The Slippery Slope

C. Simpson, the editor of Signs, a women's studies journal, has defended women's studies against the charge of being unacceptably devoted to advocacy. Her defense, however, suggests some trouble in maintaining objectivity in feminist scholarship. At a recent conference, one speaker, J. Laws, characterized the norms of objectivity & merit as M, in contrast to feminist approaches to scholarship. Another, S. Bem, described her work on androgyny as undertaken explicitly in the service of feminist goals, & suggested that open advocacy is preferable to attempting objectivity. In scientific research, however, especially in such fields as psychology, the interpretation of results is easily enough distorted by personal biases without conscious advocacy. The acceptance of advocacy scholarship threatens to destroy the moral capital of social science, leading to an erosion of research standards. This suggests the value of bringing together a series of essays dealing with ideological influences on the theory & practice of psychology, in a special issue of Social Research. W. H. Stoddard.