Sex Differences and/in the Self: Classic Themes, Feminist Variations, Postmodern Challenges

Abstract

This article examines perspectives on and intersections between two recurrent themes in the history of American psychology: sex differences and theories of self. These themes and certain connections between them are considered in three eras: early American psychology, feminist psychology coincident with the second wave of feminism, and the recent postmodern turn in psychology. A contextual analysis of parallels and contrasts among theories of sex differences and of the self in these three eras highlights problems with modernist understandings, especially with essentialist construals of gender and individualistic understandings of self. The article presents relationally defined postmodern views of gender and self, and comments on their promise for the present era of globalization and the consequent increasing attention to interconnections among people.