Resisting Gender
Twenty-Five Years of Feminist Psychology
—Sari M. van Anders, Indiana University
Resisting Gender provides a reflexive social history of the development of the psychology of women as an academic field of research and teaching. Core areas of concern in feminist psychology are examined, including discrimination, power and social control, critique of theory and content in psychology, and epistemology. The book outlines the stages through which the psychology of women has moved, and highlights the on-going questions and dilemmas for the field. The author, Rhoda K. Unger, is an eminent scholar and activist in American feminist psychology. She has been involved with the discipline as a researcher, teacher, author, and leader since its inception, and is in a unique position to introduce us to, and offer her personal perspective on, the key debates and concerns that have driven, or been driven by, the field of the psychology of women. Resisting Gender is primarily written for graduate students and professionals who are new to the psychology of women. It should also be read by scholars of psychology, sociology, social history, history of science, and women's studies.
`The book is engaging and stimulating....The book will make interesting reading for scholars, graduate students, and upper students across many specialities in psychology, sociology, and family studies that focus on gender and women's studies and the psychology of women and gender' - Contemporary Sociology
`She is illuminating and incisive in her critiques of the rapidity with which even feminist psychology moves from conceptualizing the distribution of power and its personal and interpersonal effects to focusing on "perceptions of power" as well as the move from the demonstration of the pervasiveness of sexism to studies of the psychology of prejudice, which she identifies as a retreat from behaviour to attitudes, from external barriers that women face to internal ones-their own and others' attitudes' - Cognitives, Emotions and Identities
`The well-organized book provides a needed contribution for feminist psychology, in that it is written from an experimental psychologist's perspective, which gives it a unique niche in a field in which feminist psychology and experimental psychology are often seen to be at odds with one another. Unger does a good job outlining the tensions between these and other perspectives in this book' - Contemporary Psychology
"Unger presents an authoritative account of feminist psychology and its major practitioners, as well as her own contributions, including six reprints of earlier addresses or papers."