressed group?
Of course, these questions apply to feminist women as well as men,
but appear to be more problematic because of the relatively small
number of men involved.
For present purposes, we would argue that two criteria must be
met for inclusion in our study. First, a person must attend to sex and
gender inequality at a societal level although they may also examine
individual and social factors. Second, they must have published or
publicly presented work that has highlighted women’s inequality. Selfproclaimed feminism or support of individual women is not sufficient
for inclusion in the study. Self-identification as a feminist is also not
sufficient. We recognize that most of these men have not defined
themselves as feminist because they are uncomfortable about
encroaching on women.
Procedure
First, we want to locate as many male psychologists as possible
who fit these criteria (a preliminary list of second wave male feminist
psychologists is included in an appendix, but additional men may be
found). We would like to develop a list of feminist organizations in
which they held membership and the years in which they did so. We
would also like to assemble a list of feminist publications or
presentations for each of these men. We would also like to develop a
written questionnaire about their motivations for work on gender
inequities and any personal or professional problems they encountered
working in this area. How did they enact their feminist values in
psychology? How was this received by the larger, female, feminist
community? We will try to contact the spouses or children of deceased
psychologists for any information in these areas including memoirs or
memorials.
If possible, we would also like to explore historical differences
between second wave male feminists and those men who preceded the
second wave as well as those who identify with third wave feminism.
Historical analysis may allow us to separate out general progressive
attitudes from those explicitly connected to sex and gender. However,
this may be a project for the future.
Description of student’s responsibilities
The partner will be responsible for gathering information about
the male feminists we have identified as well as others who might
emerge as we all continue to do research. The student partner will
need to use various tools for research on the internet including Google,
Google scholar, and other databases on scholarly productivity and
networking. As noted in the proposal, we are also attempting to clarify
the meaning of feminism so it would be helpful if the partner could find
some studies that deal with definitional and conceptual issues and
summarize aspects of these papers that are valuable for this project.
Finally, the partner will collaborate on developing questions for
qualitative study of male feminists’ reasons for their involvement,
accounts of their activities, and professional and personal responses to
their involvement with feminist psychology, and will help collate the
responses.
This project will benefit from the perspective of a younger
researcher who has come of age in a later period of feminism. On a
concrete level, it will benefit from having one more individual to search
the professional literature.
The student will acquire research tools that will be useful in
many future projects. Since this is an interdisciplinary project, these
tools are applicable to many areas of social science and the
humanities. They will also acquire knowledge about the complexity of
apparently simple research questions. And, they will have the
opportunity to learn about the development of a major web resource
from my collaborator as well as information about graduate training in
the history of psychology.
We expect to write up this project for publication and the student
partner will have an opportunity to contribute to it and to be a
coauthor. The research might also extend into a generational analysis
of male feminism and its implications.
Appendix: Prospective subjects
Male feminists in the second wave, area of study, and institutional
affiliation
Arnold Kahn Social Iowa State and James Madison U.
Phillip Goldberg Clinical Connecticut College (deceased)
Joseph Pleck Clinical U. of Michigan
Robert Brannon Social Brooklyn College
Alan Gross (?) Social U. of Wisconsin, U. of Maryland
Charles Gross Physiological, Harvard & Princeton
Kenneth Dion, Social, U. of Toronto (deceased)
Richard Roistacher (?), Social
Peter Glick (may not be early enough)
Peter Hegarty (more third wave than second, but his work is certainly
relevant)
“It ls hardly news that women are oppressed:” Sexism, activism, and
Charlie.
Rhoda K. Unger
Women’s Studies Research Center
Brandeis University
I first met Charlie in 1961 when I was a teaching assistant in the
Department of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. This was a rather odd position for me because I was in my
second year of graduate school in the department of experimental
psychology at Harvard. This arrangement, however, illustrates the kind
of discrimination against women in experimental psychology during the
early 60s (as well as earlier and later). I will briefly outline why I was
working at MIT in order to contrast the attitudes and behaviors of the
Harvard faculty in contrast to Charlie’s kindness and support of
women.
Sexism was particularly virulent at Harvard. There were, of
course, no female faculty members and only two female post-doctoral
fellows during the six years I studied there. The first week I arrived,
Richard Herrnstein, the director of the graduate program, called a
meeting of the first year graduate students and announced that only
one in two men were expected to obtain their Ph.D. and only one of
four women. I do not know if the percentages were correct. However,
an examination of Ph.D. recipients during the time the program
existed as a separate department (1951 – 1973) 99 men received
their Ph.D. and only 14 women.
These figures might help explain why I was supervising a very
large class in introductory psychology at MIT. The Harvard department
had been founded by E. G. Boring who. like his mentor Titchener, did
not believe that women should be experimental psychologists. Boring
did not believe that women could survive the grueling 80 hour week
prescribed for scholarly success at Harvard. Men who survived the
very difficult first year curriculum were routinely offered research
assistantships with one or another of the faculty members. Since they
did not believe that women would go on to do productive scholarship
and enhance their mentors’ reputations, women were not offered
research positions. When I passed my first year’s classes and
requested financial aid, they “solved” the problem by making an
arrangement with Hans-Lukas Teuber who was starting a neuroscience
focused psychology program at MIT and did not yet have enough
graduate students to help with the undergraduate program. I still do
not know who paid for them, but I got my tuition and a stipend as well
as an opportunity to get to know and work with Charlie.
Professor Teuber was very supportive when I told him I was
interested in physiological psychology and introduced me to Charlie
and Steve Chorover who were studying the frontal cortex of monkeys
at that time. They allowed me to assist in operations and taught me
how to use stereotaxic devices. When I decided to do some research in
a related area, the only animals available in the Harvard laboratory
were pigeons and rats. Charlie and Steve believed that the caudate
nucleus of lower mammals had some of the functions of the frontal
cortex in primates so I began to examine the effect of caudate nucleus
lesions on the ability of rats to make rapid temporal and spatial shifts.
This allowed me to use sophisticated operant conditioning techniques
available in Skinner’s lab. Harvard did not have any objection to this
combination of physiological psych and operant conditioning and
Charlie became my more or less official advisor.
The transition to official thesis advisor was made easy because
Charlie joined the experimental psych program as an assistant
professor in 1964. I tried to convince him not to do so because I
believed he would be incompatible with its sexist and politically
conservative department. By the time I was finishing up my doctoral
dissertation (1965-1966) Charlie and Dick Herrnstein (another
member of my doctoral committee because of the operant techniques
I used) were barely on speaking terms. Some of you may remember
Herrnstein as the co-author of the “Bell Curve” which argued that
intelligence was genetically determined and underlay social class as
well as racial differences. Charlie was very opposed to such social
Darwinist theories and later opposed Herrnstein’s lecture at Princeton.
Based on the autobiography that Charlie wrote for the American
Psychologist when he received APA’s gold medal for achievement in
science (Gross, 20 ) some might argue that Charlie’s progressive
beliefs were related to his father’s communism. Ironically, Herrnstein
came from a very similar background. He used to tell students about
his father carrying him on his shoulders during May Day parades in
New York City. But the two men did not get along and I had to relay
communications about my thesis. As you might expect, it was not a
pleasant thesis defense. I may have only survived because of the
sexist assumption of the department that having suddenly gotten
married a few weeks before my defense, “I had other things on my
mind.”
Charlie continued to support me and I did get a tenure track
position at Hofstra University which had no laboratory facilities for
physiological research and no intention of spending money to develop
one. Unlike most of the men at Harvard, I had never received any
informal instruction on how to write grants or introductions to potential
senior collaborators. During the period of social unrest of the mid
1960s and early 1970s I also found myself drawn into civil rights and
anti-Vietnam War activities as well as feminism. With a colleague at
Hofstra who had been trained in verbal learning, I began to publish
social psychological studies examining racism and sexism. I kept
Charlie informed about my shifting interests and he remained
supportive although it became more difficult for him to write letters of
recommendation.
Since I had not yet officially abandoned physiological
psychology, I decided to join Division 6 (Comparative and Physiological
Psychology) shortly after I joined APA in 1972. To my surprise, the
division turned down my application as well as that of Mary Brown
Parlee who had received her Ph.D. from MIT at about the same time I
had received mine. The official reason was that neither of us had
published in the area although we had given papers at conferences.
Charlie was appalled especially since there was nothing in the
division’s by-laws requiring professional publications for simple
membership.
Charlie introduced me to Ethel Tobach—a renowned comparative
psychologist and tireless social activist. They managed to convince the
division to grant us membership. As you might expect, the division had
a low percentage of female members (about fifteen percent) at the
time we applied). A few years later, the executive committee of the
division asked me to co-chair a committee with a man who was
probably the only black member of the division on the role of women
and minorities in physiological and comparative psychology. We
reviewed the data, decided that there was no role, and dismantled the
committee.
Ethel Tobach has told me recently that she met Charlie because
they worked together to force Division 6 to live up to its bylaws and
accept Mary Parlee and me as members. Soon after this Ethel and
Charlie collaborated on a book entitled “The four horsemen: Racism,
sexism, militarism, and social Darwinism (Tobach. Gianutsos, Topoff, &
Gross, 1974). An earlier version was presented at the New York
Academy of Sciences in 1972.
Charlie’s chapter was entitled “Biology and pop-biology: Sex and
sexism” and its first sentence “It is hardly news that women are
oppressed” (p. 69) is part of the title of my talk today. The next
sentence pointed out that “women as a class are abused, exploited,
discriminated against, and generally put down.” He then provided a list
of statistics showing that women were paid much less than men, were
hardly represented in the professions, and were relegated to clearical
and service jobs. His description of legal, economic, and educational
discrimination as well as the use of women by the media to sell
virtually everything is indistinguishable from feminist critiques of the
time. What is unusual is that the chapter was written by a man who
had already embarked on an eminent career in neuroscience.
Charlie drew on evidence from comparative and physiological
psychology to debunk the idea that women’s inferiority to men was
based on sex differences in biology. He listed a series of biological
myths about female inferiority and then debunked them. These
included the idea that among primates dominance and leadership are
male traits. He described a number of primate species where such
gender differences do not exist. He argued for consideration of
environmental influences and pointed out that male dominance was
greatest among those species that lived on the ground rather than in
the trees. He concluded this section by asking whether we really want
to take the Hamadryas baboon as our social and ethical model.
He next went on to question data arguing that male bonding in
primates was a unique evolutionary development that made men more
suitable for political leadership and that women are unsuitable for
leadership positions because of mood shifts based on the menstrual
cycle. He described conflicting data in both areas and noted the
absence of research on what is now known as “jet lag” as well as on
circadian rhythms in both sexes.
Finally, he discussed the evidence for a genetic basis for male
and female characteristics. The original studies on biologically
anomalous humans by John Money that emphasized the role of the
environment have proved to be incorrect. It is, of course, impossible to
separate humans from the awareness of their own genitalia. Current
literature emphasizes that the sexes form two extensively overlapping
distributions in virtually all behaviors. Unfortunately, they also show
that many psychologists prefer to look at sex differences rather than
at sex similarities. We are not as free from sexist biases as Charlie’s
earlier remarks promised we could be.
Many feminist psychologists have discussed issues involving the
biological bases of sex and gender. It is important to remember,
however, how many years ago this chapter was written and that it was
written by an eminent man in the field. There was still little theoretical
and empirical work that questioned sexist views about sex differences.
Charlie cited the current scientific literature as well as a paper which is
considered the first important paper in feminist psychology published
only a year before the discussion at the New York Academy of
Sciences that helped generate both his chapter and the book as a
whole (Weisstein, 1971). Since the book was not in Charlie’s primary
area of expertise nor could it be expected to enhance his scientific
reputation, I regard the chapter as a form of social activism as well as
a contribution to the field.
As indicated earlier, Charlie was prepared to take action when he
believed that organized psychology was being unfair to women. He
took on APA’s Division of Comparative and Physiological Psychology
privately, but made a much more public disclosure when he published
a letter to the editor of the American Psychologist about an
organization then called “The Psychological Round Table” founded by
Titchener who explicitly excluded women from membership. in the 19th
century (This organization still exists as the Society of Experimental
Psychology.). In the letter, Charlie described the organization’s
meetings in the 1960s as secretive, elitist yet intellectually banal, and
thoroughly scatological (Gross, 1977). He characterized the slides
accompanying its most important invited lecture as pornography closer
to that found in Hustler rather than Penthouse.
Charlie went on to state that in the late 1960s, he and many of
his friends stopped attending meetings because of the sexist,
antidemocratic, and secretive nature of the organization. They never
succeeded in communicating their concerns to the leaders of the
organization. In 1974 he attended a meeting (with Naomi Weisstein)
to raise these issues again. He reported that there had been some
changes and a few women were in attendance. Another
“improvement” was that male genitalia were now included among the
slides of women’s bodies for the main lecture. The changes were quite
limited. A photo from the SEP archives of attendees at the 1997
meeting still shows only one woman—see
http://www.sepsych.org/photo_archive.htm).
One might wonder why Charlie’s exposure of a small
organization of self-appointed “best and brightest” was important. In
addition to the exclusion and denigration of women, Charlie pointed
out that the members of the organization were in positions of power
and were able to support each other in obtaining grants, publications,
and career advancement. These opportunities might not have been
available to most male psychologists, but they were most definitely
withheld from women psychologists no matter how good their research
was. The secrecy which the organization maintained for many years
made it difficult to show the impact on the field of their covert use of
power.
Charlie’s personal and professional support of women is less well
known than his contributions to cognitive neuroscience. I think it is
interesting that some of his female students who came of age in the
1960s left neuroscience for research on women and gender (although
Weisstein made important contributions to the field before she became
very ill). Mary Parlee wrote many articles debunking the menstrual
cycle as a source of women’s inferiority and I wrote an article entitled
“Toward a redefinition of sex and gender” that was published in the
American Psychologist in 1979 that has frequently been used to
analyze the causality of so-called sex differences. Both Mary and I
have been presidents of the Society for Women in Psychology (Division
35 of APA).
Charlie has never held my status as a “renegade” against me. He
has been a rare model of male feminism when some think that it is a
contradiction in terms. I am proud to have been his first doctoral
student and proud to participate in this celebration of his life and
tremendous contributions to the field.
References
Benjamin, L. Jr. (1977)
Furumoto, L. (19 ). The experimentalist, 1904 – 1929. In J.
Morawski. Ed.
Gross, C. G. (1977).Psychological Round Table in the 1960s. American
Psychologist, December, p. 1120.
Gross, C. G. (1974). Biology and pop-biology: Sex and sexism. In E.
Tobach,
J. Gianutsos, H. Topoff, & C. G. Gross *eds). The
four horsemen: Racism, sexism, militarism, and social
Darwinism. Pp. 69 – 80.
Tobach, E., Gianutsos, J., Topoff, H., & Gross, C. G. (1974). The four
horsemen: Racism, sexism, militarism, and social Darwinism.
New York: Behavioral Publications.
Weisstein, N. (1968). Kinder, kuche, kirche as scientific law:
Psychology constructs the female [revised and expanded
version]. Boston, MA: New England Free Press.
Weisstein, N. (1977). "How can a little girl like you teach a great big
class of men?" the chairman said, and the other adventures of a
woman in science. In S. Ruddick & P. Daniels (Eds.), Working it out:
23 writers, artists, scientists, and scholars talk about their lives and
work (pp. 241-250). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Kinder, Kirche, Kuche as scientific law: Psychology constructs the female
N Weisstein - Boston, MA: New England Free Press. Illtroduction: …, 1968