“Men weren’t really the enemy—they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel inadequate when there were no bears to kill.”
BETTY FRIEDAN1
Maslow’s life had ended with a hope that he had imbued humanistic psychology with a moral and intellectual integrity that was strong enough to withstand the temptations of its remaining adolescence. He knew, on some level, that he had made some mistakes in parenting the movement. And while he had defensively distanced himself in his final years from his progeny (focusing his attention instead on transpersonal psychology), he had also tried to impart some final lessons.
Maslow’s plea for the value of the bodhisattvic path, and his admission that his earlier theory had been wrongly dismissive of groups, organizations, and communities, however, was tucked in the appendix of a posthumous collection of his work. Even if it had been more prominently featured, it was probably too late to transmit that particular message.
Humanistic psychology, in its varied cultural manifestations, had fallen down on the issue of group identity. Maslow himself had failed to imagine that being black or being female, for example, could have a meaning that was in any way superordinate to being human.
The avoidance of collective identity was typical of psychologists in general. Disciplinary specialization had tied them to the study of the individual psyche. But even humanistic psychologists with broader social concerns didn’t do much better at affecting professional or social change. Although black-white encounter groups earned some attention in the late 1960s, they failed to make a dent in race relations, or to heal blacks’ alienation from psychology.
The trifling numbers of blacks in the Association of Humanistic Psychology suggested that even humanistic theory held little appeal. At AHP’s 1979 convention, a mere six of the approximately fifteen hundred participants were black. Carl Rogers expressed his regret, without any intention to act. As his daughter Natalie concluded, “In AHP, race issues just never made it.”2
In the words of humanistic psychologist Richard Farson, who worked closely with Carl Rogers at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, “Humanistic psychology, like all of psychology, was dragged kicking and screaming through every liberation movement. It was embarrassing how far behind the curve we were.”3
In the first decade of the movement, concerns specific to women fared about as well as, or worse than, concerns related to blacks. But in contrast to blacks, who were only minimally involved in the movement, women were central to humanistic psychology. In failing to prioritize women’s liberation, the leaders of humanistic psychology were hurting their own followers, colleagues, and even family members.
When Carl Rogers’s daughter Natalie—who was a humanistic psychologist in her own right—chaired a panel on women at an AHP annual convention in the 1980s, she expressed her residual indignation. “I feel like a child who is angry with her parents,” she said.4 For Natalie Rogers, as for most women engaged in feminist struggles, this statement had a literal and figurative meaning. She was angry with her father, a founder of AHP, who had been a hypocrite. While he had devoted his professional energy to helping individuals reach their full potential, he had failed to see the constrained nature of his own daughter’s existence. For years, Natalie had subordinated her own identity to those of her husband and children.
Natalie Rogers was also angry with AHP, an organization whose goals appeared so harmonious with those of feminism but whose practices had fallen so short in supporting women. As late as 1984, she observed that 90 percent of the speakers at the annual convention were men, though participation figures favored women. She counted six all-male panels and ten panels in which there was one woman and two to five men, and found it ironic that a panel titled “Designing the AHP Future” was an all-male panel. She noted that these figures were a scant improvement on the AHP conferences of the 1960s and 1970s.5
For many humanistic psychologists, feminism was a family issue, rooted in their own domestic struggles. Like Rogers, who was forced to grapple with the criticism of his daughter, Rollo May was confronted by several influential woman in his life (most notably his second wife Ingrid) about the necessity of increasing his sensitivity to gender issues.
Feminist concerns crept into the lives of humanistic psychologists in much the same way they had entered the wider cultural consciousness—slowly and subtly at first. In the 1950s, with the postwar United States invested in a domestic ideal of femininity (reflected in advertising rhetoric and in women’s declining professional employment), dissatisfaction about the lot of women in American society often manifested as a greater willingness from women to express a sense of unease about their lives in general.6 In 1956, a writer for Life magazine observed: “If there is such a thing as a ‘suburban syndrome,’ it might take this form: the wife, having worked before marriage or at least having been educated and socially conditioned toward the idea that work (preferably some kind of intellectual work in an office, among men) carries prestige, may get depressed being ‘just a housewife.’ Even if she avoids that her humiliation still seeks an outlet. This may take various forms: in destructive gossip about other women, in raising hell at the PTA, in becoming a dominating mother. [ . . . ] In her disgruntlement, she can work as much damage to the lives of her husband and children (and her own life) as if she were a career woman, and indeed sometimes more.”7
Other early forms of protest were even subtler: beginning in 1957, women began having fewer children and marrying later, and more women in the middle classes began attending college.8
Meanwhile, cultural conditions were ripening for a more overt feminist resurgence. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the sexual liberation movement gave women new freedoms.9 As early as 1953, scientists began to study and publish on women’s sexuality. In 1953, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior and the Human Female (a bestseller), and in 1966 William Masters and Virginia Johnson published their laboratory studies of human sexual response, debunking myths about female sexuality and facilitating open conversation about female sexual concerns.10 By 1962, the birth control pill became widely accessible; over a million American women were soon using it for family planning.11 Literary censorship began to lift as well. Books like Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (an instant bestseller) helped to normalize a more open, less inhibited idea of female sexuality.12
In 1963, Betty Friedan offered American women a lens through which to identify their latent dissatisfaction with their roles as housewives. In her bestselling book The Feminine Mystique, she argued, “The core of the problem for women today is not sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is permitted by the feminine mystique.” For Friedan, the “feminine mystique” was the damaging myth that the only path to fulfillment for an American woman was through the role of housewife-mother.13
Friedan drew heavily on psychological theory to inform her conception of women’s problems.14 In fact she credited humanistic psychology, at least in part, with her reconsideration of the female role. Specifically citing Maslow’s work, Friedan attempted to demonstrate the humanistic, unselfish nature of women’s strivings. She described Maslow’s finding that the higher the dominance or strength of self in a woman, the less self-centered she was and the more her concern was directed outward to other people and to worldly concerns. She also credited Maslow with the insight that women who were more conventionally feminine were more focused on themselves and their own inferiorities.15 Emphasizing self-actualization, potentiality, and self-awareness, Friedan’s language throughout the book evoked Maslow’s theories.16
Friedan, who had been trained as a Freudian at the University of California, Berkeley, had come to oppose Freudianism and behaviorism, concluding that both approaches reinforced rather than challenged cultural imperatives.17 She wrote that “for years, psychiatrists have tried to ‘cure’ their patients’ conflicts by fitting them into the culture. But adjustment to a culture that does not permit the realization of one’s entire being is not a cure at all, according to the new psychological thinkers.”18 What Friedan desired was a theory that, in the image of her memoir-style book, would advance a vision of an improved culture and society through its analysis of highly personal and individual experiences.19
Though hardly exclusively responsible for the tide of feminism that swept through and beyond the 1960s, The Feminine Mystique gave voice to a set of concerns and anxieties that had been building for years and that would, over the next few decades, change the shape of gender relations in America. Friedan received a flood of responses to the book—some from barely literate women and some written in crayon—that demonstrated the personal resonance of her argument with American women.20
In the mid-1960s, these personal concerns grew increasingly overt. And they were, ironically, often exacerbated by heightened legislative attention to women’s issues. Despite the passage in 1965 of Title VII (which made it illegal to discriminate against women in hiring and promotions), the creation that same year of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, women remained politically and culturally subordinate to men. President Kennedy’s record on female appointments was actually worse than those of his four immediate predecessors, and dramatic pay differentials persisted between men and women, suggesting the ineffectuality of the EEOC.21 Women were also poorly represented in Congress: in 1966, ten of 435 members of the House of Representatives and two of 100 U.S. senators were women.22
The failure of government support to remedy the basic dynamics of gender and power signaled the need for individual action on the part of women. Organization arose from the demographic in which it had resided throughout feminism’s dormancy in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: in secular groups of elite, mainly educated, primarily white women. In 1966, NOW was formed by twenty-eight women and men who attended the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women. The founders included Betty Friedan, the organization’s first president, and the Reverend Pauli Murray (the first African American, female Episcopal priest), who jointly drafted the organization’s statement of purpose, establishing NOW’s commitment to gaining equal participation for women in all domains of society.23
In the early 1970s, the rise of consciousness-raising (CR) groups, which bore a striking resemblance to encounter groups, marked the convergence of women’s domestic and political discontent. CR groups, fueled in part by the framing ideology of humanistic psychology as advocated by Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, began at the grass-roots level, lacking formal structure and organization. Feminist Anita Shreve explained that CR was the “political reinterpretation of one’s personal life.” Its purpose was to “awaken the latent consciousness [ . . . ] that all women have about [their] oppression.”24 The embodiment of the renowned motto “the personal is political,” CR groups sought to convince women that what they had previously perceived as personal problems were actually social problems that required social rather than personal solutions.
CR groups originated somewhat organically, as groups of radical women began to form “rap sessions” or “bitch sessions” in which they vented their frustrations about their personal struggles, sharing private experiences of oppression by men that ranged from marital struggles to incidences of sexual violence.25 “The process is simple,” wrote one feminist. “Women come together in small groups to share personal experiences, problems and feelings. From this public sharing comes the realization that what was thought to be individual is in fact common; that what was thought to be a personal problem has a social cause and political solution.”26
Although CR groups originated with leftist activists, they spread more broadly through word of mouth to middle-class women with divergent political interests.27 By 1970, CR groups were active in every major American city, uniting women over discussions of their cultural victimization, sexual experiences, and innermost desires. In 1973 alone, more than a hundred thousand people nationwide reported membership in a consciousness-raising group. Typical groups remained, for the most part, limited to white women of the middle class, who were more likely to have leisure time to devote to the groups, and whose college experiences gave some intellectual form to their feminist inclinations.28
Consciousness-raising relied on the same epiphanic experience that encounter groups so esteemed. Shreve wrote, “The heart of the matter, say the women, was ‘the click’—the light bulb going off, the eye-popping realization, the knockout punch. It was the sudden comprehension, in one powerful instant, of what sexism exactly meant, how it had colored one’s own life, the way all women were in this together.”29 But while encounter groups conceived of epiphany as the goal, CR viewed the revelatory moment instrumentally—as an invaluable tool that would facilitate personal and political action.30 Feminist Kathie Sarachild argued that the purpose of CR had always been “social transformation as opposed to self-transformation.”31 And proponents of CR made every effort to differentiate it from therapy, maintaining that the purpose of CR groups was to analyze male supremacy and conceptualize ways to defeat it.
Not everyone bought this explanation. Like encounter groups, CR groups were mocked as being “trivial” and “nonpolitical,” and were disparaged as “hen parties,” even by other members of the radical left. Betty Friedan referred to CR groups as “navel-gazing.”32 Some perceived the self-absorption they associated with CR to be extremely threatening. Like drug experimentation, which caused people to “tune out,” and encounter groups, which obscured social and political concerns with personal catharsis, it was feared that CR participants might “retreat from action into self-indulgent personalism.”33 Proponents of CR argued that the effect would render contrary results, that women would become more committed to resisting the system.34
CR groups did seem to surpass encounter groups in several respects. To begin with, CR groups implicitly accounted for group-level forces, wove the political into the personal, and offered a sustaining form of intimacy and support that guided women through significant changes. Also, unlike encounter groups, CR groups remained responsive to changes in the culture, evolving as the political climate changed, as career opportunities expanded, and as the priorities of the women’s movement shifted.35 In retrospect, CR groups may have unknowingly drawn on the more moderate and salubrious tenets of humanistic psychology, while many encounter groups exacerbated the excesses and oversights.
Regardless of their cultural value and their obvious alignment with the goals of humanistic psychology, though, the necessity of women’s groups eluded most in the movement. In fact, many humanistic psychologists viewed even general feminist considerations as irrelevant to their goals. At worst, they deemed women-specific concerns to be antipathetic to the ideals of universal understanding, and they perceived individual feminists—particularly radical ones—to be threatening.
Even certain women in AHP initially rejected the notion that women’s concerns should be considered distinct from men’s. Psychologist Maureen O’Hara, for example, initially rejected a feminist analysis, feeling that the common humanistic psychology perspective characteristic of Carl Rogers, with whom she worked closely, “was already big enough to allow space for a subjectivity that was both essentially human and gendered.”36
O’Hara’s perspective quickly changed. She soon began to realize that the conversations happening in AHP were occurring absent a recognition of female subjectivity. By treating everyone the same, she sensed, the leaders were unwittingly privileging the white male. In order to recognize women as distinct individuals, it was important to acknowledge the gendered world in which their subjectivity had developed.37
In the wake of her efflorescent feminism, O’Hara came to believe that several essential characteristics of women were ignored by humanistic psychologists. Because women tended to be more relationally oriented and interdependent, she felt, viewing the life course as a journey from dependence to independence could prove inhibitory to women’s potential. She also noticed that in groups women were more inclined to make statements like “We’ve been thinking,” which would often be admonished by group leaders with the imperative to “think for yourself.” The expectation that health was equated with independence and autonomy ignored the reality of women’s relational concept of self. In order to foster women’s self-actualization, she concluded, it was necessary for facilitators to recognize the range of possibilities for the experience of self and relationships.38
The shift in O’Hara’s perspective and the mounting frustration that accompanied it was characteristic of AHP women in general, and of American women more broadly. The leaders of humanistic psychology seemed incapable of adequately considering anything beyond the distinct individual; group-level forces seemed to exist in their blind spot. Carl Rogers, for instance, genuinely believed that if you properly nurtured the subjectivity of an individual, gender was irrelevant, and he only slowly began to recognize that something was missing from his writings on the person-centered approach.39 White males like Rogers, feminist critics felt, could afford to focus solely on individuals, being themselves free of cultural oppression and discrimination. Women, however, had to attend to more pressing material and political deficits before they could have the luxury of self-focus.40 They would have to fulfill their more basic needs before examining, in the Maslowian sense, their “being” needs.
O’Hara noted that “many of the men at [the Center for Studies of the Person—an institute Carl Rogers founded in 1968] could not understand why there was any necessity for a women’s group. They saw it as hostile, and I suppose it was. I mean there were times when it was really bitter, and part of the bitterness had to do with the absolute denial on the part of men of the fact that women’s situation was any different from theirs.”41 Natalie Rogers remembers that “you really had to get in their faces to get them to listen.”42 This resistance only exacerbated the animosity many women felt toward the men, who, at least in their minds, represented the male power structure of the country. Natalie remembers herself as “very confrontative, outspoken, and angry.” In her intensity about women’s concerns, she claims, “I scared the shit out of you.”43
As frustration mounted, male leaders—particularly liberal, sensitive, and intelligent ones—found it increasingly difficult to ignore feminist concerns. The women’s liberation movement was so widespread that it seemed every man (and particularly every white, middle-class man) had a wife, daughter, or friend committed to the cause.
It was through the love and respect for the women in their lives that the founders of humanistic psychology began (slowly) to prioritize women’s issues. Carl Rogers’s increasing sensitivity to gender issues was hastened by the desperation of his daughter. In 1968, Natalie, who had been a “feisty” child and adolescent but who had “disappeared” into herself during her twenty-year marriage, announced she was divorcing a man whom both her parents liked and valued. Motivated by his strong desire for growth and understanding, Rogers struggled to understand his daughter’s perspective, and he listened to her openly. Her experience was certainly one that a humanistic psychologist could appreciate: she felt that her intellect and the wholeness of her being were suppressed by the marriage. The validity of her experience was undeniable to her father, and it began to inform his clinical interactions with women.44
Professionally, he began to adjust in simple ways, like noticing that four or five men had spoken in a row and encouraging a woman to speak. Recognizing the ways that groups served as a microcosm of the culture, he began to tackle group forces that influenced the behavior of individual women in his sessions.45
Although he grew more sensitive than most to the distinct nature of women’s experience, his struggle to integrate gender concerns persisted for decades. Natalie Rogers remembers the continued challenge that feminists presented to her father. At an invited lecture that he gave at Harvard in the early 1970s, she recalls a woman speaking up to criticize his gendered use of pronouns throughout his speech. In Natalie’s opinion, her father gave a “wrong answer,” and she and her colleagues from Greenhouse, a growth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confronted him about it later.46
He took this criticism seriously. In the late 1970s, the struggles inherent in his daughter’s transformation even penetrated his perception of his fairly traditional marriage to Helen Rogers, a woman who had been an ideal faculty wife, furthering her husband’s career with her competence and interpersonal ease, and often subordinating her own passions for painting, reading, and traveling to her husband’s needs. As Helen lay on her death bed, nearly paralyzed by arthritis, Rogers wrote, “She is giving up the old model of being the supportive wife. This change brings her in touch with her anger at me and at society for giving her that socially approved role.”47 Fortunately, Helen’s daughter Natalie and granddaughter Frances didn’t wait so long to embrace this anger. In fact, they co-led feminist workshops for mothers and daughters.48
Around the same time, Rogers attempted to express more publicly his support for women’s rights. One way he did this was by attending to the “pronoun problem.” His 1977 publication of Carl Rogers on Personal Power began with “a special note.” “I have been greatly perplexed by the pronoun problem, or, more exactly, the ‘he-she’ issue,” he wrote. “I am totally in sympathy with the view that women are subtly demeaned by the use of the masculine pronoun when speaking in general of a member of the human species.”49 He resolved this problem in the book by alternating between chapters in his use of masculine and feminine pronouns.
Rollo May, who wrote more for a popular audience, had attended to the pronoun problem a decade earlier, though perhaps without engaging in the deeper struggles with women’s realities that Rogers’s 1970s transformation represented.50 In 1972, feminist Carolyn Morell targeted Rollo May’s bestselling Love and Will for being “unintentionally sexist,” arguing that the book implicitly justified the existing power relationship between men and women and thereby contributed to women’s dissatisfaction and dehumanization. “Since he assumes innate behavioral distinctions between sex groups,” she stated, “he ignores the crucial social fact that female/male behavior and temperament, along with sex roles, is overwhelmingly conditioned, and that these distinctions have political implications. In essence, he disregards the fact that the female/male relationship is a power-structured one in which the male is dominant and the female subordinate.”51
She also accused May of reinforcing the patriarchy by writing for a male reader, making statements—like “If you called a lady ‘sexy’ ”— in which the you could only sensically be male, or lesbian. Morell described the sexual enlightenment May advocated basing superficial, invoking changes in expression but not in power.52
May’s response, which was published as an article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, was typical of the ambivalent way in which the movement grappled with feminism. Initially, he grudgingly conceded that his analysis “does suffer from unintentional sex prejudices. So does practically every other book written by a man (and most of them by women) in that period.” He also noted, again a bit defensively, that Maslow and himself were “emphatic” supporters of the feminist movement. A paragraph later, however, May pivoted toward a more positive reaction. He said that he would rewrite certain sections for future editions and would continue to struggle with the “man-woman issue.” In the spirit of humanistic psychologists, May wrote, “One can learn,” and he thanked Morell for her “help” in the revision of his book.53
Implicit in Morell’s critique of May was the argument that the white male perspective wouldn’t intuitively account for the unique position of women. She repeatedly described May’s errors as “unintentional” and “unconscious,” suggesting that the white male paradigm was itself the problem. Morell’s allegations were representative of the bulk of feminist critique of humanistic psychology, which revolved around the contention that humanistic theory arose from the experience of alienated, urban, white men of European descent who, according to one scholar, privileged “the sole self-evolving individual on a solitary and heroic journey of self-discovery [ . . . ] characterized by subduing nature, overcoming matter, transcending the body, promoting individuation, differentiation, and abstraction.”54
If humanistic psychologists were guilty of sexism, it tended to be of this more subtle variety, embedded as it was in the very circumstances in which they had been born and bred. Maslow was another example. He was highly educated, urban, and of white European descent, and had, like Rogers, married a woman who never challenged traditional gender roles. Bertha Maslow raised their two daughters, fostered her husband’s career, and never worked outside the home. By all reports, she seemed content with these choices, and so his marriage likely strengthened his belief that women were more suited to growing relationally, through their experiences with husbands and children.55
Still, in contrast to his peers, Maslow had been interested in women’s psychology and sexuality since the 1930s, when he worked with Harry Harlow. In his 1939 paper “Dominance, Personality and Social Behavior in Women,” he anticipated 1960s feminists, highlighting common desires in men and women for work, assertiveness, and growth.56
His personal papers, too, reflected his ongoing interest in women’s issues. His files from the 1950s and 1960s contained a significant number of well-marked and highlighted clippings of magazine and newspaper articles about the changing roles of women.57 And, in his journal entries from the 1960s, he indicated the pleasure he felt with regard to the sexual emancipation of women, and at the same time contemplated ways to further improve women’s cultural circumstances.
Maslow’s perspective on women’s liberation, though, would have rubbed many feminists the wrong way. The bulk of his personal musings related to what he perceived to be the essential differences between women and men. Although he was well aware of the costs of forcing women into a role that was purely relational, with no room for self-development, and although he noted that self-actualization was hardly possible for American women within the current gender dynamic, he also stressed the danger of ignoring what he believed was the unique relationality of women.58
“I think it’s the women themselves, like Betty Friedan, who get themselves into derogating & devaluing housework, children, wifehood, etc., feeling it to be not good enough: for them, & generally doing this in a dichotomous way, either-or. So they think of full-time jobs, which of course threatens the home. Why not part-time jobs in flexible time, allowing emergency needs of family to come first, as I did at Brandeis with my Woman-Salvage-Operation? This would need a very profound reorganization of the culture & of its economic structure. The Soviet solution—giving women full-time jobs—is no real, happy solution.59
Second-wave feminists diverged on the question of whether to attend to ontological gender differences, like those described by Maslow, or to promote a policy of total equality that disregarded any notion of essential difference, perceiving gender differences to be socially constructed and thus remediable.60 Equality feminists believed that the emphasis on difference was destructive, and that given the present differentials in social expectations and societal respect for men and women, the perception of immutable differences between genders couldn’t help but be contaminated by our prejudices.61
Although most humanistic psychologists seemed to be more sympathetic to difference feminists, the basic theory of humanistic psychology wasn’t inherently oriented toward either type of feminism. Upon reading the Feminine Mystique, for instance, Maslow found himself in conflict. “Humanness,” he wrote, “is postpotent to femaleness (I think! Now, after reading her book, I’m less sure of this.)”62
This type of self-doubt was characteristic of the openness with which many humanistic psychologists approached specific collective or cultural interests—even those that didn’t naturally resonate with them. For most, the urgency of women’s concerns grew more tangible in the 1970s, when women became more organized in expressing their dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, Maslow never lived to witness these changes.
The relevance of humanistic psychology to women’s goals became more palpable as more women from a range of backgrounds (female psychologists included) got involved in the women’s movement. In 1971, NOW had over 150 chapters and somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand members. By 1972, it had grown to about thirty thousand members, and feminist ideas were saturating the culture far out of proportion to the numbers of self-identified, active feminists. A 1972 poll, commissioned by Virginia Slims cigarettes (a company that sought to exploit feminist inclinations in order to sell cigarettes) showed that 48 percent of women supported efforts to strengthen and alter women’s status in America, while 36 percent opposed it. These figures had been 40 percent and 42 percent respectively in the year prior. Evaluations of the effectiveness of women’s organizations had also risen from 34 percent in 1971 to 43 percent in 1972. In response to the pressure of these interests, political opposition to the women’s movement grew increasingly hesitant. Congress passed a series of women’s rights legislation between 1972 and 1974.63
Unsurprisingly, many women who supported feminism found AHP’s goals to be complementary to their own. Ilene Serlin, former president of Division 32 (the movement’s group within the APA) with Humanistic Psychology Institute founder Eleanor Criswell, wrote about the comfort many women found in the world of humanistic psychology. “Much of humanistic thought,” they wrote, “especially in regard to the centrality of personal experience and holistic and tacit ways of knowing, has much in common with feminist theories of intersubjectivity, personal knowledge, and the importance of finding one’s own voice.”64
By the mid-1970s, many AHP women were primed to take a larger role in determining the future of the organization, which was no longer the male-dominated movement it had been in the 1950s. Women seeped into the power structures slowly, then quickly. At the inaugural meeting of the Association of Humanistic Psychology in Old Saybrook in 1964, Charlotte Bühler was the only female psychologist, and Norma Rosenquist (later Lyman) was the only other female participant. Prior to 1976, three of fourteen AHP presidents—Charlotte Bühler, Norma Lyman, and Eleanor Criswell—were women. Yet from 1976 to 2005, AHP had thirteen female presidents and sixteen male presidents.65
In contrast, the leadership of APA’s Division 32 remained male-dominated. Considered more intellectual than AHP, Division 32 had been created to transmit the principles of humanistic psychology to professional and academic psychology. As of 2001, women occupied only 16.6 percent of its officer positions, though 30.1 percent of the members were women.66
AHP was viewed as the more experiential organization and, perhaps because of its openness to cultural interests, a more appropriate site for female leadership. Jackie Doyle’s work exemplified ways that feminist concerns naturally overlapped with humanistic concerns. A former resident at Esalen and a president of AHP, Doyle cofounded the Greenhouse growth center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the hopes of incorporating feminist ideas into groups. Greenhouse held some of the first women’s groups in humanistic psychology and was dedicated to the goals of overthrowing sexist stereotypes and incorporating the precepts of liberation into women’s lives.67
Women like Doyle brought new energy to, and drew new energy from, humanistic psychology, ensuring its longevity throughout the 1970s. At times their vitality, and their capacity to respond effectively to pressing cultural concerns, seemed to dwarf the abilities of the founders, who were slower to respond to new cultural directions. In 1975, a writer for the Mountain Gazette went so far as to report that “the Women were probably the most important thing going on at the AHP conference. They seemed to be a step away from power there; or maybe they already have it. I had a murky view of strong, attractive and self-possessed women and meek, powerless men.”68