MEDNICK, MARTHA TAMARA SCHUCH

MEDNICK, MARTHA TAMARA SCHUCH (1929– ), U.S. psychologist and pioneer in the psychology of women. Mednick was born in New York City to working-class immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the City College of New York. In 1952 she joined her husband, Sarnoff Mednick, as a graduate student at Northwestern University, receiving a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1955. Mednick made a number of moves based on her husband's career, had two daughters, and did some collaborative work with him, first on a personality test and later on a measure of creative thinking. By the time of their divorce in 1964, Mednick was affiliated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Shortly afterward, she became a member of the psychology department at Howard University, was appointed a full professor in 1971, and remained there until her retirement in 1995.

Mednick was very important as a mentor and a pioneer in the psychology of women. In 1972, she co-edited with Sandra Schwartz Tangri a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues entitled "New Perspectives on Women," which she later expanded into the book Women and Achievement (1975). She helped establish and served as president of the psychology of women division of the American Psychological Association (1976–77) and was also president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (1980–82). Her research focused on race, class, and sex issues in the psychology of achievement. Many of her studies were published with students from Howard University and a list of these students reads like a Who's Who of African American women psychologists. Mednick received the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award from the Division of the Psychology of Women in 1988 for her teaching, mentoring, and scholarship in this field.

Mednick was also important in facilitating contact between American and Israeli feminist psychologists. With Marilyn Safir, a psychologist at the University of Haifa, and Dafna Izraeli, a sociologist on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University, Mednick organized the first international interdisciplinary congress on women held at Haifa University in 1981. The collection of papers from the first conference, entitled Women's Worlds (1985), highlighted research by Americans, Jewish Israelis, Palestinian, and Arab women.

bibliography:

M.T.S. Mednick, "Autobiography," in: A.N. O'Connell and N.F. Russo (eds.), Models of Achievement: Reflections of Eminent Women in Psychology, vol. 2 (1988), 245–59; G. Stevens and S. Gardner, The Women of Psychology, vol. 2 (1982).

[Rhoda K. Unger (2^nd ed.)]