The New Female Detective

What I have to say is simple enough: it is that the first genuine woman hero, previously depicted, may be found incarnated as the contemporary female detective in fiction. Starting in the 1970s, women detectives who were neither conventional nor committed to the safe and sure began to emerge in mystery narratives. Women detectives had been imagined before; but it was not until the list of books in print included more women sleuths than I could count that I felt a revolution had arrived. Like all women\u27s revolutions, it had been little noticed and noticed by the media only to be scorned. Not perfection; not even comfort, or acclamation, or absolute success marked the careers of these intrepid women. But there they were, for the first time in literature: female protagonists who did not conform to any female pattern yet devised, inscribed, or recommended

Mental Health Research in an Academic Setting

The goals of human research conducted by psychologists in an academic setting might seem at first glance as divergent as the varied interests of the individual researchers. While one concentrates on the relationships between motivational variables and simple learning, another investigates the conditions under which complex motor skills are acquired, another studies the effect of stress upon Rorschach performance, and still another attempts to devise some objective measure which can discriminate between individuals characterized by low and high achievement needs. There is, or at\u27 least should be, a goal common to all psychological research, however, that being the establishment of a well-defined body of relationships sufficient in scope to allow for prediction of human behavior in the same fashion as the behavior of masses is predictable for the physicist given information regarding certain well-defined variables. It is my position then that all psychological research, if it is worth doing, has implications for mental health insofar as it contributes to the establishment of this body of relationships. It seems logical to assume that we will be able to understand, predict, and control aberrant behavior only after we can accomplish these ends in the realm of normal behavior. The science of astronomy came to understand and predict the aberrant of the solar bodies such as the eclipse of the sun or the appearance of a comet only after it had formulated the laws governing the normal or expected behavior of bodies in our solar system