Difference Feminism and Feminist Therapy

Toward the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, a trend emerged in political feminism that adopted an essentialist view of women’s psychology. This view proposed that women’s behaviors in the interpersonal sphere arose from their inherent biological capacity to mother. This stance was called “alpha bias” by Hare-Mustin and Maracek (1990), and it embraced the concepts of women’s instinctive behaviors that had been rejected by the radical feminists of the first period. Importantly, it reframed those paradigms of instinctive femininity by valorizing previously denigrated qualities traditionally ascribed in Western patriarchies to women, such as nurturance, peace making, and a focus on relationships over rules in calculating what constituted morality. This “difference” feminism argued that while women and men were different in essential ways that were embedded in biology, those differences simply meant different distribution of skills and talents that perhaps suited women better for certain tasks.

The work of such scholars as Nancy Chodorow (1978, 1989), Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976), and Carol Gilligan (1981) yielded both theoretical and empirical bases for this strain of feminist psychology, frequently alluded to as the “different voice” model of women’s development, playing off the title of Gilligan’s well-known book on gender differences in moral development. During this time Jean Baker Miller, a feminist psychiatrist who had proposed a different voice model of women’s psychology (1976), cofounded the Stone Center group of feminist therapy theorists at Wellesley College. Stone Center theory blended feminist analysis with psychodynamic formulations to propose a relational model of women’s development founded in the mother–daughter bond and a relationally focused paradigm of feminist therapy practice that is currently known as the relational–cultural school (Jordan, 1997).

Inherent in the difference stance was the risk of recreating a gendered vision of socially separate spheres for women and men. While the alpha-bias paradigm valorized women’s gendered experiences, the rooting of those experiences in biology implied, in concert with prefeminist writings, that gender was less mutable and more fixed in biology and that social arrangements that differentially assigned roles and capacities based on sex were fair as long as equal value was given to those roles and capacities. Thus, for instance, if nurturing children were paid as well as driving trucks, then alpha bias would not be problematic, as it would function to equalize the value of gendered tasks. However, alpha bias could, and was, used to reassert that women had a rightful place in the world in the domestic rather than the public sphere (see Warner, 2006, for a discussion of the social construction of motherhood in response to alpha-bias narratives).

During the same time frame, Hannah Lerman, a radical feminist psychologist whose work was grounded in radical feminist politics and humanistic psychotherapeutic traditions, made the initial proposal of criteria for a feminist therapy (1983, 1986). Lerman’s proposal was the first to attempt to differentiate feminist therapy from psychotherapy with women by outlining the parameters of a theoretical model instead of describing clinical practice with a specific problem common to women. Her criteria for a theory to be feminist were:

The theory is clinically useful.

The theory arises from and reflects the diversity and complexity of human experience (no normative dominant group).

It views women (the “other”) centrally and positively rather than as deviant.

It arises from the experience of women and other groups on the margins.

It remains close to the data of experience; in other words, it reflects the real world as people know it.

It theorizes behavior as arising from an interplay of internal and external worlds (the biopsychosocial model).

It avoids using particularistic terminology (no mystical and mystifying language).

It supports feminist modes of practice (e.g., automatically leads toward egalitarian and empowering strategies for practice).

Another activity differentiating feminist therapy from other theories was the creation of a feminist ethics code for psychotherapists. The Feminist Therapy Institute’s (FTI) membership developed its own code (Feminist Therapy Institute, 1990), an aspirational model for feminist therapists. Concepts from this model have been integrated into the codes of mainstream mental health groups in succeeding years. Several books about ethics in feminist therapy practice were developed under the aegis of the FTI’s Ethics and Accountability Committee (Lerman & Porter, 1990; Rave & Larsen, 1995). Ethics was seen, then and now, as central to feminist theory and practice, with feminist practice itself being construed as an ethical stance (Brabeck, 2000; Brown, 1991) due to the close attention given to nonabuse of the power of psychotherapy.

This next phase of feminist therapy development was also marked by challenges from within the ranks of feminist therapists. Feminist therapists of color, poor and working-class therapists, therapists with disabilities, lesbian therapists, and other feminist therapists who were not themselves members of the dominant Euro American, heterosexual, middle-class critiqued feminist therapy and its practitioners for being inattentive to the realities of the diversity and complexity of women’s experiences. These criticisms arose in part because of the Eurocentric quality of the different voice feminist theorists whose work had begun to predominate feminist therapy discourse. The emergence of womanist, class-conscious, and other diversity-aware feminisms signaled a move away from the difference model, because a focus on the diversity of women’s experiences made transparent the absence of a female universal.

Brown and Root’s Diversity and Complexity in Feminist Therapy (1990), Adleman and Enguidanos’s Racism in the Lives of Women (1995), Comas-Díaz and Greene’s Women of Color (1994), and Hill and Rothblum’s Classism and Feminist Therapy: Counting Costs (1996) are examples of the scholarship reflecting this change from a monolithic view of women as a sex to a more nuanced perspective on women’s multiple identities and life experiences. It was around this time that more feminist therapists began to conceptualize women in the context, not simply of generic patriarchy, but of specific cultures and milieus, and to ask how feminist models of responding to distress could be informed by the experiences of women from the margins of dominant society.