Translating Gender Politics Scholarship into Practice: Views from Inside and Outside the Discipline

Abstract

Nearly 40 years ago, the women's movement—my own passionate engagement in it, my delighted, mystified questions about what the movement and feminism were doing not just to change women's rights but also to change women's and men's whole conception of women as political actors (questions I could later phrase in the language of political psychology, though I could not do so then)—drove me from biology to political science. Freshly armed with an undergraduate biology degree from Georgia Tech (the student body of which, at that time, was more than 99% male), working the graveyard shift as a medical technologist, and spending my days marching, rallying, and lobbying for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and many other feminist policy proposals in those heady days, I began to realize that the intellectual life I had always assumed I would pursue in biomedicine had departed from my imagination, to be replaced by an overmastering desire to study political science and, in particular, to study the political psychology of gender, as we came to define the inquiry.