Women of Spirit: Leaders in the Counseling Profession

The counseling literature documents the profession's inception and growth in a variety of ways. Current examples include Counseling Today's "ACA Turns 50" feature series and "Passing the Tradition: ACES Presidents 1940-97" (Sheeley, 1997). Professional counselors often identify the late 1940s and early 1950s as the time of the profession's beginning. The Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) was founded in 1952, and the American Counseling Association (ACA) was founded in 1951. Thus, these organizations emerged prior to the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, yet there remains no formal documentation of the roles that women, and in particular female leaders, have played in these professional organizations. Leadership has historically been defined by the nature of the position held within a hierarchical system. An examination of one dimension of leadership, presidential terms, revealed that women had limited formal or recognized involvement during the early years of the counseling profession. In fact, the first 34 presidents of ACES were men. Although Mary Corre was the fourth president of ACA (Simmons, 2002), she was one of only five female presidents who served prior to 1980. Although women were not prominent in presidential roles, they most likely offered leadership through informal means. In this study, we considered a broader description of leadership that extended beyond the constraints of position. We used the framework of positional and nonpositional leaders described by Astin and Leland (1991) in their study of leadership within the women's movement. Positional leaders (i.e., leaders of people) were described as individuals who "head an organization or institution" (p. 8), and nonpositional leaders were identified as university professors and other researchers (i.e., leaders of ideas) who "create knowledge central to social change" (p. 9). This article features an initial effort to document and draw on the experiences of 10 women who have been leaders in the counseling profession. Our goal in conducting this inquiry was to explore their professional lives and interactions in order to identify the common threads from which the rich tapestry of leadership was woven. Relevant Literature What makes an individual a leader? Is it style, position, behaviors, or some combination thereof? Scholars have routinely sought answers to this question through an examination of the differences in roles, styles, or traits of male and female leaders (Eagly & Johnson, 1990). Many of these studies emanated from the "great man" theory of leadership (Kellerman, 1986). Proponents of this theory posited that leadership was a masculine phenomenon because great leaders (e.g., politicians, kings, philosophers, heroes) were male. Thus, because great leaders were male, leadership, by definition, must be characterized by male traits (e.g., decisiveness, authority, power). Not surprisingly, these lines of inquiry led to a period of gender stereotyping regarding the expected behaviors and styles of leaders. Men were viewed as natural leaders, whereas women experienced a double bind. In order to lead, an individual must exhibit competitiveness, dominance, and decisiveness; these characteristics are typically at odds with the cultural expectations of women (e.g., cooperation, submissiveness, and hesitancy). Women who attempted to adopt the "expected" leader behaviors were evaluated as "bitchy," "manly," or "difficult" (Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992) because they belied the expected gender role expectations. The characteristics customarily ascribed to women were in direct conflict with the characteristics associated with leadership. Since the mid-1980s, researchers have reported a range of findings. Large-scale studies indicated that effective female leaders were thought to be empathetic, supportive, nurturing, focused on relationship building, and willing to share (Eagly, Karau, & Makhijani, 1995; Wagensteen, 1997; Wajcman, 1998). …