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Resisting Gender: Twenty-five Years of Feminist Psychology, by Rhodes K. Unger. London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 239 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 0-8039-7824-3. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8039-7825-1.
Rhoda Unger, author of the well-known and widely used textbook (with Mary Crawford) Women and Gender: A Feminist Psychology (McGraw-Hill, 2nd ed., 1996), has written an insider's history of the invention, development, and (precarious) disciplinary institutionalization of feminist social psychology. Two related impulses motivated the writing of this book: the fear of historical erasure suffered by the first wave of feminists in Europe and the United States, whose questions about the position of women in society had disappeared from academic psychology by the time Unger was a student in the 1960s; and her sense that younger women in psychology do not identify with and as feminists, at least not beyond a narrow individualism and without a commitment to a political project of social justice. Partly memoir, partly history, and partly an analysis of how ideas develop in historical, social, and institutional contexts, the book is innovatively structured, with reprints of Unger's own major papers marking shifts in her analytic focus and epistemology, presented at the end of each historical chapter. Unger is a highly intelligent guide to the vicissitudes of a field that she recognizes has had minimal impact on the broader development of feminist theory or academic psychology. Her sense of writing against erasure and her effort to understand the reasons for this predicament make compelling reading.
First, some distinctions are useful for locating the psychology of women as Unger treats it. She is an experimental social psychologist who (by her own acknowledgment) gives short shrift to the many clinical or psychoanalytic psychologists associated with the development of a feminist psychology of women. She holds an orthodox view of psychoanalysis, seeing it as committed to psychobiological mechanisms and fixed and universal sex differences, in sharp tension with her own "social constructionist" views. Nor is Unger a developmentalist...