Gynocentric Values and Feminist Psychology

[Reprinted from Feminism: From Pressure to Politics, Angela Miles and Geraldine Finn, eds., Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989] Jeri Dawn Wine teaches psychology and feminist studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. Her major interest lies in feminist analysis of social interaction and human relationship and in working toward an inclusive feminism that recognizes and affirms differences among women yet transcends the barriers of sexuality, race, and class. She was a member of the Feminist Party of Canada. She is active in the Centre for Women's Studies at OISE, is on the editorial board of Resources for Feminist Research, is active in the Canadian Women's Studies Association, and sits on the board of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. Since publication of this chapter, a number of works have represented the efforts of feminist psychologists to explore women's experience from a gynocentric perspective. Perhaps the most prominent of these publications are Belenky, et al. (1986), Women's Ways of Knowing, and the Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective's (1987) Lesbian Psychologies: Explorations and Challenges. Strongly recommended also is the special issue on Women's Development and Education in the Journal of Education (1985). Work from a gynocentric perspective that sees the qualitative and interpretive methodologies favoured by scholars working within such a perspective is still coming under considerable attack both by mainstream academics and feminist scholars (e.g., see Signs 11:2, pp. 304-33, discussion of Carol Gilligan's research), primarily for its deviation from positivist criteria for good research. Feminist perspectives in psychology are slowly emerging, a process that is a painful and controversial one, but one that is beginning to provide important ovarian theory and data for the broader feminist struggle. The process of emergence of fully feminist scholarship is a particularly difficult one in psychology for a variety of reasons that have to do with the nature of psychology's underlying philosophy, scientific methods, accepted subject matter, and its extensive investment in documentation of the inferiority of women. Equally important, though less obvious, are the inextricable linkages among these and the androcentric values inherent in prevailing psychological views of the nature of human beings - or in the disciplinary vernacular, its of man. As Jill McCalla Vickers has noted in Chapter One, it is markedly difficult for a fully feminist psychology to emerge that has the defining features of feminist scholarship in other disciplines, including its interdisciplinary character, contextualism, and concern with the female experience guided by woman-centred questions and values. In the first part of this article, I examine some of the dimensions of (to adopt Mary O'Brien's and Jill McCaIIa Vickers' apt term) psychology that render it a particularly inhospitable environment for the growth of feminist work. An ontogeny of feminist scholarship suggested by Showalter1 is then used to examine the development of feminist psychology, an ontogeny that proceeds from imitation, through protest, to a focus on female experience. In the second part of the paper I discuss work in psychology that explores a woman-centred or gynocentric perspective. is the organizing principle I've used in this discussion, a principle I consider centrally representative of women's experience and values. In essence, relationality refers to consciousness of the necessary interdependence of human beings, to a sense of connectedness to others, to awareness of one's embeddedness in human, social and historical contexts, to the maximization of well-being for all persons, and to commitment to non-violence. Relationality contrasts markedly with the individuality principle that underlies male-stream psychology's of man. Examination of work on social interaction, human relationships, development of individuals in the human context and resolution of interpersonal moral dilemmas from a gynocentric relationality perspective makes it clear that gynocentric values challenge not only the androcentric models of psychology but the very essence of patriarchal society. …

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