Entrance into Feminist Psychology
Feminism entered people’s lives and their Psychology work at a variety of different stages and times: sometimes, their path through Psychology introduced them to feminism, sometimes their feminist identity came before their interest in Psychology, and sometimes both were embedded in one another from the beginning.
Susie Orbach: “I became interested in psychology, the mind, the body, how we’re constituted, how we come to be who we are most intensely I suppose through feminism and trying to understand the structures inside of us that incline us to not act in our own best interest. So while fighting for equality and when I came into feminism it was second wave feminism so it was on the heels of the civil rights movement and black power and the struggle to get America to leave Vietnam, so feminism came out of these very vibrant huge social struggles.”
Many who were involved with feminism and activism in their life before their degrees were surprised not to find it within Psychology, which was more focussed on positivist experiments.
Discovering a feminist community within Psychology was therefore important, and POWES was one way by which people entered into feminist psychology. One person we were able to trace through the archive was Rose Capdevila. Rose expressed interest in POWES in 1997 and has been involved ever since.
