Women and Gender: Transforming Psychology

by Janice D. Yoder

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0136446000
• ISBN13: 9780136446002
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

TRANSFORMING PSYCHOLOGY, TRANSFORMING OURSELVES

Reprinted from forthcoming issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly with the persmission of Cambridge University Press:Into the midst of debates about whether Psychology of Women courses are superfluous in the presence of increasing (and often more politically palatable) Psychology of Gender courses, steps Yoder's (1999) Women and Gender: Transforming Psychology. The book's title aptly demonstrates the inextricable linkage between the concepts of women and gender. Yet, rather than being subsumed by the gender category, women are at the forefront of this scholarly rigorous, unabashedly feminist, and wonderfully engaging book. The 12 chapter book is targeted to undergraduate students and focuses on a variety of topics routinely found in psychology of women texts (e.g., history of feminist psychology, sex differences, gender socialization and development, gender comparisons, sexism, relationships, work, physical and mental health; and violence against women). Yet, there is nothing routine about Yoder's handling of these topics. Favoring a bridge between personal experience and systematic research that she calls "triangulated" (p. 18), Yoder adroitly combines contemporary research on women and gender with a diverse array of women's experiences. In the chapter entitled, "Socialization Practices: Learning to Be Ourselves in a Gender Polarized World," for example, Yoder reviews some of the most recent research on gender differences in media forums such as children's storybooks, television and the marketing of toys, and discusses her own parental experiences and concerns. To encourage readers to engage interactively with the text, Yoder has included several quizzes and mini-exercises at the beginning and end of chapters. I very much liked this innovation, and believe that this will prove ideal for personally engaging students in the study of women and gender. Best of all, rather than providing a series of research findings on a topic, each chapter is organized around clear and coherent themes. Among my favorite chapters was "Sexism: Sexist Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination" in which under the theme, sexist discrimination, Yoder presented current research on how physical discrimination affects White and African American women with physical disabilities. A theme in the chapter on "Women's Physical Health and Well-Being: Understudied, Mythologized, but Changing," focuses on the division of women's health into reproductive and "general" health categories. As she does throughout the text, Yoder asks provocative questions. In the case of the women's health division, Yoder muses whether the disproportionate focus on breast cancer research is because our society is obsessed with women's breasts or because the disease "is detected most frequently in a select subset of privileged women" (p. 247). In addition to making a substantive scholarly contribution to feminist psychology, the book is imme