The history of Psychology in critical key. Judgements and prejudices regarding the analysis of psychology in “women who attended University” in Argentina in the early twentieth century

Abstract

The historiography of psychology has incorporated at international levels, during the past decades, several critical perspectives that have questioned the use of the category “woman” as an universal, essencialist and non-historical fact. Simultaneously, the role of the discipline in the historical shaping of gender has been detected, and the normative and normalizing nature of it has served historically as the bearer of a speech of differences that has been scientifically legitimated. The present paper will offer an overview of these contributions and will exemplify such critical perspective in a given case. Specifically, it will show the connection between different lineage values in the theoretical developments regarding “psychology of university woman” in the beginning of the last century in Argentina.