Passage -4
In “womanless” disciplines, women’s experiences are thought to be too unimportant to be a focus of inquiry. So, for example, history has been Taught as an account of men’s public achievements, and literature as the writings of great male authors. In the psychology of the past 50 years, “womanlessness” was reflected in the disproportionate use of males as experimental subjects, in the failure to examine gender differences when both sexes were used as subjects, in the assumption that conclusions drawn from the study of male behavior applied to women, and more generally in the lack of attention to gender as a category of social reality. Several feminist critiques of research methodology have called attention to the practices of “womanless” psychology and its underlying assumption that women are uninteresting or unworthy of study.
Historically, much of psychological inquiry has been virtually “woman-less,” not only in its subject of inquiry, but in the place allowed women in the profession itself. Women did not have control over the resources needed
for the production of knowledge, and the topics and methods of accepted scholarship were defined in ways that were exclusionary at best and mis-ogynist at worst.
“Womanless” psychology not only omitted the consideration of women and women’s experiences, it also authorised and validated the view that those activities in which men engage are the activities central to human.
What is the main focus of feminist critiques of research methodology?
