Advice for Future Feminist Psychologists
Advice for future feminist psychologists was inspirational, often highlighting the difficulty of feminist Psychology not being mainstream, as well as revolving around the idea of community and finding similar others as essential.
Future psychologists might need to be part of a community that validates their positionality, as well as create a more hospitable academic environment.
Select quotes
Rosalind Gill: “there are spaces to do great work and critical work and, yeah, just working together and finding your people and, yeah, and taking care of each other I think is… I think it’s such an individualised place, it’s very, very, yeah, it’s very hard, it’s so hard for people especially starting out not to feel like imposters, not to feel like failures, not to feel like, “Oh everybody else has got this sorted and it’s just me and I’m not coping and what’s wrong with me?” and all of that.
And it really, really isn’t, I think if we can break some of the silence around that and just say this is a kind of systemic issue and actually, we just need to find ways of making it more liveable and caring for each other then it can still be a really good place to be.”
Christine Griffin: “I’d say make feminism your base, not psychology. Survival is resistance. And thinking critically is resistance as well.”
Virginia Braun: "find the right people to talk to because there are people out there who will support what it is that you want to do as a feminist psychologist, and someone using and exploring psychology through a feminist framework, there will be people in our communities, and to find those communities or those scholars within your department, or online networks or whatever it is, that can kind of support what you want to do."
Each of us are a part of that feminist future – you included! If you’re keen to investigate more about the feminist histories of Psychology, you can find all the materials we collected as a part of this project. The oral histories are available on the PFV website and all the archival materials have been donated to the British Psychological Society archive held in Leicester, England.
If you would like to know more, you can email the History of Psychology Centre at: hopc@bps.org.uk.