Family, Friends, and Faith-Communities: Intellectual Community and the Benefits of Unofficial Networks for Marginalized Scientists

• Published in: History of psychology 2020-11, Vol.23 (4), p.289-311
• Main Authors: Rodkey, Krista L, Rodkey, Elissa N
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Colleges; Communities; Female; History of medicine and histology; Human; Human Females; Interpersonal Control; Marginalization; Participation; Psychologists; Psychology of Women; Religion; Sciences; Scientists
• ISSN: 1093-4510; 1939-0610
• DOI: 10.1037/hop0000172

Throughout the 20th century, female scientists faced barriers to participation in scientific communities. Within psychology, the 1st generation of women fought for inclusion in the university and access to laboratories; the 2nd generation officially gained access to such resources while still in practice being excluded from many areas of psychology and being denied suitable professional opportunities (Johnston & Johnson, 2008; Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). Scholarship on these challenges tends to focus on power dynamics or on the strategies used by women to overcome obstacles to their full acceptance in the scientific world. In other words, there has been a focus on women's participation in official intellectual communities. Less attention has been paid to the motivational consequences of belonging to unofficial or informal intellectual communities. In this article, we argue that exploring the nature of unofficial communities illuminates a pattern of strategies that accounts for women's success in official communities; challenges a masculine, laboratory-centric model of science; and offers a model of intellectual work that has applications for other disenfranchised groups both in the history of science and in the modern world. We focus on 3 psychologists, Milicent Shinn, Eleanor Gibson, and Magda Arnold, whose success was underpinned by the support of unofficial networks. By so doing, we show how unofficial communities address specific needs for the marginalized. Finally, we explore applications to address the problems of the neoliberal university.