Stalking a Moving Target: Thirty Years of Summarizing a Changing Field for Changing Students

For more than thirty years, I have been engaged in writing textbooks on the psychology of women and gender. During that time, the field has expanded dramatically and shifted in focus in a number of ways. There has been growing attention to the tension between emphasizing gender differences and similarities, an increasing focus on examining gendered behavior in the light of contextual variables, and a rising awareness of within-gender differences. The student population has changed too, becoming less patient with reading, more technologically oriented, and sometimes less likely to self-define as feminist. Meanwhile, the textbook publishing industry has become increasingly consolidated into a few massive companies. The current article presents a personal perspective on some of these developments, as well as some predictions for the future.