Balancing Multicultural Competence With Social Justice

To identify a multivariate configuration of feminist beliefs best associated with optimal psychological functioning, 215 mostly White college women completed an online survey measuring their feminist beliefs (Feminist Perspectives Scale, Attitudes toward Feminism and the Women’s Movement, sense of common fate, and Feminist Identity Composite) and 13 measures of well-being with liberation, encompassing individual (e.g., well-being), interpersonal (e.g., egalitarianism), and societal (e.g., collective esteem) levels of analysis. A canonical correlation analysis revealed a significant multivariate association and yielded three distinct functions: established feminism (the strongest, most positive predictor) and its opposite (antifeminism), awakening feminism (negatively linked to individual well-being), and nonfeminist but woman-identified traditionalism (with some compromised well-being). The configuration of feminist beliefs that a woman holds, does not hold, and rejects makes a difference for her psychological functioning as well as for the roles counseling psychologists adopt to achieve multicultural competence along with social justice.