The links among gender, social science, and social reform in the Progressive Era have been well documented by historians (e.g., Furner, 1975; Leach, 1980; Silverberg, 1998). These scholars have considered the ways in which the formalization and institutionalization of the social sciences in this period gradually forced an artificial divide between the reform-oriented work of (often) female social scientists and the university-based “scientific” work of (often) male social scientists. By the late 1960s, concurrent with the rise of second wave feminism in the United States, explicitly feminist social sciences such as feminist psychology and feminist sociology emerged as recognized academic subfields even as they struggled to defend their scientific status in an era in which the boundaries between social science and popular movements for social justice were even more rigidly drawn. In this paper I examine several ways in which feminist social scientists in this period attempted to use their research to change social conditions and national policies affecting women, and the challenges they faced as women and as scientists in doing so.

I draw specifically on the rise of social science research on violence against women in the 1970s to explore these challenges. As several historians have documented, after a brief period of attention drawn to family violence and wife-beating by reformers in the mid-late 1800s (sometimes allied with the Social Purity and Temperance Movements; see Breines & Gordon, 1983; Davis, 1991; Pleck, 1987), the framing of “violence against women” as a social problem would not emerge again until the 1970s. When it did, feminist social scientists turned their attention, and the tools of science, to the issue. As activist scientists working from inside the academy, what did they see as the relationship between their work and the work of social reform? What were the relationships (if any) between grassroots activism and academia? What role did professional/scientific associations, such as the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association, play in brokering social science research to policy makers? In this paper, I explore these questions in the period up to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 to elucidate the ongoing complexity of navigating the science-policy relationship.