Looking forward, looking back: Women in psychology.

Abstract

articles in this Special Issue were prompted by and originated in the 1999 workshop of the Section on Women and Psychology (SWAP). Entitled The Past and Future of the Section on Women and Psychology, the workshop was held the 60th Annual Canadian Psychology Convention. In keeping with the anniversary theme, the presenters reflected on the Section's history, including its precarious origins and evolution, its role in cPA, and on a reassessment of the discipline in general. workshop was complemented by an address from the cPA Invited Speaker, Jeanne Marecek, whose presentation was entitled A Short History of the Future: Reconstituting Psychology's Subjects and Objects (Marecek, 1999). last reappraisal of Canadian was published by two of the original founders of SWAP (Pyke & Stark-Adamec, 1981) in this journal. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to review our progress over the last 20 years. Accordingly, the contributors to the swAP session included two key founders of SWAP, Sandra Pyke and Cannie Stark, who have also served as CPA's fourth and sixth female presidents, respectively. Joanne Gallivan, as CPA Board member and SWAP/CPA Board Liaison, provided the link to the broader workings of the Association, and Maria Gurevich represented more recent involvement in SWAP. Three of these speakers and Jeanne Marecek are among the contributors for this Special Issue. collection, therefore, represents a balance of long-standing experience and more recent participation in the field. Jeanne Marecek's article provides a broader perspective on past and present developments in epistemology, with a central focus on the deconstruction of gender and its inquiry. Sandra Pyke reviews the inception of in Canada and the influential events that shaped it. She concludes with a forecast of the future of of as a disciplinary specialization. Boatswain, Brown, Fiksenbaum, Goldstein, Greenglass, Nadler, and Pyke evaluate indicators of change, including the status of in the discipline, courses in of women, and research dealing with areas of concern. Cannie Stark focuses on the continuing and future difficulties in the realization of the goals of psychology. Finally, Maria Gurevich reconsiders some of the structural barriers to an enhanced standing of and within the discipline, reflecting on swAP's continuing role in this regard. Meredith Kimball contributed material from the archives of SWAP, which included in the Appendix to this Introduction. This includes a list of the swAP coordinators and newsletter editors, a list of the preconvention institutes and their particulars, and lists of distinguished member awards and student paper awards. perspectives in this collection are varied, and in some instances, divergent, which both expected and desirable given the span of experiences, locations, and investments. central points of departure pivot on the distinction between feminist and psychology of women. terms feminist and psychology of women have been used largely interchangeably within and across the papers. While there are some strategic reasons for doing so in the present collection, and more generally, this conflation also masks the precepts and practices that emerge from the historical distinctions between the two (Burman, 1998). Psychology of has its roots in the 1970s Anglo-American feminism (see Matlin, 1993; Squire, 1989; Unger, 1998). This was a woman-centred psychology, whose aim was to redress the theoretical and empirical inadequacies of an androcentric discipline (Kahn & Jean, 1983; Weisstein, 1968). In contrast, adopts an explicitly politicized stance and is less easily relegated to the position of a psychological area of study (Burman, 1998, p. 3). Rather than dictating specific areas of inquiry, identifies an epistemological stance within the discipline, that is, what counts as knowledge, who defines this, and how it arrived at (Burman, 1998, p. …