Abstract

Agoraphobia in women has often been associated with a restricted, "overly-feminine" sex role definition. We investigated whether assertiveness training from a female therapist would benefit agoraphobic women not only by teaching skills but incidentally by modeling a broader feminine gender role. Of 14 clients from an agoraphobic treatment program seven received assertiveness training as an adjunct to regular therapy. Sex role definition and assertiveness attitudes were measured with the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974) and the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule (Rathus, 1973), administered before and following a 7-week treatment period. All the agoraphobics initially had significantly lower Masculinity scores on the PAQ than did large normative samples. T-tests performed on the data indicated that the assertiveness group's Masculinity scores increased after treatment to the level of the normative samples, while the comparison group did not change. Results supported the clinical observation that many agoraphobic women have limited gender role definitions, and indicated that this limitation consists of a deficit of masculine traits rather than a surplus of feminine ones.