TRANSFORMING THEORY AND RESEARCH WITH WOMEN Themes and Variations

We look at some of the ways in which feminist theorists and researchers apply new insights to established topics in psychology, as they explore the landscape of the unknown and unspoken in the lives of girls and women. The articles in this special issue present research and reflections by a group of feminist scholars, some of us from the editorial board of the Psychology of Women Quarterly and others from the larger aca-demic community. Each contributor, selecting from a personal interest or expertise, reconceptualizes a topical area of psychology with the intent of reframing our understanding of its meaning, its impact on wom-en’s functioning, and/or its application to feminist research and theory. To provide a background, we review a sample of contributions of femi-nist thought to the contemporary revolution in science. We then ask the question: In what ways have feminist perspectives and scholarship transformed psychology in the particular areas addressed by these au-thors? Advances in conceptualization, theory, and method in research with women have produced some major upheavals in the field of psychology. Whether we view this movement toward application of feminist perspec-tives to psychological research as a reform or a revolution depends on ou