UK Feminist Psychology: Lasting Legacies and Feminist Futures

INTRODUCTION

The history of feminist psychology in the UK is a fascinating one. It took substantial campaigning for feminist psychology to become established within professional Psychology. This wasn’t because there weren’t any feminists who wanted to organise - it was because they weren’t allowed to!

Around this time, an intrepid group of feminists known as WIPS! (Women in Psychology) were trying to establish a similar group in the UK.

In 1987, the group were finally given official status within the British Psychological Society (BPS), where they named themselves the Psychology of Women Section (POWS).

The feminists that organised it were: Sue Wilkinson, Jan Burns, Paula Nicolson, Janet Sayers, Jane Ussher, Marilyn Aitkenhead, Linda Greenbury, Mat Idema, Sandra Oliver, Sheila Rossan and Alison Thomas.

Since then, POWS changed its name to POWES to stand for Psychology of Women and Equalities Section to reflect its inclusive and wider equalities perspective.

In countries such as Turkey, Spain, China, Brazil, India, and Israel and many others, no such formal structures for feminist psychology exist... but that’s not to say there aren’t any feminist psychologists!

In this exhibit, we will explore UK-based feminist psychology including and beyond POWES. Our aims are to protect the legacy of feminist work in UK Psychology and ensure wider access to this history. Please choose one of the following three pathways to explore further:

Feminist Entrance into Psychology

Feminism entered people’s lives and their Psychology work at a variety of different stages and times: sometimes, their path through Psychology...

POWES

POWES was described as an important community space for feminist Psychology, and Christine Griffin and Erica Burman were founding members of the section...

Advice for Future Feminist Psychologists

Advice for future feminist psychologists was inspirational, often highlighting the difficulty of feminist Psychology not being mainstream...

This exhibit is based on a project which involved collecting and curating material and documents relating to POWES, and conducting oral history interviews with 13 key UK feminist psychologists. These included:

Rosalind Gill

Career focus: Cultural and creative labour; gender and media; media and intimate life; the dynamics of discrimination and inequality; discursive, visual, and psychosocial methods

Christine Griffin

Career focus: Youth research; consumption and identity; gender relations

Sonia Livingstone

Career focus: The mediation of everyday life, digital technologies; media literacy; online risk and opportunity; child internet safety; children’s rights in the digital environment

Susie Orbach (COMING SOON!)

Lynne Segal

Career focus: Feminism; sex and gender, ageing and joy, as well as community (and) activism; meddles in politics

Valerie Walkerdine

Career focus: Subjectivity; girlhood; critical psychology; class and gender; arts, culture and media

Meg-John Barker

Career focus: Gender; sex & relationships (e.g., non-monogamy/polyamory, BDSM/kink); knowledge mobilisation through creative popular outreach; mental health & self-care; dismantling binaries

Virginia Braun

Career focus: Critical health/social psychology; sexuality and gender studies; qualitative research methods; thematic and discourse analysis

Helen Malson

Career focus: Eating disorders, including treatment and prevention issues; gender; culture; qualitative methods; critical discourse analysis; feminist poststructuralism

Annadis Rúdólfsdóttir

Career focus: Discourse analysis; social psychology; qualitative research; gendered relations

Victoria Clarke

Career focus: Thematic analysis; critical psychology; gender and sexuality, intersectional feminism; appearance and embodiment; family and relationships

Erica Burman

Career focus: Developmental psychology; critical feminist psychology; minoritisation; colonialism; discourse analysis; psychoanalysis; childhood and educational studies

Rose Capdevila

Career focus: Single-issue social movements; social justice; mothering; social media; gender; history of feminist psychology

The project was funded by the British Psychological Society, and was partially funded by the Open Psychology Research Centre at the Open University. The project upon which this exhibit is based was conducted by Professor Rose Capdevila, Dr Katherine Hubbard, and Dr Lois Donnelly.

Credits

Jilbert Ebrahimi

Andrej Lišakov

Katarzyna Pypla