Copyright American Psychological Association

Introduction:
Feminist Therapy—Not for
Cisgender Women Only

F eminist therapy came into existence toward the end of the 1960s. Its
appearance coincides with the second wave of feminism in the United
States and initially reflected the concerns raised by that movement. Its early
adherents were psychotherapists, primarily women, who transformed
their protests against sexism in the mental health professions into the
development of a viable alternative for women seeking psychotherapy, one
in which clients would not encounter the sexism, misogyny, and stereo-
typing that were ubiquitous in the mental health field until then. Femi-
nist therapy is a theory that derives its inspiration and wisdom from an
in-depth interrogation of standpoints that are unavailable to the domi-
nant culture simply because they have been relegated to the margins—
the standpoints of European American women; people of color; lesbian,
gay, and bisexual people; gender-variant people, such as transgender
and gender-queer people; poor people; displaced workers; people with

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0000092-001
Feminist Therapy, Second Edition, by L. S. Brown
Copyright © 2018 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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FEMINIST THERAPY

disabilities; and immigrants and refugees. Feminist practice is psychology

derived from the realities that lie outside, beneath, and at variance from
the visions of the dominant patriarchal mainstream. It is a theory that
not only listens to but privileges the voices and experiences of those who
have been defined as “other” by dominant cultures. It is an integrative
and competency-based paradigm that perceives human beings as respon-
sive to the problems of their lives, capable of solving those problems, and
desirous of change. It is also a politically informed model that observes
human experience within the framework of societal and cultural realities
and through the dynamics of power informing those realities.
Feminist therapy does not simply study the “other” to offer a neutral
perspective on that experience. Rather, what is inherent in feminist ther-
apy is the radical notion that silenced voices of marginalized people are
potentially the sources of the greatest wisdom. This is a liberatory shift-
ing of the value of knowledge claims from those of culturally appointed
experts to the expertise of the oppressed. This perspective, when made
central to analysis and practice, is potentially transformative of everything
about therapy as generally practiced. In feminist practice, the margins
become a new center epistemically and conceptually.
In the 5 decades since therapists began to use the term to describe their
work, feminist therapy has evolved significantly from its roots as a psycho-
therapy for women that functioned primarily as a corrective against the
sexist treatment approaches of the era (Rawlings & Carter, 1977; Rosewater
& Walker, 1985). It has developed into a sophisticated postmodern, lib-
eratory, technically integrative model of practice that uses the analysis of
gender, social location, and power as a primary strategy for comprehend-
ing human difficulties (Brown, 2006b, 2016). It has become a practice
that encompasses work with people of all genders (Baird, Szymanski, &
Ruebelt, 2007; Levant & Silverstein, 2005; MacKinnon, Bhatia, Sunderani,
Affleck, & Smith, 2011; Szymanski & Hilton, 2013), children, families of
every sort (Silverstein & Goodrich, 2003), and larger systems, standing in
continuous challenge to all newly emerging disempowering dynamics in
the culture of psychotherapy and in the larger society.
Feminist therapists, who were once exclusively women, now include
people of all genders among their ranks (Brown, 2006b; Levant &

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INTRODUCTION

Silverstein, 2005; Singh & Burnes, 2011). Feminist constructs of what

constitutes good psychotherapy practice, such as the use of written
informed consent to treatment that outlines the rights of the client (Hare-
Mustin, Marecek, Kaplan, & Liss-Levinson, 1979), are no longer seen as
radical challenges to therapist authority but rather as foundational to
ethical practice for all psychotherapists. Many feminist innovations have
become integrated into mainstream models of client rights and psycho-
therapist responsibilities (Ballou, Hill, & West, 2008), although more often
than not, feminist therapy’s role in instituting a phenomenon is taken
for granted today, just as the radical roots of a signed consent to psycho-
therapy have be-come invisible.
Because of its name, feminist therapy is often misunderstood as
being only about cisgender women. This is due to unfounded stereotypes,
assumptions, and implicit biases about feminists and feminism arising
from reactions in the popular culture that are present in both profession-
als and laypeople against progressive social change agents and critical dis-
course about gender. It is not uncommon for professionals not to think
of themselves as feminist therapists because of their uninformed negative
associations with the concept of feminism, only to discover that their core
values about how to practice psychotherapy are best defined by feminist
therapy (Swing, 2007)—and to have their beliefs about feminism and femi-
nists changed in the process.
Feminist therapy has gone through a number of significant transfor-
mations and developments on its way to its current incarnations. However,
what remains as true today about feminist practice as at its inception in
the midst of the social movements of the 1960s is its central focus on and
attention to dynamics of interpersonal and personal power both in and
outside the therapy office. What has also remained a constant in feminist
therapy is that it situates the psychotherapy experience within the broad
social and political contexts informing constructions of gender, power,
and powerlessness. Therapy is construed as happening not solely during
the session or in the consulting room but is linked to the events of daily
life and to the politics of power, privilege, and disempowerment that are
inherent, overtly and subtly, in all of the cultures in which feminist thera-
pists practice.

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Feminist therapy first emerged from the consciousness-raising (CR)

groups of the second wave women’s movement as a commentary on
women’s experiences in therapy and the implications of sexism for women’s
psychological well-being. CR has the same place in feminist therapy that
the concept of the unconscious has in psychodynamic formulations—that
is, as the core construct from which all practice has grown, and around
which practice continues to center.
Today, feminist therapy continues to be founded theoretically in a
close and careful analysis of the meanings and contributions of gender
and other aspects of intersectional identity such as culture, phenotype,
social class, sexual orientation, national origin, and age, both to norma-
tive identity development and life trajectories as well as to the etiologies of
distress and dysfunction. Consciousness continues to be raised by feminist
practice, although the strategies for doing so in the therapeutic context
may little resemble those of the CR groups of the 1960s, just as psycho-
dynamic practitioners are not likely to use abreaction as the road to uncov-
ering of unconscious material as Freud did in his first years of developing
psychoanalysis. However, as a theory, the most important change that has
occurred in nearly 5 decades is that feminist therapy has moved from a
sole focus on women and gender to become a more inclusive multicultural
model of practice for work with all people that starts its analyses of power
and powerlessness at the location of discourses of gender (Brown, 2013).
Feminist therapy can be defined as follows:

The practice of therapy informed by feminist political philosophies

and analysis, grounded in multicultural feminist scholarship on the
psychology of women and gender, which leads both therapist and
client toward strategies and solutions advancing feminist resistance,
transformation and social change in daily personal life, and in rela-
tionships with the social, emotional and political environments.
(Brown, 1994, pp. 21–22)

Each part of this definition is important. The insistence on the use of

culturally competent knowledge claims, the centering of feminist therapy
and theory in feminist politics, the attention to the transformative effects
of the therapeutic process both on clients and on therapists, and the shared

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INTRODUCTION

and separate contexts for those parties—each is a necessary component

of engaging in a psychotherapy that is feminist. The project of feminist
therapy is one of subversion as a strategy for effecting growth and healing
for people in distress (Brown, 1994, 2004, 2006b, 2007, 2008). Subversion
is a concept that broadly represents the psychotherapeutic strategies by
which therapist and client, working together collaboratively, use the tools
of psychotherapy to undermine the internalized and external patriarchal
realities that serve as a source of distress and as a brake on growth and
personal power for all humans. In the feminist lens, psychotherapy is itself
construed as a potential component of systems of oppression. Therapy as
usual operating in the absence of an analysis of gender and power, prac-
ticed in ways that can actively or inadvertently uphold problematic status
quos and reinforce hierarchies of value inherent in dominant cultures can
enable systemic forms of oppression. Feminist analysis teaches that one
is either part of the problem or part of the solution, never an allegedly
neutral bystander to systemic oppression. Consequently, in feminist therapy,
almost every taken-for-granted aspect of business as usual for a therapist,
from where the office is located to how diagnosis is done to how thera-
pist and client relate both within and outside of the office and the therapy
session, is analyzed, questioned, and challenged with the tools of feminist
theory, with the goal of making psychotherapy not only nonoppressive but
actively liberatory.
Patriarchies are the near-universal hierarchical social systems in which
attributes culturally associated with maleness are privileged and those
associated with female experience are denigrated (Lerner, 1993), no matter
the sex of the individual in whom these qualities are found. Systemic patri-
archy is identified by feminist therapy and theory as the primary source of
human distress, including those kinds of distress that are organized into
diagnostic categories and labeled psychopathology by the mental health
disciplines. The actual distress or behavioral challenges about which
an individual initiates therapy is thus seen not as pathological per se,
no matter how much it impairs a person’s functioning, but most likely
a response to being immersed in toxic patriarchal realities. Such toxic
social hierarchies of value are construed as inherently inimical to per-
sonal power and healthy functioning for all people, even those apparently

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privileged by patriarchal norms of dominance and hierarchy. Feminist

therapy, while viewing all psychotherapies as inherently political due to
their participation in sustaining such oppressive norms (even via pas-
sive disengagement from an analysis of those norms), actively positions
itself as having a political impact in the direction of social change at the
location of the individual or system presenting for therapy.
By this, feminist therapy means that its practitioners actively seek first
to understand and then to undermine the intrapsychic representations
of patriarchal systems in human consciousness that act as in-dwelling
agents of oppression in most people. People self-objectify and self-oppress
because they have been psychologically colonized by patriarchal norms and
beliefs. Feminist therapists accomplish this overarching goal of psycho-
therapy as a tool for liberatory social change at the individual level by ana-
lyzing gender, power, and social locations or intersectional identities as
strategies for comprehending how and why a person feels distress or
behaves in ineffective or dangerous ways. This analysis of the emotion-
ally colonizing effects of patriarchy is also integrated into understanding
the psychotherapeutic process itself, so that every component of therapy
potentially challenges patriarchal norms.
Feminist therapy’s theoretical origins can be found in several political
movements that are all subsumed under the rubric of feminism. It situ-
ates philosophically within the larger rubric of critical psychology (Fox
& Prilleltensky, 1997; Morrow & Malcoe, 2017), which includes a group
of theories, such as liberation psychology (Duran, Duran, Brave Heart, &
Yellow Horse-Davis, 1998; Martín-Baró, 1986, 1994; Comas-Díaz, 2012),
multicultural psychology (Comas-Díaz, 2000, 2006b, 2008, 2012; Comas-
Díaz & Greene, 2013), and narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990). All
of these theories are located epistemologically and methodologically at
the margins of logical positivist empiricism in psychology. They share a
critique of those professional cultures’ assumptions about health, distress,
normalcy, and the nature of the therapist–client relationship. The scien-
tific scholarship of feminist psychology, which has developed in tandem
with the creation of feminist practice, has, over time, become an impor-
tant source of information informing feminist theory and practice. That
science is itself a challenge to normative assumptions about the creation of

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knowledge claims, relying on multiple methodologies in which the voices

and experiences of participants as knowers of experience are privileged
through participatory methodologies (Ballou, 1990; Weiss & Fine, 2004).
Feminist practice also draws on knowledge sources not always valued
in the world of psychology, including autobiography, literature, the arts
(Comas-Díaz, 2012), and social sciences such as anthropology and critical
historical theory concerned with understanding cultural and historical
roots of patriarchy. Feminist psychotherapy practice is interdisciplinary,
encompassing the work of people of all genders from all of the disciplines
delivering care for people’s psychological well-being. It continues to be
influenced by emerging developments in the social justice movements for
women’s and human rights from which it originally sprang, as well as by
changes in the overtness and toxicity of patriarchal realities in the psycho-
social environment.
Because the word feminist is assumed by many people to apply only
to women, professionals and laypeople alike frequently think of femi-
nist therapy to be both by and for women only, or even for feminist
women only. In its original incarnation, this would have been an accurate
appraisal; almost every initial adherent to this model was a woman, and
the early years of feminist therapy are marked entirely by an attention to
women’s special needs in psychotherapy (Greenspan, 1983; Rawlings &
Carter, 1977; Rosewater & Walker, 1985). This is no longer the case: Femi-
nist therapy is practiced by people of all genders, with every possible type
and configuration of client (Ballou, Hill, & West, 2008; Brown, 2006b;
Enns, 2004; Levant & Silverstein, 2005).
Feminist therapy, unlike many other theories of therapy, does not have
an identifiable founding parent or parents who created it. It is a para-
digm developed from the grassroots by many feminists practicing psycho-
therapy in all of the various mental health disciplines, and its beginnings
occurred in the context of many people’s experiences and interactions in
personal, political, and professional settings. Because there has never been
a central authority, accrediting body, or founder, those who identify as its
practitioners do not always agree on the boundaries of what constitutes
feminist therapy. However, in recent years, some core theoretical precepts
appear to have gained consensus support, even as feminist therapies that

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reflect different flavors of understanding of those precepts and integration

with a number of other strains of psychotherapeutic thought continue to
emerge. Feminist therapy is an immensely diverse field, with its different
iterations and strands reflecting the multiplicity of trajectories through
which each feminist therapist and feminist therapy theorist has arrived at
her or his version of the theory.
This volume represents an attempt to synthesize feminist therapy’s
heritage and roots, theory, and modes of practice as they stand in the early
21st century. As a psychologist trained in a traditional Boulder model pro-
gram during the early 1970s, my standpoint on feminist therapy is largely
from within my own discipline and my own time frame, and this volume
will likely not adequately represent the work of feminist therapists who are
social workers, psychiatrists, nurses, and counselors, even though members
of each of these professions have contributed to the discourse on feminist
therapy practice and to my own understanding of that practice. My train-
ing as a clinical psychologist also affects my standpoint, which is different
from that of those trained in other disciplines of psychological practice.
Because it is being addressed in a separate volume in this series, this book
does not include an in-depth discussion of a particular school of femi-
nist practice, relational–cultural therapy (Jordan, 1997, 2010, 2018), which
has developed separately from and in parallel with other major streams
of feminist therapy thought and practice. The model of feminist therapy
described here is strongly influenced by multicultural and global feminism
and by the politics of the social justice movements of feminism, multi-
culturalism, and other similar movements working to transform society.

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