Difference/Equal Value Feminism and Feminist Therapy

The political strategies of feminism transformed as research from feminist psychological science began to provide a more nuanced view of differences and similarities between women and men and as within-sex differences related to culture, social class, and other forms of experience emerged as more salient for understanding difference. No longer did political feminists argue that women and men should receive equal treatment because they were the same. Instead, the argument was one of basic fairness, that people should be accorded equal treatment and opportunity because that was the right thing to do and that each person’s particular skills and capacities should inform access to opportunity. This changing politic of feminism is reflected in the third phase of feminist therapy’s heritage.

As feminist therapists began to see women in a more complex manner, gender, too, began to be more closely interrogated, given the diminished influence of essentialist constructs. Some feminist psychologists and therapists had begun to question whether feminist therapy was for women only. Some of these feminist therapists were already working with men, such as Ganley (1991) who developed treatment programs for men who beat their women partners. Early feminist family therapists, such as Hare-Mustin (1978), Bograd (1991), and Nutt (1991), were working with men in the context of assisting heterosexual couples. They made compelling arguments for the application of feminist therapy to the intrapsychic effects of sexism and patriarchy that were oppressive to men. These writers and others asserted that even though women’s and men’s concerns might be superficially different in content, given how culture socially constructs gender, at the root patriarchy could still be identified as a causal factor in distress for men as well as women.

This third phase in the development of feminist therapy is best marked by a 1993 consensus conference on education and training in feminist practice held under the auspices of SPW and the APA Education Directorate. Findings of this conference were described in Worell and Johnson (1997). More than 200 feminist psychologists and psychology graduate students attended and met in weekend-long working groups, developing conceptual paradigms and defining parameters for feminist practice touching on supervision, assessment, and the integration of diversity into feminist theory. This gathering included some of the most powerful and influential writers, thinkers, and practitioners in feminist therapy, including many of the living founding mothers of AWP, SPW, and FTI.

Several other important theory contributions emerged in the early 1990s. In Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy (1994), Brown developed a paradigm for defining radical feminist practice that offered feminist models for assessment and diagnosis and that more deeply explored what was meant by the egalitarian relationship. Kaschak, in Engendered Lives (1992), proposed a feminist model for understanding identity development through the lens of gender in the social context. This “self-in-context” model of personality development extended past the self-in-relation construct of the Stone Center authors to a vision of self in relationship to the larger world as well as the more intimate sphere of close connections.

Worell and Remer (1996, 2003) proposed the empowerment feminist therapy model (initially empowerment therapy for women) during this period of time. It represents one of the first attempts to systematize the types of specific interventions that would constitute a feminist approach to psychotherapy. Although this model focuses primarily on women’s experiences, the authors take the perspective that feminist practice is not simply psychotherapy with women but rather contains elements of empowerment, the analysis of power, and the evocation of feminist consciousness as its core constructs. These authors and groups of feminist therapists achieved a full differentiation of feminist therapy’s theories of practice and personality during the third period of the paradigm’s development, so that by the end of the 20th century it had become clearly defined and distinguished from other approaches to therapy.