Alexandra Rutherford
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592167 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Rutherford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Rutherford |
| SIGNATURE | RUTHERFORD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5089-1495 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Towards a psychopolitical approach to nostalgia
Whether through divisive injunctions to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), or the impassioned calls to “Take Back Control” that punctuated the Brexit campaign, nostalgia is a salient force in contemporary life. Yet, in psychology, nostalgia is increasingly celebrated as a predominantly positive, universally shared experience. We argue that this disconnect reflects a broader neoliberal pulse running through psychological research, one that frames …
Toward a decolonial psychology: Recentering and reclaiming global marginalized knowledges
Because colonialism was tailored to local geographies, any vision of decolonial psychology also needs to address the legacies of particular colonial histories. One of the central questions addressed in this special issue, "Toward a Decolonial Psychology: Recentering and Reclaiming Global Marginalized Knowledges," is what it means to create possible futures that are rooted in Indigenous cultures, place, people, and land and disentangled from colon…
L’intersectionnalité et l’histoire de la psychologie
En tant que cadre conceptuel et analytique, l’intersectionnalité a influencé, et peut transformer, la façon dont les chercheur·ses abordent la psychologie et son histoire. L’intersectionnalité fournit un cadre pour examiner la manière dont de multiples catégories sociales se combinent dans des systèmes caractérisés à la fois par l’oppression et le privilège et affectent les expériences de celles et ceux qui occupent les intersections de ces catég…
Navigating violence and risk: A critical discourse analysis of blind women's portrayals of self-protective measures
Women with disabilities experience high rates of violence and harassment, yet meaningful violence prevention interventions providing the opportunity to learn how to be active agents in their own self-protection are virtually non-existent. To understand why, we draw on insights from feminist disability studies to explore some of the unexamined assumptions and discourses in gender-based violence prevention research. We then apply a feminist critica…
Going public: Mobilizing, materializing, and contesting social science history
New Editor's statement
Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue
This article introduces the special issue Fifty Years Since Stonewall: The Science and Politics of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Here, the commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall uprising frames our discussion of issues of representation that arise in commemorating events in general, and events in the history of psychology in particular. We describe how the articles in the special issue expand the existing narratives about the history of l…
APA handbook of the psychology of women: Perspectives on women's private and public lives (Vol. 2).
APA handbook of the psychology of women: History, theory, and battlegrounds (Vol. 1).
Feminism, psychology, and the gendering of neoliberal subjectivity: From critique to disruption
Numerous feminist scholars have argued that women, especially young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects. Informed by Foucauldian approaches that extend neoliberalism beyond a set of free market principles to a dynamic that creates new forms of subjectivity, these scholars have demonstrated the elisions between “postfeminism” and neoliberalism in the positioning of young women as consumers, self-helpers, and “empowered” agent…
B. F. Skinner and technology’s nation: Technocracy, social engineering, and the good life in 20th-century America
Psychologist B. F. Skinner developed and promoted a technology of behavior as the basis for widespread social reform over much of his career. In 1948, he published his behaviorally engineered vision of the good life in his utopian novel Walden Two (Skinner, 1948). Skinner's efforts were part of a much larger social engineering tradition that received one of its fullest expressions in the Technocracy Movement of the 1930s. Fifteen years before Ski…
Surveying rape: Feminist social science and the ontological politics of sexual assault
College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here …
Contextualizing a Life in Science: Janet Taylor Spence and the History of Women and Gender in American Psychology
Making better use of U.S. women” Psychology, sex roles, and womanpower in post‐WWII America
The relationship between American psychology and gender ideologies in the two decades following World War II was complicated and multivalent. Although many psy‐professionals publicly contributed to the cult of domesticity that valorized women's roles as wives and mothers, other psychologists, many of them women, reimagined traditional sex roles to accommodate and deproblematize the increasing numbers of women at work, especially working mothers. …
"The difference being a woman made" Untold Lives in personal and intellectual context
To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Scarborough and Furumoto's classic work Untold Lives, and to honor the intellectual legacy of Elizabeth Scarborough (1935-2015), we introduce this special issue devoted to the histories of women, gender, and feminism in psychology. We provide a short biographical sketch of Elizabeth, highlighting her own marriage-career dilemma, then contextualize the publication of Untold Lives within the histor…
II. “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” as critical feminist history of psychology: Discourse communities and citation practices
Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement
Jennifer Nelson’s meticulously researched More Than Medicine adds another layer to our understanding of the women’s health movement in the United States. Building on her earlier work she further explores the complex intersectional dynamics of the movement.1 She also positions it philosophically and historically in the trajectory of earlier civil-rights influenced, community-based health care provision efforts that were tied to Johnson’s War on Po…
Nancy Main Henley (1934–2016)
Presents an obituary for Nancy Main Henley who passed away on June 4, 2016, in Maryland. Henley was a feminist trailblazer who conducted influential work on gender, communication, and power. (PsycINFO Database Record
Naomi Weisstein (1939–2015)
This article memorializes Naomi Weisstein, who passed away on March 26, 2015 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. In Chicago, Illinois, Weisstein began what would become a defining feature of her career and legacy-combining feminist political activism with both her academic and personal life pursuits. By the time she began her first faculty position at Loyola University in Chicago in 1966, Weisstein was an outspoken feminist. In 1968, she pu…
Pioneers of Psychology 5e International Student Edition
Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender
In our introduction to this special issue on the histories of feminism, gender, sexuality, and the psy-disciplines, we propose the tripartite framework of "feminism and/in/as psychology" to conceptualize the dynamics of their conjoined trajectories and relationship to gender and sexuality from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. "Feminism and psychology" highlights the tensions between a political movement and a scientific discipline a…
From seduction to sexism: Feminists challenge the ethics of therapist–client sexual relations in 1970s america
Before the 1970s, psychologists and other mental health professionals who had sex with their patients committed no ethical violations. Indeed, the line between seduction and sexual exploitation in the therapy hour was extremely blurry to patients and therapists alike. This article is about how that changed. We focus on feminist psychologists' efforts, through the American Psychological Association Task Force on Sex Bias and Sex Role Stereotyping …
Maintaining Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Psychology: "Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the "Woman Problem
Using mid-twentieth-century American psychology as my focus, I explore how scientific psychology was constructed as a distinctly masculine enterprise and was navigated by those who did not conform easily to this masculine ideal. I show how women emerged as problems for science through the vigorous gatekeeping activities and personal and professional writings of disciplinary figurehead Edwin G. Boring. I trace Boring's intellectual and professiona…
Using Psychology’s Feminist Voices in the Classroom
Psychology of Women and GenderThe authors acknowledge the contributions of Mary Crawford, Rachel T. Hare‐Mustin, and Ellen B. Kimmel, who were co‐authors of the chapter that appeared in the first edit…
The subfield of psychology of women and gender coalesced in the 1970s, spurred by the resurgence of American feminism. However, scientific interest in women and gender stretches back through the discipline's history. We first describe early female psychologists; for these women, investigations of sex and gender entwined with their struggles for recognition and fair treatment. Turning to the past 40 years, we provide an account of some key accompl…
Responsible Opposition, Disruptive Voices: Science, Social Change, and the History of Feminist Psychology
Feminist psychology began as an avowedly political project with an explicit social change agenda. However, over the last two decades, a number of critics have argued that feminist psychology has become mired in an epistemological impasse where positivist commitments effectively mute its political project, rendering the field acceptable to mainstream psychology yet shorn of its transformative vision. In this article, we explore the complexity of a…
Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender
In our introduction to this special issue on the histories of feminism, gender, sexuality, and the psy-disciplines, we propose the tripartite framework of "feminism and/in/as psychology" to conceptualize the dynamics of their conjoined trajectories and relationship to gender and sexuality from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. "Feminism and psychology" highlights the tensions between a political movement and a scientific discipline a…
Surveying rape: Feminist social science and the ontological politics of sexual assault
College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here …
The social control of behavior control: Behavior modification,individual rights, and research ethics in America, 1971-1979
In 1971, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights began a three-year study to investigate the federal funding of all research involving behavior modification. During this period, operant programs of behavior change, particularly those implemented in closed institutions, were subjected to specific scrutiny. In this article, I outline a number of scientific and social factors that led to this investigation and discuss the study itself.…
Reclaiming SPSSI 's Sociological Past: Marie Jahoda and the Immersion Tradition in Social Psychology
Aspects of the life and work of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)'s first female president, Marie Jahoda (1907–2001), are examined to help reclaim social psychology's, and SPSSI' s, lost connection to sociology. Throughout her career, Jahoda promoted a nonreductionistic, problem‐focused sociological social psychology that was profoundly influenced by her early interdisciplinary training and by subsequent collaborations …
Radical behaviorism and psychology's public: B. F. Skinner in the popular press, 1934–1990
B. F. Skinner is perhaps 2nd only to Freud among the most publicly identifiable psychological figures of the last century. This article reviews the popular press coverage of Skinner between 1934 and 1990 to examine how radical behaviorism was interpreted, portrayed, and received by psychology's public. Reactions to Skinner were often skeptical or condemnatory. It is suggested that some members of the public had difficulty accepting his views beca…
Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue
This article introduces the special issue Fifty Years Since Stonewall: The Science and Politics of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Here, the commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall uprising frames our discussion of issues of representation that arise in commemorating events in general, and events in the history of psychology in particular. We describe how the articles in the special issue expand the existing narratives about the history of l…
Feminist Women’s Accounts of Depression
Feminist theorists have argued that women’s experiences of depression are intimately tied to multiple systemic factors, such as oppression and violence. Although these theories challenge the dominant paradigm, they tell little about how feminist women who have been diagnosed with depression construct their own experiences. This article reports on interviews with nine feminist women who had received a diagnosis of depression that were conducted an…
B. F. Skinner's technology of behavior in American life: From consumer culture to counterculture
From the 1940s through the 1970s, articles in popular magazines and newspapers presented B. F. Skinner in a wide array of guises, from educational revolutionary and utopian to totalitarian and fascist. Understanding these diverse, and often contradictory, portrayals requires a consideration of the social and political discourses in which they were embedded. In this paper, I suggest that reports of Skinner's work were influenced by a number of cul…
From the Ground Up: Feminist Approaches, Methods, and Critiques
B. F. Skinner and technology’s nation: Technocracy, social engineering, and the good life in 20th-century America
Psychologist B. F. Skinner developed and promoted a technology of behavior as the basis for widespread social reform over much of his career. In 1948, he published his behaviorally engineered vision of the good life in his utopian novel Walden Two (Skinner, 1948). Skinner's efforts were part of a much larger social engineering tradition that received one of its fullest expressions in the Technocracy Movement of the 1930s. Fifteen years before Ski…
II. “Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women” as critical feminist history of psychology: Discourse communities and citation practices
From seduction to sexism: Feminists challenge the ethics of therapist–client sexual relations in 1970s america
Before the 1970s, psychologists and other mental health professionals who had sex with their patients committed no ethical violations. Indeed, the line between seduction and sexual exploitation in the therapy hour was extremely blurry to patients and therapists alike. This article is about how that changed. We focus on feminist psychologists' efforts, through the American Psychological Association Task Force on Sex Bias and Sex Role Stereotyping …
Maintaining Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Psychology: "Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the "Woman Problem
Using mid-twentieth-century American psychology as my focus, I explore how scientific psychology was constructed as a distinctly masculine enterprise and was navigated by those who did not conform easily to this masculine ideal. I show how women emerged as problems for science through the vigorous gatekeeping activities and personal and professional writings of disciplinary figurehead Edwin G. Boring. I trace Boring's intellectual and professiona…
Can't a mother sing the blues? Postpartum depression and the construction of motherhood in late 20th-century America
Popular depictions of 20th-century American motherhood have typically emphasized the joy and fulfillment that a new mother can expect to experience on her child's arrival. But starting in the 1950s, discussions of the "baby blues" began to appear in the popular press. How did articles about the baby blues, and then postpartum depression, challenge these rosy depictions? In this article, we examine portrayals of postpartum distress in popular maga…
Sexual Violence Against Women: Putting Rape Research in Context
Contextualizing a Life in Science: Janet Taylor Spence and the History of Women and Gender in American Psychology
Making better use of U.S. women” Psychology, sex roles, and womanpower in post‐WWII America
The relationship between American psychology and gender ideologies in the two decades following World War II was complicated and multivalent. Although many psy‐professionals publicly contributed to the cult of domesticity that valorized women's roles as wives and mothers, other psychologists, many of them women, reimagined traditional sex roles to accommodate and deproblematize the increasing numbers of women at work, especially working mothers. …
Using Psychology’s Feminist Voices in the Classroom
Society Very Definitely Needs Our Aid”: Reflecting on SPSSI in History
The year 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) . One of the primary reasons SPSSI was established was the desire, on the part of its founders, to use scientific research for social action and to bring the insights of social science into national‐level debates about social issues. This anniversary affords us the opportunity to examine when, where, why, and how SPSSI has been more and le…
In Our Own Voice: The Impact of Feminism on Canadian Psychology
Interviews with four feminist psychologists are used to explore the impact of feminism on psychology in Canada. Using a thematic analysis, three levels of impact - individual, disciplinary and institutional - are derived and discussed with specific examples from the Canadian context. We highlight opportunities and obstacles to feminist influence, and make tentative suggestions for strengthening feminism’s current and future presence in Canadian p…
B. F. Skinner and the Auditory Inkblot: The Rise and Fall of the Verbal Summator as a Projective Technique
Behaviorist B.F. Skinner is not typically associated with the fields of personality assessment or projective testing. However, early in his career Skinner developed an instrument he named the verbal summator, which, at one point, he referred to as a device for "snaring out complexes," much like an auditory analogue of the Rorschach inkblots. Skinner's interest in the projective potential of his technique was relatively short lived, but whereas he…
Radical behaviorism and psychology's public: B. F. Skinner in the popular press, 1934-1990
Radical behaviorism and psychology's public: B. F. Skinner in the popular press, 1934–1990
B. F. Skinner is perhaps 2nd only to Freud among the most publicly identifiable psychological figures of the last century. This article reviews the popular press coverage of Skinner between 1934 and 1990 to examine how radical behaviorism was interpreted, portrayed, and received by psychology's public. Reactions to Skinner were often skeptical or condemnatory. It is suggested that some members of the public had difficulty accepting his views beca…
B. F. Skinner and the Auditory Inkblot: The Rise and Fall of the Verbal Summator as a Projective Technique
Behaviorist B.F. Skinner is not typically associated with the fields of personality assessment or projective testing. However, early in his career Skinner developed an instrument he named the verbal summator, which, at one point, he referred to as a device for "snaring out complexes," much like an auditory analogue of the Rorschach inkblots. Skinner's interest in the projective potential of his technique was relatively short lived, but whereas he…
Raising Her Voice: The Life of Leta Stetter Hollingworth
B. F. Skinner's technology of behavior in American life: From consumer culture to counterculture
From the 1940s through the 1970s, articles in popular magazines and newspapers presented B. F. Skinner in a wide array of guises, from educational revolutionary and utopian to totalitarian and fascist. Understanding these diverse, and often contradictory, portrayals requires a consideration of the social and political discourses in which they were embedded. In this paper, I suggest that reports of Skinner's work were influenced by a number of cul…
In Our Own Voice: The Impact of Feminism on Canadian Psychology
Interviews with four feminist psychologists are used to explore the impact of feminism on psychology in Canada. Using a thematic analysis, three levels of impact - individual, disciplinary and institutional - are derived and discussed with specific examples from the Canadian context. We highlight opportunities and obstacles to feminist influence, and make tentative suggestions for strengthening feminism’s current and future presence in Canadian p…
The social control of behavior control: Behavior modification,individual rights, and research ethics in America, 1971-1979
In 1971, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights began a three-year study to investigate the federal funding of all research involving behavior modification. During this period, operant programs of behavior change, particularly those implemented in closed institutions, were subjected to specific scrutiny. In this article, I outline a number of scientific and social factors that led to this investigation and discuss the study itself.…
V. Feminist Questions, Feminist Answers: Towards a Redefinition
In 1979, Rhoda Unger presciently asked ‘Should we study sex differences?’ More than 25 years later, this question remains as contentious and unresolved as it was then. In the intervening years, there has been intense, sophisticated, and eloquent debate among feminist psychologists on the merits and demerits of the sex-difference venture. In 1994, Celia Kitzinger posed the same question in a special feature of this journal and invited six feminist…
Exceptional Women: Their Life and Work Through Psychobiography
A Century of Change: Gender, Religion, and Science at Mount Holyoke
Georgia Babladelis (1931–2009): Breaking Traditions, Building Foundations
Responsible Opposition, Disruptive Voices: Science, Social Change, and the History of Feminist Psychology
Feminist psychology began as an avowedly political project with an explicit social change agenda. However, over the last two decades, a number of critics have argued that feminist psychology has become mired in an epistemological impasse where positivist commitments effectively mute its political project, rendering the field acceptable to mainstream psychology yet shorn of its transformative vision. In this article, we explore the complexity of a…
Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on Psychology, Women, Culture, and Rights
Can't a mother sing the blues? Postpartum depression and the construction of motherhood in late 20th-century America
Popular depictions of 20th-century American motherhood have typically emphasized the joy and fulfillment that a new mother can expect to experience on her child's arrival. But starting in the 1950s, discussions of the "baby blues" began to appear in the popular press. How did articles about the baby blues, and then postpartum depression, challenge these rosy depictions? In this article, we examine portrayals of postpartum distress in popular maga…
From the Ground Up: Feminist Approaches, Methods, and Critiques
Sexual Violence Against Women: Putting Rape Research in Context
Thirty-Five Years and Counting: Feminist Psychology in PWQ , a Job for the Long Haul
Life as a woman in psychology has changed a lot since the movement which gave birth to all of this started. I moved from blissful unawareness of the source of my low status to a realization about how much of what happened to me was due to the deeply rooted reflexive sexism of my discipline. The association has moved a long way—the mere presence of women in the hallways and at the table of the governance bodies has been the greatest consciousness-…
Society Very Definitely Needs Our Aid”: Reflecting on SPSSI in History
The year 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) . One of the primary reasons SPSSI was established was the desire, on the part of its founders, to use scientific research for social action and to bring the insights of social science into national‐level debates about social issues. This anniversary affords us the opportunity to examine when, where, why, and how SPSSI has been more and le…
Reclaiming SPSSI 's Sociological Past: Marie Jahoda and the Immersion Tradition in Social Psychology
Aspects of the life and work of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)'s first female president, Marie Jahoda (1907–2001), are examined to help reclaim social psychology's, and SPSSI' s, lost connection to sociology. Throughout her career, Jahoda promoted a nonreductionistic, problem‐focused sociological social psychology that was profoundly influenced by her early interdisciplinary training and by subsequent collaborations …
Psychology of Women and GenderThe authors acknowledge the contributions of Mary Crawford, Rachel T. Hare‐Mustin, and Ellen B. Kimmel, who were co‐authors of the chapter that appeared in the first edit…
The subfield of psychology of women and gender coalesced in the 1970s, spurred by the resurgence of American feminism. However, scientific interest in women and gender stretches back through the discipline's history. We first describe early female psychologists; for these women, investigations of sex and gender entwined with their struggles for recognition and fair treatment. Turning to the past 40 years, we provide an account of some key accompl…
Problems of sex and the problem with nature: A commentary on “Beyond Kinsey”
In this commentary on the three articles in the special section "Beyond Kinsey: The Committee for Research in Problems of Sex and American Psychology," I focus on the implications of each author's analysis for understanding scientific constructions of sex and sexuality by examining the complex intersection of sex and nature. I show how each paper illuminates the ways nature was deployed by researchers investigating one of the most intimate yet mo…
Feminist Women’s Accounts of Depression
Feminist theorists have argued that women’s experiences of depression are intimately tied to multiple systemic factors, such as oppression and violence. Although these theories challenge the dominant paradigm, they tell little about how feminist women who have been diagnosed with depression construct their own experiences. This article reports on interviews with nine feminist women who had received a diagnosis of depression that were conducted an…
Using Psychology’s Feminist Voices in the Classroom
Feminism and/in/as psychology: The public sciences of sex and gender
In our introduction to this special issue on the histories of feminism, gender, sexuality, and the psy-disciplines, we propose the tripartite framework of "feminism and/in/as psychology" to conceptualize the dynamics of their conjoined trajectories and relationship to gender and sexuality from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. "Feminism and psychology" highlights the tensions between a political movement and a scientific discipline a…
From seduction to sexism: Feminists challenge the ethics of therapist–client sexual relations in 1970s america
Before the 1970s, psychologists and other mental health professionals who had sex with their patients committed no ethical violations. Indeed, the line between seduction and sexual exploitation in the therapy hour was extremely blurry to patients and therapists alike. This article is about how that changed. We focus on feminist psychologists' efforts, through the American Psychological Association Task Force on Sex Bias and Sex Role Stereotyping …
Psychology (35 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (27 works) · Political science (22 works) · Psychoanalysis (22 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Social science (14 works)