‘It’s taking women’s accounts seriously’

The fascinating and turbulent history of feminist psychology in the UK has been captured in a project by the British Psychological Society's Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES). In a collection of 13 oral histories and multiple documents from the BPS archive, feminist psychologists talk about the history of feminist psychology, the difficulty of establishing a BPS Section, the development of their own feminist identities and the impact of those on their work.

In the collection, feminist psychologists talk of the resistance they faced in their efforts to organise and establish a feminist psychology Section, with the BPS refusing their application initially – the first time this had happened. 

Although official feminist psychology groups had been founded as early as 1969 in the USA, in the 70s in Canada and early 80s Australia, it wasn't until 1987 that a group was given official status by the BPS.

Then known as the Psychology of Women Section, its creation was led by Sue Wilkinson, Jan Burns, Paula Nicolson, Janet Sayers, Jane Ussher, Marilyn Aitkenhead, Linda Greenbury, Mat Idema, Sandra Oliver, Sheila Rossan and Alison Thomas. Some of their stories have been captured in the oral histories including Emeritus Professor of Feminist and Health Studies Sue Wilkinson (Loughborough University).

In her interview, Wilkinson said that at the start of her academic career in the late 1970s and early 1990s, she became more aware of the restrictions of women in psychology – both in terms of a lack of representation of women in senior positions and within the BPS. In 1983 and 1984 she ran two symposia on feminist psychology at the Social Psychology Section's annual conference. 

'In the course of doing that and running them and meeting other women, I came to realise that there was not much of an institutional space for women in psychology and women's concerns and women's research and so on. And that kind of led to the beginnings of my feminism, or at least the rapid development of my feminism – I like to think it was a seed in there already somewhere, in organising for and with women in psychology.'

Wilkinson said that as soon as there was a rallying point, feminists 'came out of the woodwork in all directions'. She and a group of others began thinking about establishing a feminist Section in the BPS. 'It was also the time which I first met feminist psychologists from the USA. So Rhoda Unger came over to the second symposium and was able to fill me in on the history of women and psychology in the United States and the relationship between AWP [Association for Women in Psychology] and Division 35 of the American Psychological Association. There was a sense that elsewhere in the world there was already a community. We were just 15 years behind in Britain.'

It took two more years before the BPS Psychology of Women section was approved – Wilkinson said in her oral history interview that the group learned a great deal over those two years. 

'We learnt to cultivate powerful allies. We learnt how to write appropriate scientific rhetoric for the proposal. One of the things I did was to look internationally at what kind of struggles had happened in the States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand... and discovered there were terrific parallels. Everywhere these sorts of arguments have been used every time women began to try to organise within psychology. So I was publishing stuff looking at the rhetoric of these organisations and how they actually used that rhetoric as a form of institutional power to make sure women's organisations didn't happen, or if they did they were kind of marginalised in some way that really meant they would have little effect.'

When speaking about the resistance to establishing a section in the BPS she added, 'I think the essence of it was that there is no recognised area of psychology that is about women… [that] this is just a women's group, it is a political organisation in disguise, masquerading as something scientific.'

The oral histories and online exhibition have been published by Psychology's Feminist Voices – a research project based at York University in Toronto directed by Professor Alexandra Rutherford – and are now also stored with the BPS History of Psychology Centre. 

The POWES project was funded by the BPS, with partial funding from the Open Psychology Research Centre based at the Open University, and was conducted by Professor Rose Capdevila (Open University), Dr Katherine Hubbard (University of Surrey), and PhD researcher Lois Donnelly (University of Worcester).

Many of the oral history interviewees, including Emeritus Professor Paula Nicolson (Royal Holloway, University of London), mentioned their first taste of feminist psychology was during the symposia organised by Sue Wilkinson in the early 1980s. Nicolson was involved in the earliest days of Women in Psychology (WIPs!) which formed following those symposia and organised conferences and campaigned to establish a section.

'We met regularly with great enthusiasm. We were very productive in terms of the decisions we made and lobbying the British Psychological Society and lobbying senior members of it, fellows, so we could get signatures because that was the rule; to get a hundred fellows' signatures in order to set something up like this. Several of us… were more or less at the same stage of doing our PhDs, so whereas I don't think any of us got support particularly for what we were doing from the organisations where we worked, or who we were registered with, we got a lot of support from each other. It really was a life-changing experience for us, it definitely was.'

Professor Jan Burns' (Canterbury Christ Church University) oral history interview traces her fascinating career path, her interest in history and involvement in the earliest days of feminist psychology in the UK, as well as balancing both her psychological interests and feminism. 

Burns also speaks about the intersectionality of her own work and experience as a woman, lesbian, and psychologist from a working-class background. She also talks about the tension between applied and academic psychology – with the latter often being given precedence. 

'I think one of the splits that isn't talked about is theoretical versus applied. And certainly, we saw it in the Psychology of Women Section, and I see it with my career direction… I spent so much of my life sitting in academia, listening to talks [thinking] "Where the hell is this going? What relevance has this to women on the street?".'

Professor Jane Ussher (Western Sydney University) was asked about the difference between critical and feminist psychology in her oral history interview. 'Was it Rebecca West who said "Anyone who doesn't think a woman is a doormat is a feminist? So I think it's an attention to gender, to gendered issues... It's a recognition that we still live in a very patriarchal, phallocentric society, that socially women are very disadvantaged, and psychologically women are often very disadvantaged.

'Women are more likely to be pathologised. So it's a recognition of the taken-for-grantedness of those sorts of assumptions. [Feminism is something that says] that gender has to be a part of the equation if we're looking at experience. If you look the definition of feminism in the journal Feminism and Psychology, they also talk about class and race, but I think sometimes we can sound as though we're being very tokenistic when we put all these things together. I suppose for me it's about the centrality of gender and experience in terms of what is feminist psychology. It's taking women's accounts seriously.'

The POWES and Psychology's Feminist Voices exhibition also brings together advice for future feminist psychologists from the oral history interviews. Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis (City, University of London) Rosalind Gill said there were spaces to do great critical work. 

'I think it's such an individualised place, it's… very hard... for people especially starting out not to feel like imposters, not to feel like failures, not to feel like, "Oh everybody else has got this sorted and it's just me and I'm not coping and what's wrong with me?" and all of that. And it really, really isn't, I think if we can break some of the silence around that and just say this is a kind of systemic issue and actually, we just need to find ways of making it more liveable and caring for each other then it can still be a really good place to be.'

• View the oral histories and exhibition on Psychology's Feminist Voices website.
• You can also search the HOPC archive catalogue for more records relating to the history of UK Psychology