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This analysis of 50 French and Norwegian women in high positions of leadership stresses how gendered relations structuring private and professional lives will vary in different cultures according to their socio-historical contexts. The specific contexts of two Western European democracies, France and Norway, reveal a number of differences impacting on the careers and the construction of the personal and social identities of women leaders. Interviews were held with French women who (a) assumed pioneering leadership positions in the 1970s (n = 10) and (b) who followed in the 1980s (n = 20) and with Norwegian women leaders (n = 20). Sixty percent of the total sample had held posts as cabinet or subcabinet ministers. Illustrations from their narratives, collected through semistructured interviews about their personal and professional itineraries, are used to discuss a number of questions from a comparative cultural perspective: the sense of double marginality, extraneity, lack of entitlement and vulnerability; role-model legitimation; feminism and the women's movement; political parity/mixity; gender consciousness and solidarity; and family and female-male interactions.

Gordon Allport's account of the development of social psychology in the 1954 Handbook of Social Psychology became, de facto, a standard or official historical reference for researchers and apprentices. His history also provided the field's ontological center point with a definition of social psychology that would become predominant. The revised and updated chapter appeared posthumously in 1968, was then reprinted (lightly edited) in 1985, but was removed from the 1998 Handbook. In 1966, Allport prepared a parallel evaluation of six decades of the history of social psychology, for a conference on graduate education in social psychology. This paper was critical of “elaborate mendacious experimentation” and ended with a plea for an interdisciplinary cross-cultivation. It was rarely cited. Ironically, it was Allport's “official” history, his justificatory Handbook account, that often was used for graduate mentoring rather than the more critical history, specifically written to address issues of graduate education. Other “official” Handbook historical chapters that succeeded Allport's displayed less breadth of geographical and transdisciplinary coverage and offered a shorter temporal, more presentist, and more selective personalist historical perspective. In contrast to more contextualist accounts, these Handbook chapters are constrained in a number of ways that raise questions about the success, functions, and professional consequences of such “official” histories, and who should write them. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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