Women, Psychology, and Social Issues Research

Abstract

This article reviews the history of women psychologists' contributions to social issues research. The first part describes the work of a few remarkable women in the early part of the century whose scientific participation and feminist orientations were equally unusual. It then focuses on the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), which was founded in 1937, and traces the various stages of women's participation in it, beginning with its essentially all male leadership for over 20 years (with a few notable exceptions), through the flurry of short-lived feminist concerns after World War II, to the dramatic upsurge of female leadership and scholarship of the past two decades. Some potential reasons for the 20-year hiatus between postwar feminist interests and similar concerns in the late 1960s are discussed.