III. Historical significance of Shields’ 1975 essay: A brief commentary on four major contributions

This article argues that Shields’ work demonstrated that it is impossible to practice value-free science. And, despite the efforts of many feminist psychologists who have argued that the question of sex differences is someone else’s question, biological theories about the differences between women a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFeminism & psychology Vol. 26; no. 3; pp. 272 - 281
Main Authors Unger, Rhoda, Dottolo, Andrea L
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.08.2016
Subjects
second-wave feminism
Stephanie Shields
power
science
value free
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Summary:This article argues that Shields’ work demonstrated that it is impossible to practice value-free science. And, despite the efforts of many feminist psychologists who have argued that the question of sex differences is someone else’s question, biological theories about the differences between women and men are still popular and influential today. This paper will call attention to four areas of scholarship produced by second-wave feminist psychologists who were inspired by Shields’ work: (1) rediscovery of the work of first-wave feminist psychologists, (2) discussion of the impossibility of value-free research on sex differences, (3) introduction of new categories of analysis such as “gender” and reframing research based on these new categories, and (4) addition of more value-laden categories to sex such as race, social class, and sexuality and using intersectionality theory to design new avenues of research.
ISSN:0959-3535
1461-7161
DOI:10.1177/0959353516641141