2002 Carolyn Sherif Award Address: Gender, Race, and Generation in a Midwest High School: Using Ethnographically Informed Methods in Psychology

Abstract

Abigail Stewart Sherif Award Citation. For your exceptional contributions to feminist psychology, the Society for the Psychology of Women presents to you the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award. Your entire career has been marked by distinction; you have been as prolific in publishing as you have been in mentoring. You have illuminated women's lives, their personalities, their development, and their adaptation to change. You have advanced feminist theory, and your academic leadership has created the opportunity for students to do graduate work in feminist psychology. We honor you and your work with gratitude. In this essay I make two arguments. First, I argue for the value of ethnographically informed methods in psychology in general and particularly for the psychology of women. Second, I argue for the importance of the role of generation in psychology, perhaps particularly in the study of values and social identities. In advancing these arguments, I draw on evidence from an ongoing, ethnographically informed study of the graduates of a Midwestern high school in the mid-1950s and late 1960s. The two generations of graduates have distinctive accounts of their experiences, with the older generation's accounts consistent across gender and race, and the younger generation's accounts inflected by both race and gender. Differences in the form of generational identity in the two cohorts are discussed.