Speaking of Psychology: Feminism A to Z, with Gayle Pitman, PhD

Feminist discussions are often aimed at adults, while girls tend to be left out of the conversation. In this episode, Gayle Pitman, PhD, talks about her new book, Feminism from A to Z, and how parents and teachers can use a feminist theory and perspective to give teenage girls the support, courage and energy to face the challenges of adolescence.

Gayle Pitman, PhD, is a professor of psychology and women’s studies at Sacramento City College. Her teaching and writing focus on gender and sexual orientation, and she has worked extensively with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. She is the author of the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award winner, This Day in June, which is published by Magination Press, APA’s childrens’ book imprint.

Pitman’s latest book, also published by Magination Press, is called Feminism from A to Z, and is a hands-on introduction for teens. Each chapter offers an alphabetical journey through the basics of feminism, with writing and action exercises incorporated into each entry.

Audrey Hamilton: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I’m your host, Audrey Hamilton. In this episode, I talk with a psychologist about bringing feminism to young girls and teens who are coming of age in a challenging time.

Gayle Pitman: “So there’s all these things that, you know, show that hey we’re equal, and we’ve succeeded and we’ve arrived and yet obviously we can look around our culture and see that we still have a long way to go.”

Audrey Hamilton: More than previous generations, today’s teens are being brought up to believe that girls can do anything, but they still face the challenges of being a teenage girl. And that does include increased rates of depression and low self-esteem. But according to our guest, feminist psychological theory and practice could be used to better support teenage girls while giving them the courage to face the challenges of adolescence.

Gayle Pitman is a psychology and women’s gender studies professor at Sacramento City College. She’s also a children’s book author, and has written several books published by Magination Press, focusing on LGBTQ issues for children. Her latest book is called “Feminism: A to Z.” It’s a hands on introduction for teens and tweens who are interested in learning about feminism. Welcome, Dr. Pitman.

Gayle Pitman: Hi. Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton: So your latest book, “Feminism A to Z.” I’m interested to hear what this book is about and who it’s for.

Gayle Pitman: It is exactly what it sounds like. It’s feminism from A to Z. It’s intended as a book for teenagers and potentially older tweens. It’s kind of in that ballpark depending on how mature the child is. Basically giving kids an introduction to the world of feminism. And I structured it as an A to Z by chapter. So each chapter has a focus that’s organized by letters. So like for example, the first chapter is called “A is for anger.” And it outlines the reasons why girls and women might be angry about the various injustices that have been committed against them over the centuries, really, as well as how women and girls who are angry are perceived. Right, like anger and femininity tend not to go together, at least in our culture. So that’s the focus for that chapter. And then each chapter also has a history focus, focusing on some element of women’s history or feminist history or what have you. And then there’s an activity called “try this.” So it really gets kids into action – kind of out of their heads and into their hands and heart if you will and finding ways to take action in their own lives. So, it’s really intended for a teenage audience, although you could scale it up or scale it back depending on the journey of the child.

Audrey Hamilton:  I was just going to say I imagine this is difficult because for teenagers and the kids that age, they’re very much in their own heads and in their own worlds, right? That is what is most important to them. So I’m curious to know why you thought that it’s important to bring the message of feminism to a group like that?

Gayle Pitman: Right. Well, I teach women and gender studies at Sacramento City College and so a lot of my students at 18, 19, 20-years old, sometimes older than that. And I think that’s usually the age where girls and women start to learn about feminism, start to become more aware. And yet I think that if girls were introduced to some of the concepts of feminism earlier that that could really help them weather the storms of adolescence. Because I think that not only there are the physical and cognitive changes that happen during adolescence, there’s also kind of a level of awareness that teens start to get. An awareness that the world may not be what they thought it was when they were children. They become more aware of sexism and racism and homophobia and transphobia and other types of injustices and yet they may not necessarily – they have the cognitive tools to understand it intellectually, but they may not necessarily have the emotional tools or the maturity to be able to navigate those kinds of realities. And I think that feminism can offer a set of tools, if you will, to help them wrap their heads around this in their own lives. So that’s really why I decided to write the book.

Audrey Hamilton:  Is there research out there to show that young girls, teenagers are more likely to identify as feminists than older generations and do their ideas of feminism line up with older generations’ ideas of feminism?

Gayle Pitman: Right. So there’s really two questions there, right? Are millennials likely to call themselves feminists and why or why not, depending – and if they do, do their ideas of feminism line up with other generations?

And so what I’ve seen in the research – and I haven’t seen anything like super recently – but what I’ve seen over the years is that generally, the further away we get from like the 1960s, 1970s era of feminism, the less likely we tend to see girls and women identifying as feminists. There was a bit of a blip during the nineties, which a lot of people refer to as the “third wave of feminism,” although there’s lots of people who don’t like wave models necessarily and there’s some discussion of that in the book.

I think that especially for millennials they’re a generation that’s kind of caught between a rock and a hard place and what I mean by that is that they are growing up in an era where they have more rights than ever before, right? Like they have the right to go to school. They have the right to learn how to read. They have the right to open up their own checking account. Things we just take for granted, which a couple of generations ago was not necessarily the case. And so there’s all of these things that you know show that hey, we’re equal. We have succeeded and we have arrived. And yet, obviously we can look around our culture and see that we still have a long way to go. And so because of that I don’t think that most teens and young adults today identify with like old school kind of feminism of the 70s and I think that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of feminism. They think of like holding banners and marching – uh, I don’t know, burning their bras, which interestingly is a myth. It never happened.

Audrey Hamilton:  Is it really?

Gayle Pitman: Yeah. It was basically a form of propaganda that was you know, was flooded throughout the media to convince people not to be feminists. And it worked because you still hear that phrase today. So, I think that’s what a lot of girls and young women think of when they think of feminism.

And one of the things that I do with my students on the first day of class, in my psych of women class, is ask them to write down what words come to mind. We do sort of like a free association activity. What words come to mind when they hear the word feminist? And it’s so fascinating because they’re all of these words that come up, some of which are empowering, some of which are really negative. And then we start to unpack the actual definitions of feminism and some of the different feminist philosophies. And that’s one of the things that the early chapters of “Feminism From A to Z” does is start to shine a light on the fact that there isn’t just one way to be a feminist. There’s a variety of different approaches to it. A variety of different theoretical perspectives depending on who you are, depending on your social location, depending on a variety of different things. And once students start to recognize that, then they’re much more likely to buy into it.

But, I think it’s the label. Like, I think it’s something about the word that kind of makes girls – makes millennials in particular say oh no, that’s not me, that’s something different.

Audrey Hamilton:  Right. So in this age of social media, girls are also getting I would say very mixed messages about what’s okay to share, what’s the right way to do things? But it’s also easy for them to connect with each other. You know, find other people who share their views. How do you think social media is shaping the feminist movement now among younger generations or is it hindering the movement?

Gayle Pitman: You know, I hear a lot of people say that millennials are not very politically active. Right, like they don’t care about politics. They don’t stay on top of social issues, etc. And I, I don’t know maybe I live in a bubble with my students, but I would disagree. I would say that they pay attention differently than previous generations did and that a lot of their activism stems from social media. I mean I think for example about the Black Lives Matter movement, which isn’t necessarily a feminist movement, although there’s a feminist intersection there. That started as a twitter hashtag. I mean, that was an act of – that was a form of social media activism. We think a number of years ago about the occupied movement. That also started on social media. The March on Washington after the election where women across the country were knitting pink hats, pink pussy hats. That started as a social media trend. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for activism and connecting that way using various social media platforms.

The downside that I see is that there’s something very powerful about like people physically getting together and having a conversation in real time that’s not hindered by technology and I don’t know, I think it’s a little early to tell whether or not it is social media and technology in general is a hindrance to that. I just see a lot less personal engagement in that way. There’s a lot of online engagement – technology infused engagement, but in terms of face-to-face, like boots on the ground type of organizing, and even just brainstorming and you know just sharing, sharing of everyone’s narratives and life stories, I think that that’s, it remains to be seen I think how social media impacts that process.

Audrey Hamilton:  Your work also focuses on educating students on LGBTQ history. One of your other Magination Press books “When You Look Out the Window.” Can you talk a little bit about that book, what it’s about and why do you think it’s important for parents and educators to teach children these stories?  

Gayle Pitman: Right. So “When You Look Out the Window” is a picture book biography about lesbian activist couple Phillis Lyon and Del Martin who if you live in the San Francisco bay area, like almost everybody knows who they are because they are just iconic. But if you live outside of that area, lots, there’s people within the LGBTQ community who may know who they are and what their contributions are, but I would say that the vast majority of people are just completely unfamiliar with their activism. And the reality is that they, I think in many ways launched the LGBT movement back in the 1950s. When we think about Stonewall, the Stonewall riots as kind of the beginning of the modern day LGBT social justice movement. But, if you go back a couple of decades earlier back to the 1950s when Phillis and Del met and then moved in together and started their activist journey, the landscape was very harsh. I mean it was the post-war era. It was the era of McCarthyism and the red scare and fear of anyone who was potentially communist or different or leftist or not mainstream in any way, whatever way. And that was the environment that Phillis and Del were living in in San Francisco. And instead of hiding or instead of kind of staying under the radar, they were out and loud and proud and you know, just like pounding the pavement until Del died in 2008.

And so I think that their story is really powerful and that is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this. And the other thing, kind of going to your second question is that I worry a lot that these narratives, if they don’t get written down or if they don’t get passed down in some way, shape or form that they’re going to get lost. There’s lots of LGBT history that’s already been lost, largely because LGBT people typically don’t live in families with other LGBT people. They’re kind of in isolation and have to find community in some way. So there isn’t that kind of natural, passing down of stories. That kind of oral tradition, that oral narrative that you see say in communities of color or other marginalized groups where people have shared identities. In the LGBT community, that’s a much more difficult kind of process. So if people aren’t writing these down and recording them in some way, it’s easy for those stories to get lost.

I’m seeing it already in my classroom. When I teach about sexuality and gender, lots of my students don’t know anything about the Stonewall riots, they’ve never heard of Phillis Lyon or Del Martin, they didn’t know about McCarthyism and the red scare. Increasingly and this is really scary to me considering that this is within my own lifetime, there’s lots of students are unaware about the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and the ways in which the government did or didn’t intervene to try to prevent further deaths from happening. And so when they learn of this, they number one become surprised, and then number two, really angry, especially my LGBTQ identified students. I mean, the first question they’ll ask is how come nobody ever taught us this? This is unbelievable. And I think it’s a symptom of a larger problem, of history not necessarily getting passed down. And I think a great place to start is with children.

Audrey Hamilton:  This is kind of just a side question but I’m curious, you’re a psychologist, you’re a college professor. Tell me how you’ve gotten involved in writing children’s books?

Gayle Pitman: That’s a fair question.

Audrey Hamilton:  What was it about children’s books that – and I think you touched on that a little bit just now, but like you said, passing down these stories to children is somewhere to start.

Gayle Pitman: Yeah. Right, it’s actually good that you asked that question because my path in writing children’s books is kind of a twisty and turning one. So I have a friend outside of my academic work in psychology and all of that who’s a children’s author and illustrator and she was an academic in children’s writing and creative writing at a university. And she at some point in her career decided to step back from academia and do her writing and illustrating full-time and also launch writing classes.

So, she had just moved to Sacramento. She was launching her very first class. She was trying to drum up business. I ran into her one day. She was telling me about her class and she basically twisted my arm and I’m not fabulous at saying no so I said yes and then afterwards I was like “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I said yes to this. I can’t do this. I don’t have time. Blah, blah, blah.”

But, oh my gosh, this class was unbelievable. It was so much fun. It just opened up a whole different area of my brain, I guess you could say. A whole different form of creativity and once I started doing that type of writing and then getting a sense of the landscape of kids’ books and seeing what was there but also what wasn’t there, like who wasn’t being represented in children’s books and what wasn’t being written about that I got even more motivated to start focusing my energy in that direction.

Audrey Hamilton:  Well great. Dr. Pitman, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure.

Gayle Pitman: Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton:  Thanks for listening. Make sure you check out our other episodes of Speaking of Psychology and please subscribe if you haven’t already. We are a proud member of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue. You should check that out if you want to hear about the latest and most exciting psychology research.If you are interested in the practice of psychology, be sure to listen to Progress Notes. Topics include how health care policy and social media affect practicing psychologists. You can find those podcasts on iTunes and Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website to listen to even more episodes and gather more resources on the topic we discussed. Thanks for joining us. I’m Audrey Hamilton with the American Psychological Association and this is Speaking of Psychology.