Psychology of Women Quarterly

An historical review of the development and rejection of Freud's seduction theory is presented. Questions are raised regarding the relationship of self-analysis to Freud's repudiation.

To date, research on effective rape avoidance strategies has involved media-recruited, acknowledged rape victims and avoiders, most of whom were assaulted by total strangers. In the present study, rape avoidance research was extended to a sample of acquaintance rape victims and avoiders who were located by a self-report survey that identified women who both do and do not conceptualize their assaults as rape. The study's goal was to determine whether acknowledged rape victims, unacknowledged rape victims, and rape avoiders could be discriminated by situational variables including the response strategies used in the assault. Victims and avoiders were significantly discriminated. Compared to rape victims, avoiders (1) were less likely to have experienced passive or internalizing emotions at the time of the assault, (2) perceived the assault as less violent, and (3) were more likely to have utilized active response strategies (i.e., running away and screaming). The results suggest that the major findings of existing research on stranger rape avoidance are generalizable to acquaintance rape. However, concerns are expressed over methodological limitations of research on rape avoidance from the victim's perspective.

In this study it was hypothesized that, among lesbians, agreement with feminist ideology and participation in feminist activities would correlate positively with self-esteem, self-acceptance, and social support. Demographic variables were also examined as correlates. Respondents were contacted through 11 lesbian, gay, and feminist organizations and establishments and asked to complete a research questionnaire. One-hundred-twenty-three usable questionnaires were returned. Age and current involvement in a lesbian relationship were significantly related to self-esteem, self-acceptance, and social support. Participation in feminist activities also correlated with self-acceptance. The results give tentative, but important, information useful in understanding the correlates of self-esteem and support among lesbians.

Women in different phases of the menstrual cycle were compared to each other and to men in their responses to a social interaction stimulus: a videotape depicting a female nurse interacting with a hospitalized patient. Sex differences and cycle-phase differences were found for both affective and cognitive dimensions. Premenstrual women reported feeling more dominant, energetic, indifferent, negative, and somewhat more tense than women menstruating or women in the intermenstrual cycle phase. However, they did not differ from men in their affective ratings. Premenstrual women evaluated the nurse as less attractive than did men and they attributed greater responsibility for the nurse's behavior to the patient than men and intermenstrual women. Women in all groups evaluated the nurse as nicer and more pleasant, interesting, concerned and self-assured than did men. All women also felt more friendly toward the nurse and reported that they would be more comfortable asking her questions than the men did. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The relationship of math participation and success to self-esteem and career goals is examined in a sample of 64 women and 52 men college students at the end of their sophomore year. No gender differences were found in math anxiety or perceptions of the usefulness of mathematics, but women were less likely to select a math-related career goal. Among the men students, math participation and self-assessments of math ability were positively related to more general self-estimates of competence; among women, these variables were not related significantly. Women's choices for math-related careers were more closely associated with scholastic ability and math background than were men's career choices. These results are discussed in the context of societal pressures and supports for men and women in regard to math participation.

The purpose of this study was (a) to describe the nature of women's ambitions across three generations of women within families, (b) to assess the women's perceptions of factors influencing their ambitions, and (c) to determine their estimates of success in attaining their ambitions. In addition, influence of the generations upon each other and relative similarity of ambitions within families versus within generations was evaluated. Subjects were 10 women who were seniors at a large, midwestern state university, their mothers, and their maternal grandmothers. The most prevalent categories of ambitions across all generations were marriage/family, educational, and vocational. Change in women's roles and a trend toward greater economic affluence across generations had the greatest influence on ambition development and attainment. Influences of one generation on another were apparent for adjacent, but not for nonadjacent, generations. In general, women's ambitions were more similar within generations than within families.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between job satisfaction and selected family variables that might constrain or enhance the job satisfaction of employed mothers. Results of stepwise regression indicate that four family variables were more useful in explaining variation in job satisfaction than six background variables that had been expected to influence job satisfaction. Results suggest that job satisfaction could be enhanced by increasing family support for women's employment.

This research relies on data from a survey conducted in 1981 to explore the potential negative and positive consequences of having multiple roles. The responses of 500 employed women to questions about self-esteem, satisfaction with careers, partners, and children, and perceptions of life stress and pleasure were examined. The number of roles held by respondents ranged from 1 to 5 (worker, partner, parent, volunteer, and student). The results indicated that higher self-esteem and greater job satisfaction were associated with holding more roles. However, neither marital nor parental satisfaction was consistently related to the number of roles held. Although the majority of working women reported their lives to be stressful, this finding was independent of the number of roles held, and women with more roles did not consistently report a greater number of stressful life domains. These findings suggest that, for employed women, having multiple roles may enhance psychological well-being.

Although the “chronically mentally ill” have become a subject of national concern and although differences among the young, old, and minorities have been recognized, sex differences have been largely ignored. The authors describe the experientially determined problems of long-term mentally disabled women. Research is presented from a review of 320 hospital records of patients served in seven community and state hospitals throughout Michigan, encompassing client variables and service information. Significant sex differences were found for client age, marital status, living arrangement, diagnosis, functioning level, voluntary/involuntary status, admission information, medications, medical care and destination post-discharge. Many of the results confirm stereotypes of sex differences in institutionalized populations (age, diagnosis, and so forth). Other results, such as more women living independently and no sex differences in violent behaviors, are contrary to popular assumptions. Using case studies, the authors further discuss the important issues suggested by the results, e.g., why women become psychiatric patients, discharge planning, and over-medications. A plea is made for a greater amount and intensity of research on women with long-term mental disabilities.

Multiple indices for evaluating the feminist challenge in psychology are identified, and provide a context for discussing selected aspects of research in personality and social psychology that reflect the impact of feminism on psychology. Women's involvement in the research process, the types of research methods used, and substantive concerns were examined in selected issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology between 1963 and 1983. Despite a significant increase in the proportion of articles with female authors, there were no clear changes in any of the methodological variables we assessed. Comparisons of these studies and those published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly suggest that the impact of the feminist challenge is far more noticeable in this more explicitly feminist journal. Evidence pertaining to the relative impact of publishing in explicitly feminist versus “mainstream” journals, derived from analyses of citation frequency of several feminist studies, was examined. Overall, results suggest that feminist values may have affected research topics more than research methods within personality and social psychology. Several implications of this gatekeeping function of methodology are discussed.

The hypothesis that female and male bodies are equally represented in human anatomy text illustrations was tested to determine whether medical students are shown both females and males as possessing equally important and normal bodies in medical school instructional material. All anatomy texts currently in use in a major western medical school (N = 8) were surveyed. In text sections dealing with standard (non-gender-specific) anatomy, male subjects were shown in 64% of the illustrations in which gender was discernable, females were shown in 11%, and gender-neutral or equal representations were shown in 25%. Females and males were found to be represented approximately equally in chapters on urogenital (gender-specific) anatomy (45% female, 48% male, 7% neutral or equal representation). The implications of these findings for the perpetuation of sexist attitudes in the medical profession are discussed.

A sample of southern college students is used to investigate race and sex differences among nine Likert-type sex role attitudes. Results show that black and white men share a similar sex role orientation while black and white women also share a similar world view. There were only two instances where blacks were notably different from whites. First, blacks were more likely to feel that a woman's real fulfillment in life comes from motherhood, and second, blacks were more likely to feel that it was appropriate for a mother with school-age children to work.

The effects of sex-typing on self-esteem, achievement orientation, and attitudes toward women were examined in Fiji using 600 secondary school and 240 university students. As Spence and Helmreich (1978) found in the U.S., sex-typing effects were strong on all variables, with Androgynous and Masculine students scoring highest on Self-esteem, Mastery, Work Orientation and Competitiveness, and Undifferentiated students scoring lowest. Sex-typing interacted with sex on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. The effects were stronger among secondary school students than among university students. As in the U.S., sex differences were less marked than sex-typing differences, although there were fewer sex differences on these measures in Fiji than in the U.S. The importance of instrumental traits in achievement orientation and self-esteem was confirmed in a vastly different cultural setting, suggesting the possibility of pancultural generality of sex-typing effects.