'There will be narratives of female lives only when women

no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and stories of men."

---Carolyn Heilbrun, 1995

 Unfortunately, it wasn't until the feminist movement that real concern for women’s development began to interest scholars, which partly explains why there is a lack of research that specifically addresses women artists and issues of identity. In addition, beginning with Freud, theories of human development have traditionally been conceived in terms of male development, with female development either ignored or treated as an afterthought. Consequently, until very recently we knew little about female development, in that much of the theory of development has been written to describe male phenomena (Adelson and Doehrman, 1980; Gilligan 1979)

 Carol Gilligan (1979) has revealed that women were missing even as research subjects at the formative stages of social psychological theories. Therefore, the potential for bias on the part of male investigators was heightened by the tendency to select predominately or exclusively male samples for research. In addition, Belenky and Clinchy have revealed that:

This omission of women from scientific studies is almost universally ignored when scientists draw conclusions from their findings and generalize what they have learned from the study of men to lives of women. If and when scientists turn to the study of women, they typically look for ways in which women conform to or diverge from patterns found in the study of men. With the Western tradition of dividing human nature into dual but parallel streams, attributes traditionally associated with the masculine are valued, studied, and articulated, while those associated with the feminine tend to be ignored (1979: 6).

 Thus, we have learned a great deal about the development of autonomy and independence, abstract critical thought, and the unfolding of a morality of rights and justice in both men and women. We have learned less about the development of interdependence, intimacy, and contextual thought (Bakan 1966; Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1977, 1979, 1982; McMillan 1982).  Developmental theory has traditionally established men's experience and competence as a baseline against which both men's and women's development is evaluated, which has led to the misreading of women's experiences.

Various researchers have complained that concepts of autonomy, independence, and abstract achievement do not describe the focal issues of growing up female. For example, Gilligan's (1982) influential study of moral development showed that women conceptualize and experience the world "in a different voice," a voice that is more person centered and empathic, more emotionally connected and less abstract than the male voice. Men and women, concludes Gilligan, operate with different internal modes.

Where a dominant image for men is that of hierarchy, competition and autonomy, women respond to their lives through the images of the web, or concerns about connectedness or relationships to others. As a result of these fundamental differences, experiences such as achievement and affiliation are different for men and women, even though behavioral manifestations may look the same. In addition, Miller and her research group (Miller, 1984; Kaplan,1982; Klein, 1984) have posited the existence of a "relational self' in women that is central to their growth. "Development according to the male model overlooks the fact that women's development is proceeding but on another basis...women's sense of self becomes very much organized around being able to make and then to maintain affiliations and relationships" (Milter, 1976: 3).

Nancy Chodorow (1978), a feminist sociologist and practicing psychoanalyst has used object relations theory to explain how socially constructed gender roles have shaped the development of a woman's identity. She argues that women, because they are mothered by someone of the same sex, form a different inner patterning of relationships that prevents them from ever becoming as separate and autonomous as men.  She writes:

From the retention of preodipal attachments to their mother, growing girls come to define and experience themselves as continuous with other; their experience of self contains more flexibility or permeable ego boundaries. Boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation. The basic sense of self is connected to the world; the basic masculine sense of self is separate (1978: p. 169).

 All of these researchers share a growing recognition of the importance of relatedness to women and the necessity of finding some social psychological constructs to describe women's personal experiences of identity formation as distinct from mens.