now you see it, now you don’t- feminist training in family therapy

7/25/2019 Now You See It, Now You DonT- Feminist Training in Family Therapy

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Now You See It, Now You Dont: Feminist Training

in Family TherapyTHELMA JEANGOODRICH w

LOUISE BORDEAUX SILVERSTEIN z

This article describes the state of feminist training in family therapy. Methods of

assessment include questionnaires to all programs accredited by COAMFTE in uni-versities and institutes and to leading institutes not accredited; interviews with editors of the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy ; interviews with many who pioneered the feminist critique in family therapy; inspection of two major national conferences; anda search of publications. Although most program directors describe their programs as feminist and judge their training to be sufcient, their report contrasts with the perspectives of many of the journal editors and pioneers, with the small amount of trainingin gender issues at national conferences, and with the small number of publications.The authors offer discussion of the ndings and recommendations.

Fam Proc 44:267281, 2005

T he words of Rachel T. Hare-Mustin always provide good grounding: All therapyis political, either supporting the status quo or challenging the status quo. . . .Therapists may claim neutrality, but neutrality always supports the status quo(2003, p. xiii). With a status quo that continues lopsided favor for men over women insociety and in family, how are we currently training our therapists to positionthemselves in the clinical hour?

This question echoes the original feminist challenge to family therapy that beganin the late 1970s and continued to the early 1990s (see Silverstein, 2003, for a review).By feminism, we refer to the premise that women should have political, economic,and social rights equal to those of men. Sexism refers to policies, beliefs, and actionsthat oppose that premise. Feminists charged that family therapy supported a versionof family functioning that recapitulated societys gendered inequalities. With theissue of gendered power highlighted, everything in family therapy was called intoquestion.

Compared with that active period, feminism has greatly diminished in familytherapys conversation as it has in the national conversation. Now the focus is onmulticulturalism. We track the course of these two emphases in this article as we

wUniversity of TexasHouston Medical School, Houston, TX.z Yeshiva University, New York, NY.


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assess the state of feminist training in family therapy. Methods include question-naires, interviews, and inspection of conferences and publications. Following ourndings and discussion, we offer recommendations.

FINDINGS

COAMFTE Requirements

The Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education(COAMFTE; 2005) requires programs to meet standards for the curriculum. Relevanthere are those for gender and multiculturalism. In paragraph 300.01 describing re-quirements for didactics, we read, programs are expected to infuse their curriculumwith content that addresses issues related to diversity and power and privilege as theyrelate to age, culture, environment, ethnicity, gender, health/ability, nationality, race,religion, sexual orientation, spirituality, and socioeconomic status. In paragraph 320.04describing requirements for clinical knowledge, standards hold that content will ad-dress . . . gender, violence, addictions, and abuse, in the treatment of individuals, couples,and families from a relational/systemic perspective. In the same section paragraph320.07 directs that content will include significant material on diversity and discrim-ination as it relates to couples and family therapy theory and practice.

These standards represent a marked change from the time prior to the feministcritique, when nothing about power and privilege was required concerning eitherrace 1 or gender. Soon after the introduction of the standards in 1988, Coleman, Avis,and Turin (1990) surveyed 285 programs in the United States and abroad concerning feminist perspectives in training. Fifty-ve programs responded. Only 27 of those

followed a feminist model or provided opportunities to develop gender awareness. Thestandards have existed longer now and have been revised, but concerns remain thattheir lack of specicity leaves too much room for interpretation, for variability indepth of analysis, and for choice in emphasis.

COAMFTE-Accredited Programs

We sent questionnaires to the 82 programs accredited by COAMFTE in the UnitedStates and Canada and followed up with those who did not respond. The eventualreturn rate was 67%. The percentage of returns from each region of the country varied

little, ranging from 60% to 71%. Answers are presented in Table 1. Like all self-reportdata, these answers and those below from the postgraduate institutes may have beeninuenced by social desirability.

Responses indicate strong compliance with the standards from COAMFTE. Com-ments from respondents qualify the nature of that compliance. First, there is variationamong faculty members of a program. Respondents wrote that some are more diligentthan others at treating gender issues as key F for example, by initiating discussion of these during clinical work and by focusing on power rather than only on difference.

Second, there is variation from one part of the country to another. Three noted thatin socially conservative areas, addressing gender issues causes more difculties than

1 We understand race to be a social construct, not a biological category. We refer to it in ourtext because of its usage in American society to institutionalize and discriminate against people

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in less conservative areas. These difculties affect the kind of attention paid to genderissues.

Third, there is variation in what the organization of the curriculum actually indi-cates. For example, Bruce Kuehl at the University of WisconsinStout wrote regarding the question about separate courses on gender, Our program does not have a specificcourse on gender. . . . Even if we devoted all 56 credits of our curriculum to genderissues, it would not be enough. . . . Instead we take a broader perspective centering onsocial power and privilege, and use things like age, gender, sexual orientation, race,social class to illustrate how such power inequity processes work. As a result of thissurvey, ours and other programs may look inattentive when in fact we are trying to besensitive to many issues. Eight other directors specied that they contextualizegender with other social justice or multicultural issues.

Institutes

We requested information from the directors or their directors of training at ninepostgraduate institutes not accredited by COAMFTE and therefore not includedabove. Seven responded: the Ackerman Institute, New York, New York; the FamilyInstitute of Westchester, White Plains, New York; the Family Therapy PracticeCenter, Washington, D.C.; Houston-Galveston Institute, Houston, Texas; the Insti-tute for Family Services, Piscataway, New Jersey; the Minuchin Center for theFamily, New York, New York; and the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

All respondents said that feminist perspectives were integrated throughout theirprograms, including clinical supervision. All identied their programs as feminist,with four specifying that gender-sensitive approaches are also used. All described theamount of training as adequate, with a caveat from Marcia Sheinberg at Ackermanthat is also relevant to other programs with many faculty: We have a teaching guide

T ABLE 1COAMFTE-Accredited Programs

1. In your training program, do you have a course or seminar or other format that focuses specificallyon gender issues?

yes 60% no 40%2. If so, is itrequired? 70% elective? 30%

3. Is discussion of gender issues integrated throughout your program? For example, in a discussion of marital therapy, are gender issues such as differences in power or male violence against womendiscussed explicitly?

yes 96% no 4%4. Do supervisors and faculty make it their responsibility to address gender issues routinely during

clinical supervision? yes 94% no 6%

5. Does your program generally take a gender sensitivity perspective, emphasizing differences inthe roles and psychology of men and women, or is there more of a feminist perspective,emphasizing differences in power for men and women and the effects of patriarchy on men andwomen?

gender sensitivity 31% feminist 44% both (written in) 25%6. What is your opinion about the current training in gender issues in your program?

too much 0% about right 78% too little 22%

GOODRICH & SILVERSTEIN / 269


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all faculty cover it? No. Two directors, Rhea Almeida at the Institute for FamilyServices and Marianne Walters at the Family Therapy Practice Center, noted thatcurrently in the eld, feminist issues are given lower priority and less clarity than theywere in the 1980s and 1990s.

National Conferences

To investigate the national conversation in family therapy training, we selected theannual conferences of two enduring organizations relevant to training. The AmericanFamily Therapy Academy comprises leading family therapy teachers, clinicians,program developers, researchers and social scientists (American Family Therapy Academy, 2005). The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy spon-sors the certifying body of family therapy for clinicians and supervisors. As shown inTables 2 and 3, presentations show a decline in attention to gender issues and anincrease in attention to multicultural issues over the last 15 years. Judged by titles

and abstracts, virtually all presentations for 2004 listed as gender or multicul-tural address differences in traits, behavior, or values rather than differences inpower and privilege.

Publications

Silverstein (2004) searched books, chapters, and peer-reviewed articles in Psyc-INFO for the keywords race, ethnicity, gender, racism, and feminism . As shown inTable 4, publications examining women, girls, and gender far outnumber those ex-amining race and ethnicity. Including power and oppression as keywords producesTable 5, which indicates that articles on feminism start out more prevalent than ar-ticles on racism, but the difference declines dramatically over time.

The search in PsycINFO included two journals that focus on family issues: Family Process and the Journal of Marriage and Family . To focus more specifically on familytherapy, we searched Family Process from 1990 to 2004 for the keywords feminist, gender, girls, and women . The search indicated that 9 articles met these criteria from1990 to 1995, 8 from 1996 to 2000, and 3 from 2001 to the third quarter of 2004, for a total of 20.

We searched Family Process for the keywords race or ethnicity and included articlesfeaturing a specific ethnic group (e.g., Japanese families or African American couples).There were 4 articles from 1990 to 1995, 14 between 1996 and 2000, and 18 from 2001

through the third quarter of 2004, for a total of 36. Only 4 articles indicated a concernwith both gender and multicultural issues. Thus, the practice identied by Reid (2002)of focusing on a single domain continues.

The 20 articles in Family Process that focus on feminism, gender, girls, or womenrepresent 4% of the articles from 1990 to 2004; the 36 articles on race or ethnicityrepresent 7% of the articles published over these 15 years. Thus, articles dealing withrace and ethnicity increased from the 1990s to the present; those dealing with femi-nism/gender declined. Most important, the extremely small numbers for both domainsrepresent their marginalization within family therapy.

Editors of the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy We spoke with the editors for the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy (JFFT) , the

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T A B L E 2

A m e r i c a n F a m i l y T h e r a p y A c a d e m y A n n u a l M e e t i n g s , 1

9 9 0 a n d 2 0 0 4

P l e n a r i e s

F o r u m s

R o u n d t a b l e s

I n t e r e s t

G r o u p s

P r e c o n f e r e n c e

W o r k s h o p s

9 0

0 4

9 0

0 4

9 0

0 4

9 0

0 4

9 0

0 4

F e m i n i s t o r

G e n d e r I s s u e s

3 6 %

2 0 %

1 0 0 %

0 %

2 1 %

0 %

8 %

5 %

5 0 %

0 %

R a c e / E t h n i c i t y /

M u l t i c u l t u r a l I s s u e s

9 %

3 0 %

0 %

5 0 %

0 %

1 4 %

0 %

1 6 %

0 %

1 0 0 %

T o t a l P r e s e n t a t i o n s

1 1

1 0

1

2

3 3

2 1

2 5

1 9

1 0

3

N o t e . T w o e v e n i n g p r o g r a m s , o r i n s t i t u t e s , o c c u r a t A F T A

. I n 1 9 9 0

, t h e p r o g r a m d e s c r i b e d t h e W o m e n s I n s t i t u t e a s a d d r e s s i n g f e m i n i s t i s s u e s ,

h e M e n s I n s t i t u t e a s a d d r e s s i n g e f f e c t s o n r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f c h a n g e s i n

w o m e n s r o l e s . I n 2 0 0 4

, b o t h i n s t i t u t e s d e s c r i b e d t h e i r m e e t i n g s a s t i m e s

o r p e o p l e t o s h a r e a n d g e t t o k n o w o n e a n o t h e r .



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asked each editor to give us her perspective on the current state of training in feministissues. These are excerpts representative of their more extended responses:

Lois Braverman, founding editor . Multiculturalism as an ism has risen as the domi-nant linguistic paradigm, and in it, gender is considered, but not in the same way itused to be considered. It is one of many. I see that happening in training as well as inthe culture. Women are better off than in the 60s F middle-class professionals, but notworking class and poor women. But womens position in marriage has not changedvery much. These days, the inequality in marriage is mentioned but not tackled Fneither by women nor in family therapy. Gender training in family therapy has dis-tanced itself from our feminism as pioneers just like young women in the culture havedistanced themselves from the feminism of their mothers.

Janine Roberts . Teaching about gender is fragmented because of the complexity of gender issues. Social identity F age, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation Fcan be understood as an evolving process. We need to help people have anchor pointswithout getting stuck in essentialist ways. Feminism has not taken a back seat as much asthat the other contextual issues have received more attention in peoples lives.

Betty Mac Kune-Karrer . I am disappointed overall. Gender has become something people mention and give lip-service to. People talk about it in one or two lectures, butit has not become a framework. People treat it as an issue rather than as something embedded in every context. Students nd these issues very complex and interesting,but without a supervisor supporting the interest, how far can they take it? Somesupervisors say they do not bring up gender unless supervisees bring it up. Yet thereare other things they bring up themselves because they believe them to be important.

Toni Zimmerman . The earlier writing from feminists critiquing family therapyhas made feminism a part of training programs now. An enormous movement has

T ABLE 3 American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Annual Meetings, 1990 and 2004

Plenaries Workshops Other Seminars

90 04 90 04 90 04

Feminist or GenderIssues

0% 0% 6% 1% Open Forum 0

Race/Ethnicity/ Multicultural Issues

19% 25% 3% 14% Open Forum Special Track

Total Presentations 16 4 192 110

T ABLE 4Total Publications on Race/Ethnicity and Women/Girls/Gender from PsycINFO

Race/Ethnicity Women/Girls/Gender

19901995 3702 29,33519962001 6145 39,9312002 2004 2642 17 035

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happened. But there are missing pieces that need to be worked into the programs. Oneis the struggle to balance work and family. Second is the translation of theory intopractice. We need to help students nd ways to help couples deal with inequality.

Anne Prouty Lyness, current editor . I worry that programs that have a separate courseon gender are modeling that it does not permeate every aspect of everything for

everyoneF

even White men. Gender is so essential. So are class, ethnicity, age, sexualorientation, and other social power issues F for everyone, although some people ex-perience it with social violence of poverty and isms. Separating gender out and notinfusing it throughout F and giving it low priority F makes for a sad situation.Training therapists not to be a conscious part of the solution perpetuates social vio-lence in the therapy room. Two colleagues and I are about to start a doctoral programin marriage and family therapy at Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene,New Hampshire, with an emphasis in social justice.

Pioneers

What might those who originated the feminist critique in family therapy have to sayabout current training in feminist issues? We asked 13 of them to tell us. Elevenresponded, 10 by telephone, 1 by e-mail. We include a portion of each response.

Carol Anderson . Many of the things we were concerned about in the 80s have becomea given now and do not seem to represent hot issues today. That does not mean the oldissues are resolved, but people think they have won those battles or think they have a handle on how to ght them. I am not doing family therapy these days so I am not surehow power and gender are being addressed in therapy. I am doing research on low-income women who definitely feel so powerless that its like the whole womens

movement passed them by. Judith Myers Avis . I nd couple and family therapists generally more aware of genderissues than they were 20 years ago. But that awareness is often supercial, at the levelof identifying differences, without an analysis of power or an understanding of how toaddress gender issues effectively in therapy. The program I taught in has been highlycommitted to educating therapists in a feminist-informed analysis of gender andpower. After graduation, however, many therapists are recruited into dominantagency brief therapy practices which focus on the personal to the exclusion of thepolitical.

Betty Carter . Feminism has to inform all supervision and not be conned to teaching about gender in one room way down a dark hall for an hour a week as if that is

T ABLE 5Total Publications on Racism and Feminism from PsycINFO

Racism Feminism

19901995 604 1,23919962001 1,026 1,33820022004 417 502



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supervision, then something big has happened in the last 7 years since I left Fsomething monumental.

Virginia Goldner . I am not teaching in family therapy these days, but I certainly feel

when I supervise privately now and again on couples work, a basic awareness hasdefinitely taken hold. There is a shorthand people use to reference differences in re-lational style and power issues that everyone seems to take for granted. So I think wesucceeded in changing the whole eld.

Rachel Hare-Mustin . Feminism, like all revolutions, has become co-opted and ren-dered powerless by the establishment. Because women are journal editors and inleadership positions in AFTA or AAMFT, many people assume that gendered powerinequities no longer exist. AFTA has taken ight into multiculturalism becausedealing with male/female issues is too frightening for many people. Narrative therapy

has contributed to making feminism invisible because the not knowing stancemakes it impossible to name hierarchy, power, and dominance struggles.

Kitty La Perriere . The visibility of the issue is very small. It has become submergedbeneath the issues of diversity, ethnicity, abuse of all kinds F sexual, physical, verbal Fposttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse. In the last number of years, I havereceived not a single pamphlet for a conference with a focus on gender training. I havereceived many on those other subjects. We have come a little ways, but it seems to havereceded in its urgency. Maybe it is so politicized. You can talk about ethnicity or di-versity from a whole spectrum of positions, but if you talk about feminist issues, you

become a dangerous liberal. It is distressing.

Peggy Papp . I believe gender should not be separated out and considered an issue.It is our awareness of how gender shapes our lives and what to do about it that be-comes the issue. In training, the major problem is how to translate concepts of genderequality into your therapeutic approach so the family nds them useful. Until theideas become personalized in ways that respond to the current problems in peopleslives and their idiosyncratic experiences, words like gender and feminism maysound cliche . Our eld needs to focus on the gender alignments as they manifestthemselves in our culture today. Many of them have shifted.

Cheryl Rampage . All the programs incorporate gender training in some little place Fon Thursday during Week 9 of the course on diversity. But there is no coherence; it isnot imbued throughout the curriculum. Students are in their 20s and dont know fromfeminism. They think, Of course, women should make money equal with men. Of course, men should not beat their wives. But when they see couples, they have noidea why things do not always work out that way.

Olga Silverstein . Things have changed in the last 10 to 20 years. Everyone now in theeld assumes they have no gender bias. Everyone knows if you are a good person ortherapist, you are free of gender bias. That does not mean that people are free of it orcan even dene what it means. So it has become hidden or covert, whereas in the years

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Froma Walsh . I am not encouraged that we have gained much ground in 20 years.Power issues are neglected, especially by male instructors; they often do not even seethem. The womens movement brought power inequities and abuses to awareness tothe point that it is a special topic in the curriculum, but in case consultations where it

is not the topic, it is not brought up. This is the most neglected issue.

Marianne Walters . My sense of the eld is that the feminist perspective has beenintegrated to some extent, but many programs do not work with it, really. Does thetraining look at power relations in every aspect of the therapy F the therapy itself andfamily events and family constellation and the dynamics of husband and wife and thesibling relationships? Womens issues are compartmentalized. People think we shouldaddress them, but power relations are toned down. The life and thrust given towomens issues has been lost because of fear. People think we should not upset menfurther.

DISCUSSION

Although AAMFT now requires programs to address gender as well as race, eth-nicity, and sexual orientation, there appears to be wide variation in the depth andbreadth of the approach. Nevertheless, most directors describe the training as femi-nist and as adequate. Their report contrasts with the (small) amount of training ingender issues at national conferences and in publications in refereed journals. Activityin those arenas indicates that since the 1990s, feminism has not been a priority infamily therapy and has declined even more in recent years.

The editors of the JFFT offer perspective on this contrast. They point out that thefeminist critique of the 1980s had major impact on the eld; virtually every training program addresses gender better than it did prior to this critique. However, manymissing pieces remain to be addressed, especially issues of power within couples.Unfortunately, since the late 1990s, feminist issues have been given lip service, sofeminist training in the eld has become fragmented. If there is a feminist on thefaculty, the training is likely to be excellent. In the absence of a strong feministpresence, feminism is likely to be given low priority. We would add that without a stronger feminist presence on the national stage of family therapy, training programsare perhaps left too vulnerable to local pressures, which in much of the country aresocially conservative. We (the authors) would like to see family therapy lead ratherthan merely reect the climate of the culture, local or national.

There is also contrast between what directors sometimes report as adequate andwhat they regard as ideal. Among directors who added comments to their question-naires, a common theme was the difculty of nding the proper time and format togive attention in the curriculum to all the important dimensions affecting a familyslife. This concern was well-expressed by Kate Warner, director at Valdosta StateUniversity in Georgia: I wish we had individual classes on everything and yet I wantto integrate things. If you do integrate, how do you keep the issues from being watereddown? If we are seeing a woman living in poverty who is disabled and being beaten byher husband, I want a therapist to see her not just as a woman, but as a poor woman,and a disabled person, and so on with the other aspects of social location, and how shelocates herself. So there are class and disability and power issues. Actually, we need



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Wetchler, director at Purdue UniversityCalumet, wrote, We dropped our separatecourse on gender a year and a half ago and went for the infusion model. We are looking at reinstituting the course to hit home the point because with infusion, it gets diffuseand does not cause enough of a perturbation. Such struggles testify not only to lo-

gistical difculties, but also to recognition of the importance of the issues.Still, there were those who wrote that feminist training is being done in a perfunctoryway, folded into a course on multiculturalism as one lecture. Commented one directorwho said he preferred not to be identied, Feminism is now combined with a strong multicultural emphasis. In fact, I would say that multiculturalism is probably strongerthan feminism among the faculty. I see this as a reection of how the eld has changed.

Comments from the pioneers reveal general doubt about how deep and wide thechange has been in family therapy to incorporate feminist perspectives. Indeed,Goldner is the only one who made a strongly positive assessment, and she is no longerteaching in family therapy. Primarily, the pioneers emphasize how feminist issues are

cordoned off from clinical work and from the rest of the curriculum. As well, they saythat the issues have lost not only their visibility, but also their urgency. Three of thepioneers offer the thought that multiculturalism has displaced feminism.

Has multiculturalism displaced feminism? Reid (2002) and Silverstein (2004) haveshown that the relations between multiculturalism and feminism are in fact recip-rocal. Feminist writings largely ignore race; multicultural literature neglects feministissues. This failure of each to include and enhance the other contributes to the mar-ginalization of both. They are treated as specialties, thereby depriving them of broadimpact. For example, although gender denes all aspects of the lives of both men andwomen, feminism is usually considered a womens issue. Similarly, only the be-havior of immigrants and people of color has been part of the multicultural curricu-lum. Even when feminism and multiculturalism have made their way into curricula,discussion focuses on cultural and gender differences rather than on discriminationand dominance. Moreover, gender and feminism have been taught primarily bywomen who dene themselves as feminists, and multiculturalism has been taughtalmost exclusively by people of color.

Feminism and multiculturalism are actually tightly bound. Gender, ethnicity, race,class, and other aspects of social location intertwine to construct a life. Further,feminism and multiculturalism both aim to equalize power and privilege for mar-ginalized groups. Just as true commitment to multiculturalism goes beyond studying racial differences to examine institutionalized racism, feminism goes beyond studying gender differences to examine institutionalized sexism. Indeed, when programs focuson differences rather than discrimination, we have several concerns.

First, the differences paradigm presents an inaccurate view of men and women.Barnett and Rivers (2004) noted that a small number of studies take ndings of trivialbut statistically significant differences between men and women and emphasize themuntil they are accepted as important F without acknowledging the enormous overlapbetween the sexes. Examples include differences in brain size and functioning, andperformance on standardized tests.

Second, several authors have become famous asserting gender differences withoutsubstantiating them with empirical research. Examples include Gilligan (1982) aboutdifferences in tolerance for intimacy, Tannen (1991) about linguistic and communi-cation patterns, and Pipher (1994) about adolescent self-esteem. Because these as-

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have characterized this body of work as good entertainment, but not good scholar-ship (MacGeorge, Graves, Feng, Gillihan, & Burleson, 2004, p. 172).

MacGeorge and colleagues (2004) challenge the frequently heard idea that men andwomen are so different in their communication styles that they belong to two cultures.

They reveal multiple limitations in studies reporting gender differences in disclosureand discussion of emotional upset. They also cite three new studies showing that menand women provide and respond to supportive messages in ways that are more similarthan different. MacGeorge and colleagues concluded that overlap in these functionsfar outweigh any differences.

Third, the differences paradigm invites trainees to adopt an essentialist positionthat avoids the realities of discrimination. Political problems then are seen as merelypersonal problems. The ready conclusion is that individuals can change aspects of their lives that are actually beyond their control.

For example, a couple might enter counseling after the birth of their rst child,

conicted about whether the wife should decrease her involvement in paid employ-ment from full time to part time. Both the husband and wife have been socialized tobelieve that women have a natural sensitivity to infants, and that the mother-infantbond is the most important element in a childs development. Therefore, both mem-bers of the couple think that the mother should stay home, at least part time, for atleast the rst year of the infants life.

When the couple enters therapy, the mother has already been home for 2 months. Although she has enjoyed some aspects of being home with her newborn, she has alsoexperienced the social isolation and intellectual understimulation of full-time mothering compared with her job as an assistant district attorney. She also knows that staying outof full-time work for a year will alter her career path dramatically. Despite her feeling that the optimum solution for their infant is for her to stay home for as long as possible,she is seriously considering returning to work full time and hiring a nanny. The fatherdoes not want a stranger raising his child. He is shocked that his wife is considering leaving the baby. He points out that paying a nanny will consume most of her after-taxsalary. At no time does either the mother or the father consider the possibility that thefather will stay at home for a period of time and work part time. Because he is on thepartner track in a law rm and therefore makes considerably more money than themother, this decision seems to make perfect sense.

In contrast, empirical research (Lamb, 1997) studying parental behavior with new-borns has shown that neither mothers nor fathers have a special sensitivity to infants.Both parents learn on the job. Because mothers typically spend so much more timewith infants than do fathers, they become more sensitive to infant cues. Thus, whenmothers and fathers are compared at the end of the infants rst year, mothers are moresensitive to infants because they know them so much better. Similarly, more than 50 years of research on other-than-mother care has shown that high-quality, consistentchild care does not lead to negative developmental outcomes (Silverstein, 1991).

The fact that these data continue to be relatively unknown in both popular cultureand professional training despite a large body of empirical research suggests thatthe gender differences hypothesis serves some societal function. The feministperspective is that the differences paradigm provides support for mother-blaming and further serves to keep women out of the workforce, or at least to hinder theircareer success. Thus, the differences paradigm supports male dominance in patriar-



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Therapists also have been socialized to believe that biological differences in re-productive functions construct gender differences in parenting. A therapist who is notgrounded in the feminist deconstruction of the gender differences paradigm is at riskto interpret the mothers feelings as psychic conict about her mothering role. Such a

therapist is likely to join with the husband, explicitly or implicitly, thereby lending expert status to the argument for the mother to remain at home as the primarycaregiver. However, limiting her involvement in paid employment is likely to makethe wife vulnerable to discriminatory employment practices such as the mommy track,the glass ceiling, and the increasing disparity in pay between men and women as theyclimb a career ladder. Thus, the therapist may unwittingly contribute to the impactof institutionalized sexism on the client.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Its strange. I just went to my book shelf to nd my

well-used copy of The Invisible Web , and its not in its

place on the shelf. This seems a timely metaphor for

gender issues within the curricula, in keynotes and

workshops at conferences, and more generally in the social

and political spheres. Where have they gone?

Marilyn Boyd

Director, University of Winnipeg

There needs to be an overarching theoretical framework for feminism and multi-culturalism focused on dominance and subordination, power and privilege. We suggestsome elements:

1. Addressing power and privilege in sociopolitical systems and in family systemsMany and varied consequences befall women living in male-centered, male-domi-

nated society. The shape of these consequences varies by race and class F and racismand classism bring their own consequences F but no woman escapes. Even privilegedwomen are not free. Addressing power differentials in family and society marks thecommitment to feminist and multicultural training. One program that stronglydemonstrates such commitment is Rhea Almeidas Cultural Context Model (Almeida,2003; Hernandez, Almeida, & Dolan-Del Vecchio, 2005) at the Institute for FamilyServices, Piscataway, New Jersey. This model works with couples and families bycreating a collective consciousness about social justice. Clients enter a communityfocused on dismantling power imbalances between men and women and between in-dividuals of dominant and marginalized groups. The program provides a woman witha coalition of women, thereby increasing her power in her family. Similarly, theprogram provides a man with a coalition of men who challenge male privilegeand support him as he struggles to change. The rst phase of therapy occurs in thesesame-sex groups for education about male power and privilege, and dominant and

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therapy F which also occurs in the presence of members of the community. In thisway, our connection with and stake in one another is underscored.

2. Adopting a Complexity Paradigm

Reid (2002) refers to a complexity paradigm that includes multiple domains of experience (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, immigrant status, sexual orientation, and class)and the interactions among those domains. COAMFTE standards support attention toeach domain but do not make clear that we must train students to focus on the com-plexity of factors, not on one attribute thought primary. We add that we must trainstudents to see the links between the families presenting problems and the elements of social location with their associated power positioning F regardless of whether the familysees the links. Resources helpful for such training may be found in the 25 case-basedchapters in Silverstein and Goodrich (2003). We draw particular attention to the chapteron supervision by Mac Kune-Karrer and Foy (2003). Additionally, we recommend the

Power Equity Guide developed by Haddock, Zimmerman, and MacPhee (2000), andmethods described by Prouty, Thomas, Johnson, and Long (2001).

3. Conceptualizing all behavior as culturalStudying all ethnic groups, not simply ethnic minority groups, underscores the fact

that every person emerges from a specific cultural context that must be understood. White identity, then, needs to be part of multicultural education. A sociopoliticalperspective can elucidate the tendency of White people to be unaware that they areone of many racial groups rather than the universal. Further, we need to see culture asan explanation, not a rationalization. In other words, just because it is customary in a given culture for the husband to have high status and the wife to be submissive doesnot make the arrangement harmless. Almeida (2003) challenges practices that sup-port male dominance in traditional cultures. She holds that such traditions F forexample, that Asian women are submissive F do not represent authentic culturalpractice, but rather exist to maintain male dominance. She contrasts these with cul-tural traditions that support the liberation of women, for example, the Black Madonna in Latina culture (Comas-Diaz, 2003) or Chinese feminist practices (Almeida, 2003).Thus, her approach integrates both feminism and multiculturalism. As an additionalillustration, Silverstein teaches in a secular graduate school that is part of a largerModern Orthodox Jewish university. The majority of students are White, middle class,and secular, with a minority of Orthodox Jewish students and students of color. In-stead of beginning with African American, Asian, or Latino culture, Silverstein asksthe Orthodox students to explain Modern Orthodox Judaism to the class. They oftenrespond, I dont feel comfortable being the spokesperson for a whole community.Subsequent discussion provides experiential learning that illustrates the culturalnature of all behavior and makes it easier to empathize with students of color calledupon to be spokespersons for their ethnicity and race.

4. Implementing separate courses as well as infusionIn comparing a program with gender studies integrated throughout the curriculum

with one offering a separate course, Filkowski, Storm, York, and Brandon (2001)found neither format more effective, with each offering advantages. Although theauthors did not do so, we nd their results to argue in favor of providing both kinds of



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body of knowledge before they can integrate it into other areas. Moreover, coming tounderstand sexism and racism upends customary thinking about self, family, andsociety. Two courses, one on race/ethnicity and one on feminism, allow new perspec-tives to cohere. Students are then better able to use a complexity paradigm in their

other classes. To concerns about insufcient time for covering everything, wesuggest that teaching how unequal power generates oppression makes it less neces-sary to teach much of the content relevant to every social location. Covering every-thing occurs as clients describe their experience.

5. Including a focus on self Because we all are socialized in racist and sexist cultures, programs must help

students and faculty examine their own social locations, including how these assignmembership in dominant and oppressed groups, demarcate personal privilege, createpersonal bias, and direct personal power. Dovidio and colleagues (2002) reported much

empirical evidence that middle-class White people typically engage in racist behaviorsthat are subtle, indirect, and unconscious, except when the right thing to do is veryclear. Sue (2003) presents narratives of anguish and guilt from White people who havefaced their unconscious racism. Similarly, Turner and Avis (2003) describe the strong emotions of their students in coming to terms with gender oppression as a core powerrelation cutting across other oppressions. Training needs to include methods thatpromote such struggles with racism and sexism on a personal level alongside exam-ining the societal level.

CONCLUSION

We return to Rachel T. Hare-Mustin: The question in therapy is always about thechoice of question. . . . What biases of ours affect our seeing and hearing? What doesour social location cause us to know and not know? What end does a particular viewserve? Who benets? Who loses? (2003, p. xii). Training ourselves and our students tohave these questions near while working with families keeps us mindful of ourmembership and their membership in oppressive systems, and helps us avoid com-plicity and harmful repetition. We close with the words of an aboriginal social worker.

If youve come to help me, youre wasting your time. But if youve come because your lib-eration is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Lilla Watson

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Barnett, R.C., & Rivers, C. (2004, September 3). Men are from earth and so are women. Itsfaulty research that sets them apart. The Chronicle Review, p. B11.

Coleman, S.B., Avis, J.M., & Turin, M. (1990). A study of the role of gender in family therapy

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Comas-Diaz, L. (2003). The black Madonna: The psychospiritual feminism of Guadalupe Kali,and Monserrat. In L.B. Silverstein & T.J. Goodrich (Eds.), Feminist family therapy: Em- powerment in social context (pp. 147160). Washington, DC: American Psychological Asso-ciation Books. Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education.(2005). Standards of Accreditation version 10.3. Retrieved June 21, 2005 from http:// www.aamft.org.

Dovidio, J.F., Gaetner, S.L., Kawakami, K., & Hodson, G. (2002). Why cant we just get along?Interpersonal biases and interracial distrust. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psy- chology , 8, 88102.

Filkowski, M.B., Storm, C.L., York, C.D., & Brandon, A.D. (2001). Approaches to the study of gender in marriage and family therapy curricula. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy , 27 , 117122.

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Hare-Mustin, R.T. (2003). Foreword. In L.B. Silverstein & T.J. Goodrich (Eds.), Feminist familytherapy: Empowerment in social context (pp. xiiixiv). Washington, DC: American Psycho-logical Association Books.

Hernandez, P., Almeida, R., & Dolan-Del Vecchio, K. (2005). Critical consciousness, accounta-bility, and empowerment: Key processes for helping families heal. Family Process , 44 ,105119.

Lamb, M.E. (1997). The development of father-infant relationships. In M.E. Lamb (Ed.), Therole of the father in child development (3rd ed., pp. 104120). New York: Wiley.

MacGeorge, E.L., Graves, A.R., Feng, B., Gillihan, S.J., & Burleson, B.R. (2004). The myth of gender cultures: Similarities outweigh differences in mens and womens provision of andresponses to supportive communication. Sex Roles , 50 , 143175.

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Pipher, M. (1994). Revising Ophelia . New York: Putnam.Prouty, A.M., Thomas, V., Johnson, S., & Long, J.K. (2001). Methods of feminist family therapy

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Sue, D.W. (2003). Overcoming our racism: The journey to liberation . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Tannen, D. (1991). You just dont understand: Women and men in conversation . New York:

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now you see it, now you don’t- feminist training in family therapy

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