Abstract
Carolyn Wood Sherif (1922-1982) was a prominent American social psychologist and expert on the psychology of women. Her biography is important in part as a study of how second-wave feminism altered the professional lives of female academics during the 1960s and 1970s. After years of invisibility, despite her co-authorship of the classic Robbers Cave experiment, it was only in the 1960s that she began to receive recognition as a psychologist in her own right, independent of her husband and collaborator, Muzafer Sherif. Her own writings, some published after Muzafer Sherifs health problems forced his retirement, continued their joint endeavors in the social psychology of attitudes and elucidated fundamental aspects of gender, viewed as a sociological category. The rise of Carolyn Wood Sherifs career, like that of many other academic women throughout history, was initially thwarted by a problem of overshadowing. This thesis explores the reasons for the emergence of such a woman from her husband's professional shadow.
