Profile
Stephanie Shields
Birth:
1949
Training Location(s):
PhD, Pennsylvania State University (1976)
MS, Pennsylvania State University (1973)
BS, Santa Clara University (1971)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Pennsylvania State University (1996-Present)
University of California Davis (1977-1996)
Pennsylvania State University (1975-1977)
Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History Interview:
Career Focus:
Gender and emotion; social psychology of gender; history of women and gender; intersectionality.
Biography
Stephanie A. Shields was born on February 6, 1949, in Omaha, Nebraska. She was raised in a home environment that stressed the importance of a college education and independence. As a first-generation university student, she received a California State Scholarship which provided funding for four years of Bachelor of Science education at Santa Clara University—including a year abroad in Rome. She developed a feminist consciousness in her senior year when she read a newly published book by Judith Bardwick on the psychology of women and questioned its biological determinism.
On her return from Rome, Shields was hired as an undergraduate teaching assistant for developmental psychologist, Eleanor Willemsen, and did an internship at the Head Start Center. She became interested in "how kids learn to map internal states so that they can tell the difference between emotion and not emotion, this emotion or another emotion" as well as "how they learn to map their feeling states onto the language and appearance that other people use."
After receiving her B.S. degree, Shields went to graduate school to study emotion at The Pennsylvania State University. When she began graduate school, she described herself as "a newly hatched, newly turned on, and a little pissed-off baby feminist." She remembers vividly the gender disparities in the Department of Psychology in her first year. She recalls that only two of the 30 tenure-line faculty at the time were women (Carolyn Wood Sherif and Ellen Piers). As well, when six new faculty openings came up, they were all filled by white men. The following year, she and lecturer Phyllis Berman initiated a collective meeting with the women in the Department of Psychology which eventually led to a seminar on the psychology of women.
Shields' interest in the history of the psychology of women began her first year in grad school when she took a course in the history of psychology on the recommendation of her roommate. Although not supported by the instructor, she followed her own interests and wrote an extensive, well-researched, 70-page paper on the history of the psychology of women that started at the time of Aristotle, through Christine de Pizan, to American functionalism. Through this research she encountered the work of psychologist Leta Stetter Hollingworth. In her third year of graduate school, when she was free from teaching because of an NSF traineeship, she devoted much of her time to research the history of the psychology of women, building on her earlier term paper to further research 19th
Century to early 20th Century psychology of women in the U.S. and Europe. The resulting paper and another on the lost work of Leta Hollingworth, were published in the American Psychologist in 1975. Although Shields was not a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) at the time (she didn’t have enough money for dues), she nonetheless submitted her paper on the history of the psychology of women to APA's Division of the Psychology of Women, Division 35, to present at the New Orleans conference in 1974. Her paper was accepted and she presented it "in a room just chock full of people and with people standing, all of them excited about the new APA Division.
Although Shields was in the developmental psychology stream in graduate school, she wrote her master's thesis perceptions of women’s emotional responses to their pregnancy. During her doctorate she became interested in psychophysiological measurement and moved on to studying the psychophysiology of emotion. Her dissertation was titled Children's Perceived and Actual Physiological Responses to Stress. In 1975, when she was still ABD, she was offered a full-time position as a lecturer at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University. Although she enjoyed teaching there, she wanted to move to a research university. In 1977, she received an offer of an Assistant Professor position at the University of California, Davis. She accepted the position and moved back to California where her family and many friends lived.
Shields continued to do research on the psychophysiology of emotion at the University of California Davis. As she notes of this time: "I had been told very clearly that I was not going to get tenured if I did work about the history of gender...It was not [considered] real research."
Shields was torn between her interest in the psychology of gender and her research on emotion. She eventually got an opportunity to teach both Psychology of Women and Psychology of Emotion courses alongside each other. Through her students she realized that gender and emotion are very much related, and that examining how beliefs about gender and beliefs about emotion influence one another was a way forward in research.
Her contributions to the theory and practice of psychology are reflected in the 85+ articles and book chapters she has published (as of this writing), in areas ranging from emotion and gender to feminist theory and the history of psychology. She published Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion in 2002. In the book, Shields argues for moving beyond a "gender differences slash similarities type model," noting that this approach stays at the level of comparing genders as opposed to problematizing and thereby explaining when, why, and how gender matters.
Shields has been very active in the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), including as the founding editor of the newsletter and ISRE’s listserv and in other capacities. In 1996, she had an opportunity to meet with prominent emotion researcher Magda Arnold in Tucson, AZ. Arnold was 93 years old at the time. Although Arnold's work had not been particularly influential in Shields' own research, she was impressed by the fact that Arnold's scientific work on emotion in the 1960s was truly groundbreaking; no one else was studying emotion in that way at that time. She thus organized a special issue of the journal Cognition and Emotion on Arnold's contributions to emotion research.
Shields left the University of California, Davis and since 1996 has been a Professor of Psychology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University—University Park. Her advice to feminists who are pursuing psychology? Shields notes the importance of making bridges among various intellectual and subdisciplinary communities and taking a long view on efforts to change psychology. Getting psychology to change, she notes, is like getting an oil tanker to take a turn: "You have to start 40 miles ahead to get a little bit of a turn and so you know you have to choose where you are going to have your impact."
by Pelin Gul (2011)
Addendum. Shields served as President of the Society for the Psychology of Women (APA Division 35) 2011–2012. She organized the Institute for Academic Feminist Psychologists (2012; 2016; 2018; 2024 thus far) for early career academics to create networks that can promote and support each other professionally. Throughout her career she has been concerned with applying basic research to practical interventions, most recently via WAGES, an interactive demonstration that illustrates the cumulative effect of unconscious biases in the workplace.
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Shields, S. A. (1975). Functionalism, Darwinism, and the psychology of women: A study in social myth. American Psychologist, 30, 739-754.
Shields S. A. (1991) Gender in the psychology of emotion. In K. T. Strongman (Ed.), International Review of Studies on Emotion. Volume1 (pp. 227-245). New York: John Wiley.
Shields, S. A. (2002). Speaking from the heart: Gender and the social meaning of emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Recipient of 2003 Association for Women in Psychology's Distinguished Publication Award)
Shields, S. A. (2005). The politics of emotion in everyday life: "Appropriate" emotion and claims on identity. Review of General Psychology, 9, 3-15.
Shields, S. A. (2007). Passionate men, emotional women: Psychology constructs gender difference in the late 19th century. History of Psychology, 10, 92-110.
Shields, S. A. (2008). Intersectionality of social identities: A gender perspective. Special issue of Sex Roles, 59, 301-311. Recipient of 2009 Association for Women in Psychology’s Distinguished Publication Award.
Shields, S. A. & Dicicco, E. C. (2011). The social psychology of sex and gender: From gender differences to doing gender. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35, 491-499.
Shields, S. A. (2012). Waking up to privilege: Intersectionality and opportunity. In Y. Flores-Niemann, A. Harris, C. González, & G. Gutiérrez y Muhs (Eds.), Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia, pp. 29-39. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt4cgr3k.8
Shields, S. A. (2013). Gender and emotion: What we think we know, what we need to know, and why it matters. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 37, 423-435.
MacArthur, H. J. & Shields, S. A. (2015). There’s no crying in baseball, or is there? Male athletes, tears, and masculinity in North America. Emotion Review, 7, 39-46. DOI: 10.1177/1754073914544476
Shields, S. A. (2015). Transformational moments in feminist psychology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 39, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/0361684315574502
Shields, S. A. (2016). Functionalism, Darwinism, and advances in the psychology of women and gender: From the 19th century to the 21st. Feminism & Psychology, 26, 397-404. DOI: 10.1177/0959353516663567
Shields, S. A. (2016). Feminist psychological science and the future of gender research. In T-A. Roberts, N. Curtin, L. Cortina, & L. E. Duncan (Eds.) Best practices in feminist psychological science: Gender beyond difference. New York: Springer DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32141-7
Warner, L. R. & Shields, S. A. (2018). Intersectionality as a framework for theory and research in feminist psychology. In Gender, sex, and sexualities: Psychological perspectives (N. K. Dess, J. Marecek, & L. C. Bell, Eds.), pp. 29-52. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shields, S. A., McCormick, K. T., Dicicco, E. C., & Zawadzki, M. J. (2018). Demonstrating the cumulative effects of unconscious bias with WAGES-Academic (Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation): Short and long-term impact on faculty and administrators. 10.1615/JWomenMinorScienEng.2018014113
Shields, S. A., Charash-Cohen, Y., & Walle, E. A. (2020) Everyday beliefs about emotion: Their role in subjective experience, emotion as an interpersonal process, and emotion theory. Special topic, Frontiers in Emotion Science. Also issued as an e-book.
Shields, S. A. (2020). From “gender difference” to “doing gender” to “gender and structural power” in psychological science. In S. Fenstermaker & A. J. Stewart (Eds.), Gender, considered: Feminist reflections across the social sciences, pp. 333-361. New York: Macmillan/Palgrave.
Richmond, K., Settles, I., & Shields, S. A., & Zelin, A. (Eds.). (2023). Feminist scholars on the road to tenure: The personal is professional.
Cognella.
Ma, S. & Shields, S. A. (2026). Gendering emotion across cultures and throughout history. In M. Yik (Editor), The Oxford handbook of emotion & culture. Oxford University Press.
Photo Gallery
Stephanie Shields
Birth:
1949
Training Location(s):
PhD, Pennsylvania State University (1976)
MS, Pennsylvania State University (1973)
BS, Santa Clara University (1971)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Pennsylvania State University (1996-Present)
University of California Davis (1977-1996)
Pennsylvania State University (1975-1977)
Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History Interview:
Career Focus:
Gender and emotion; social psychology of gender; history of women and gender; intersectionality.
Biography
Stephanie A. Shields was born on February 6, 1949, in Omaha, Nebraska. She was raised in a home environment that stressed the importance of a college education and independence. As a first-generation university student, she received a California State Scholarship which provided funding for four years of Bachelor of Science education at Santa Clara University—including a year abroad in Rome. She developed a feminist consciousness in her senior year when she read a newly published book by Judith Bardwick on the psychology of women and questioned its biological determinism.
On her return from Rome, Shields was hired as an undergraduate teaching assistant for developmental psychologist, Eleanor Willemsen, and did an internship at the Head Start Center. She became interested in "how kids learn to map internal states so that they can tell the difference between emotion and not emotion, this emotion or another emotion" as well as "how they learn to map their feeling states onto the language and appearance that other people use."
After receiving her B.S. degree, Shields went to graduate school to study emotion at The Pennsylvania State University. When she began graduate school, she described herself as "a newly hatched, newly turned on, and a little pissed-off baby feminist." She remembers vividly the gender disparities in the Department of Psychology in her first year. She recalls that only two of the 30 tenure-line faculty at the time were women (Carolyn Wood Sherif and Ellen Piers). As well, when six new faculty openings came up, they were all filled by white men. The following year, she and lecturer Phyllis Berman initiated a collective meeting with the women in the Department of Psychology which eventually led to a seminar on the psychology of women.
Shields' interest in the history of the psychology of women began her first year in grad school when she took a course in the history of psychology on the recommendation of her roommate. Although not supported by the instructor, she followed her own interests and wrote an extensive, well-researched, 70-page paper on the history of the psychology of women that started at the time of Aristotle, through Christine de Pizan, to American functionalism. Through this research she encountered the work of psychologist Leta Stetter Hollingworth. In her third year of graduate school, when she was free from teaching because of an NSF traineeship, she devoted much of her time to research the history of the psychology of women, building on her earlier term paper to further research 19th Century to early 20th Century psychology of women in the U.S. and Europe. The resulting paper and another on the lost work of Leta Hollingworth, were published in the American Psychologist in 1975. Although Shields was not a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) at the time (she didn’t have enough money for dues), she nonetheless submitted her paper on the history of the psychology of women to APA's Division of the Psychology of Women, Division 35, to present at the New Orleans conference in 1974. Her paper was accepted and she presented it "in a room just chock full of people and with people standing, all of them excited about the new APA Division.
Although Shields was in the developmental psychology stream in graduate school, she wrote her master's thesis perceptions of women’s emotional responses to their pregnancy. During her doctorate she became interested in psychophysiological measurement and moved on to studying the psychophysiology of emotion. Her dissertation was titled Children's Perceived and Actual Physiological Responses to Stress. In 1975, when she was still ABD, she was offered a full-time position as a lecturer at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University. Although she enjoyed teaching there, she wanted to move to a research university. In 1977, she received an offer of an Assistant Professor position at the University of California, Davis. She accepted the position and moved back to California where her family and many friends lived.
Shields continued to do research on the psychophysiology of emotion at the University of California Davis. As she notes of this time: "I had been told very clearly that I was not going to get tenured if I did work about the history of gender...It was not [considered] real research."
Shields was torn between her interest in the psychology of gender and her research on emotion. She eventually got an opportunity to teach both Psychology of Women and Psychology of Emotion courses alongside each other. Through her students she realized that gender and emotion are very much related, and that examining how beliefs about gender and beliefs about emotion influence one another was a way forward in research.
Her contributions to the theory and practice of psychology are reflected in the 85+ articles and book chapters she has published (as of this writing), in areas ranging from emotion and gender to feminist theory and the history of psychology. She published Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion in 2002. In the book, Shields argues for moving beyond a "gender differences slash similarities type model," noting that this approach stays at the level of comparing genders as opposed to problematizing and thereby explaining when, why, and how gender matters.
Shields has been very active in the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), including as the founding editor of the newsletter and ISRE’s listserv and in other capacities. In 1996, she had an opportunity to meet with prominent emotion researcher Magda Arnold in Tucson, AZ. Arnold was 93 years old at the time. Although Arnold's work had not been particularly influential in Shields' own research, she was impressed by the fact that Arnold's scientific work on emotion in the 1960s was truly groundbreaking; no one else was studying emotion in that way at that time. She thus organized a special issue of the journal Cognition and Emotion on Arnold's contributions to emotion research.
Shields left the University of California, Davis and since 1996 has been a Professor of Psychology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University—University Park. Her advice to feminists who are pursuing psychology? Shields notes the importance of making bridges among various intellectual and subdisciplinary communities and taking a long view on efforts to change psychology. Getting psychology to change, she notes, is like getting an oil tanker to take a turn: "You have to start 40 miles ahead to get a little bit of a turn and so you know you have to choose where you are going to have your impact."
by Pelin Gul (2011)
Addendum. Shields served as President of the Society for the Psychology of Women (APA Division 35) 2011–2012. She organized the Institute for Academic Feminist Psychologists (2012; 2016; 2018; 2024 thus far) for early career academics to create networks that can promote and support each other professionally. Throughout her career she has been concerned with applying basic research to practical interventions, most recently via WAGES, an interactive demonstration that illustrates the cumulative effect of unconscious biases in the workplace.
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Shields, S. A. (1975). Functionalism, Darwinism, and the psychology of women: A study in social myth. American Psychologist, 30, 739-754.
Shields S. A. (1991) Gender in the psychology of emotion. In K. T. Strongman (Ed.), International Review of Studies on Emotion. Volume1 (pp. 227-245). New York: John Wiley.
Shields, S. A. (2002). Speaking from the heart: Gender and the social meaning of emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Recipient of 2003 Association for Women in Psychology's Distinguished Publication Award)
Shields, S. A. (2005). The politics of emotion in everyday life: "Appropriate" emotion and claims on identity. Review of General Psychology, 9, 3-15.
Shields, S. A. (2007). Passionate men, emotional women: Psychology constructs gender difference in the late 19th century. History of Psychology, 10, 92-110.
Shields, S. A. (2008). Intersectionality of social identities: A gender perspective. Special issue of Sex Roles, 59, 301-311. Recipient of 2009 Association for Women in Psychology’s Distinguished Publication Award.
Shields, S. A. & Dicicco, E. C. (2011). The social psychology of sex and gender: From gender differences to doing gender. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35, 491-499.
Shields, S. A. (2012). Waking up to privilege: Intersectionality and opportunity. In Y. Flores-Niemann, A. Harris, C. González, & G. Gutiérrez y Muhs (Eds.), Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia, pp. 29-39. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt4cgr3k.8
Shields, S. A. (2013). Gender and emotion: What we think we know, what we need to know, and why it matters. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 37, 423-435.
MacArthur, H. J. & Shields, S. A. (2015). There’s no crying in baseball, or is there? Male athletes, tears, and masculinity in North America. Emotion Review, 7, 39-46. DOI: 10.1177/1754073914544476
Shields, S. A. (2015). Transformational moments in feminist psychology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 39, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/0361684315574502
Shields, S. A. (2016). Functionalism, Darwinism, and advances in the psychology of women and gender: From the 19th century to the 21st. Feminism & Psychology, 26, 397-404. DOI: 10.1177/0959353516663567
Shields, S. A. (2016). Feminist psychological science and the future of gender research. In T-A. Roberts, N. Curtin, L. Cortina, & L. E. Duncan (Eds.) Best practices in feminist psychological science: Gender beyond difference. New York: Springer DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32141-7
Warner, L. R. & Shields, S. A. (2018). Intersectionality as a framework for theory and research in feminist psychology. In Gender, sex, and sexualities: Psychological perspectives (N. K. Dess, J. Marecek, & L. C. Bell, Eds.), pp. 29-52. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shields, S. A., McCormick, K. T., Dicicco, E. C., & Zawadzki, M. J. (2018). Demonstrating the cumulative effects of unconscious bias with WAGES-Academic (Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation): Short and long-term impact on faculty and administrators. 10.1615/JWomenMinorScienEng.2018014113
Shields, S. A., Charash-Cohen, Y., & Walle, E. A. (2020) Everyday beliefs about emotion: Their role in subjective experience, emotion as an interpersonal process, and emotion theory. Special topic, Frontiers in Emotion Science. Also issued as an e-book.
Shields, S. A. (2020). From “gender difference” to “doing gender” to “gender and structural power” in psychological science. In S. Fenstermaker & A. J. Stewart (Eds.), Gender, considered: Feminist reflections across the social sciences, pp. 333-361. New York: Macmillan/Palgrave.
Richmond, K., Settles, I., & Shields, S. A., & Zelin, A. (Eds.). (2023). Feminist scholars on the road to tenure: The personal is professional. Cognella.
Ma, S. & Shields, S. A. (2026). Gendering emotion across cultures and throughout history. In M. Yik (Editor), The Oxford handbook of emotion & culture. Oxford University Press.