Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Misogyny in the Science of Psychology

The second founding document of feminist therapy, developed in an explicitly feminist context and also written by a psychologist, was Naomi Weisstein’s Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female (1968). Weisstein was trained as a comparative and physiological psychologist at Harvard in the early 1960s, doing her doctoral research on parallel processing in the brain. She achieved her doctorate in the context of extreme sexist discrimination, including denial of access to libraries and lab facilities (Lemisch & Weisstein, 1997), and was a feminist community activist and rock musician in addition to being a psychological scientist.

Weisstein’s article, which developed through several iterations from 1968 until its eventual publication in the feminist anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan, 1970), constituted the emergence of the feminist voice within psychological science. She critiqued several taken-for-granted assumptions about women’s functioning that were ubiquitous in the psychological science taught at that time and represented in the practices of clinicians, using the tools and methods of that same science to expose its sexism and misogyny. Her article’s title was provocative, as the German phrase she used was a quotation from Nazi writings about women’s roles. Weisstein threw down the gauntlet to psychological science, in essence saying that where women were concerned it was no more enlightened than the most oppressive form of fascism.

Weisstein began her critique by noting that women were actually rarely the subjects of study when commentaries about women’s behavior were being generated. While the absurdity of such a strategy appears obvious to 21st century readers, Weisstein’s analysis of the scientific literature of psychology was accurate in depicting this immense and then-completely accepted lacuna where women were concerned. She skillfully analyzed research in several areas of psychological science to demonstrate that participant samples from which generalizations were made to and about women were routinely composed only of men (and those almost always Euro American college students, presumably heterosexual) and that this generalization in the absence of empirical support occurred without protest from editors of journals who would publish this work. Exclusion of women as a data source about women was business as usual in psychological science of the day.

Weisstein pointed out that women’s behavior was frequently explained by means of extrapolation from and comparison to findings of research with nonhuman animals. Her critique presaged more recent feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology writings about women and gender in which strategies similar to the ones discredited by Weisstein are used to define gendered behaviors as fixed and immovable (see Contralto, 2002). More recently commentators such as primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1990) have demonstrated through their critiques of sexism in ethology and anthropology that the nonhuman animal research literature itself contained interpretations of the behavior of female animals that was rife with sexism, rendering the generalizations to female humans even more specious. Thus, if female rats appeared to instinctively engage in certain behaviors, which were interpreted through the lens of sexist gender assumptions by male scientists, women ought to have a similar instinct, and women who did not behave similarly were ipso facto pathological.

Weisstein also took aim at psychoanalytic formulations of women. Although psychoanalysis had begun as a theory that liberated women by acknowledging them as sexual beings, orthodox analytic theories in the United States had become contaminated with cultural sexism and were complicit in its enforcement. Thus, Helene Deutsch’s Psychology of Women (1944), in which women were defined as inherently passive and masochistic, had become the primary authoritative source about women for many practicing psychotherapists by the middle of the 20th century. Weisstein—perhaps echoing Karen Horney’s (1967) earlier observation that the concept of penis envy might simply reflect the egocentric musings of a now-grown male child who was himself so attached to his penis that he could not imagine how those not possessing one would not envy him—critiqued then-pervasive psychoanalytic formulations of women as being less morally capable, more dependent, and less fully adult than men. She pointed out the complete absence of empirical, research-based support for these assertions upon which most of psychotherapy with women was founded. While today such assertions about women might seem outrageous, rereading Weisstein reminds us that in 1968 and for many years afterward, they were the conventional wisdom about women ascribed to by almost all practicing psychotherapists.

Weisstein’s article served as the foundation of the science of feminist psychology, with many social, developmental, and other research psychologists rising to her challenge in subsequent years to develop empirical data about women’s actual functioning. Her article was also a prophetic comment as to what would be the findings of the final founding document of feminist psychology, which appeared in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in January 1970.