The Women of Psychology

During the turn of the 20^th century, gender ideals were changing in America: women were becoming more educated and were influencing the decisions made about women’s places in the economy and politics, as they pressed on for independent rights. In opposition to these emerging rights were some men who continued to be frustrated by trying to be successful in the workforce, and felt threatened by some of the more powerful women in the society. Psychology, as a new discipline, was also feeling the effects of women striving for and acquiring a competitive edge in the workforce. Often times, women in science would make a significant contribution to their field, but would go unrecognized or their work would be regarded as unimportant (Minton, 2000). Psychology was no exception, and three women pivotal to the development of psychology as a discipline were Leta Stetter Hollingworth, Helen Thompson Woolley, and Mary Whiton Calkins.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth was born in 1886 in Nebraska, where she endured a difficult life, raised by her father and grandfather, as her mother had passed away during childbirth. Nevertheless, she achieved an outstanding academic record in her studies, and upon graduation from high school, she entered the University of Nebraska, at the age of sixteen. While there, she continued her reputation as an accomplished student, pursuing the studies of Literature and the English Language, and it was here that she also met her future husband. Soon after graduation from the university, she was offered a teaching job at a local public high school, where she taught Literature. It wasn’t long before she advanced to being the principal of the high school, and it was during this time that her colleagues could recall the remarkable concern she showed for her students.

After marrying her husband Harry, the two moved to New York where Leta began graduate work at Colombia University. However, her interest in studies changes, and she decided to leave literature and pursue sociology and education instead, and received her Masters in Education in 1913. Soon after that, she accepted a job at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives, where she administered Binet intelligence tests while beginning her doctoral work at Colombia, under Edward Thorndike. She received her Doctorate in 1916 and accepted a teaching position in educational psychology at Columbia Teacher's College where she worked until the end of her life, when she died in 1939. She continued to work at Bellevue at least one day a week and helped to establish the Classification Clinic for Adolescents where she later used it as a psychologist. She also dedicated her time to training clinical psychologists, and was the principal of the School for Exceptional Children.

Leta Hollingworth contributed work in the areas of women and sex differences, and work with adolescents, the mentally deficient, and the mentally gifted. While doing her graduate work at Colombia, she decided to examine the status of women in society seriously, which was probably impacted by how she viewed her own role as a woman in society. She wondered if women were viewed as inferior to men because of their biology or because they were victims of a male dominated social order. An assertion held at the time was that there was greater variability among men while women as a species were less variable. The fact that variability was measurable, inspired Hollingworth to devise an experiment. using infants, that would not be influenced by the environmental conditions that could account for variability differences in adults. Her results showed that there were no differences in variability between the sexes.

Her work with the mentally deficient and the mentally gifted is what she is most known for. She began doing research on the characteristics of mental deficiency and of special mental disabilities as part of her graduate work as well. She learned from working with "mentally defective" children that many of them had normal intelligence, but were suffering from adjustment problems, especially during adolescence, and wrote the following books describing her research findings with the children she studied: The Psychology of Subnormal Children, Special Talents and Defects, and The Psychology of the Adolescent, which became the leading textbook in the field for the next two decades, replacing the one written by G. Stanley Hall.

In the early 1920's Leta Hollingworth began her research on gifted children. She was concerned that the proper educational opportunities did not exist for them. She developed a process for working with gifted children that stressed the importance of maintaining contact with them everyday, identifying them early in life, not isolating them from other children and realizing that their needs were not being met by the regular school structure. Her first long- term experiment with the gifted involved a group of fifty children ages seven to nine with IQ's over 155 that were studied for a three- year period. The experiment served two purposes: first, to study as many aspects of these children as possible, including such things as their backgrounds and family circumstances, their psychological makeup, as well as physical and social and temperamental traits. The second purpose was to develop a curriculum that would prove beneficial to these exceptional children. Hollingworth continued to stay in contact with this group for the next eighteen years adding to her study the spouses and children of the original participants. Among her findings was the fact that many exceptional children suffered from adjustment problems due to two things: inept treatment by adults and lack of intellectual challenge. Often, adults ignored them because it was thought that these children were self-sufficient. The results of Hollingworth's studies served to dispel the myth that exceptional children were fragile, clumsy and eccentric (Benjamin, 1975).

Another important influence in the field of psychology was Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley. Woolley was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1874. Both her mother and her father were advocates of education for women and were very supportive of her academic interests. Woolley and her two sisters all attended college. After graduating from Englewood High School she enrolled at the University of Chicago. She is said to have been a remarkable student there. She received her undergraduate degree in 1897 and a Ph.D. in 1900 with studies focused on neurology and philosophy At the University of Chicago, she carried out the first major research concerned with the differences between men and women. Upon reviewing literature on the subject, she concluded that there were "marked inconsistencies, contradictions, and lack of data behind the conventional wisdom on sex differences" (Scarborough, 1987).

Such ideas were commonly used as justification for the exclusion of women from academia and professional roles, the "natural" reasons why women should stay within their domestic boundaries. Helen Bradford Thompson's work directly challenged these beliefs. Her research provided scientific data to support women's urgings for acceptance into the public domain. Her dissertation involved the first experimental laboratory study comparing mental traits of men and women. She conducted experiments in seven areas of mental functioning including motor ability, skin and muscle senses, taste and smell, hearing, vision, intellectual faculties, and affective processes. Her methods controlled for confounding variables and, and she avoided using averages that distorted distributions of data (Scarborough, 1987). Overall, she found wide individual variations among her participants, but found that men and women were astoundingly alike. When she did find differences, she demonstrated how environmental influences could account for them.

In 1911, Helen became director of the Bureau for the Investigation of Working Children, which was formed after the enactment of the Ohio child labor law in 1910. The child labor law gave the state legal control over children until the age of 17 and enabled the investigation of working children's development. Under the direction of Woolley, the bureau conducted a five-year study investigating the mental and physical differences between 750 children in school and 750 children who had left school to go to work at the age of fourteen Basically, she found that education can increase children's IQ, and that children benefit from being in school in this way.

Woolley appealed to national groups of educators, social workers, and vocational guidance personnel, as well as congress to pass revised compulsory school attendance and child labor law for Ohio. The findings of her research made obvious important contributions to the area of child development. She spent the last 17 years of her life invested in her daughter Eleanor, at her home in Pennsylvania before she died in 1947.

The third influential female psychologist discussed here it Mary Whiton Calkins. Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1863 to a family that strongly encouraged the education of its children, especially the study of languages and cultures. It has been said though that Calkins’ father distrusted the traditional educational system and preferred boarding his children with French and German families. Calking did, however, graduate high school, and entered Smith College in 1885 at the sophomore level, where she chose to double major in the classics and philosophy.

During the following year Calkins also worked unofficially at the psychology laboratory at Clark University, where her interests in psychology began to develop. Although her degree was in philosophy, Calkins continued to pursue her desire to study psychology throughout her entire university career. And upon graduation from Clark University, she began teaching psychology at Wellesley in 1895 as an associate professor. She was later made a full professor in 1898, a position she held until she retired in 1927.

Mary Whiton Calkins was one of the first female pioneers in psychology. She was responsible for the creation of a method of memorization called the right associates method, and upon being accepted as a full professor at Wellesley College, she basically founded the psychology department there. She was the first female president of both the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1905, and the American Philosophical Association in 1918. She developed and promoted a more self-based psychological approach to understanding human behavior, even as behavioral psychology began to dominate the field.

The topics that she wrote on in psychology covered a wide range including dream research, animal consciousness, memorization, and more. In 1892 she presented a report on a dream study that she had worked on at the first meeting of the APA, to which the members there were highly impressed. Thirteen years later she was elected president of that same organization. In 1900, Calkins was finally able to publish her first article on her system of psychology of the self, a topic which had become her primary focus in the field. Over the next 30 years, Calkins continued to present, develop, and defend her theory of self-psychology, gradually moving more towards philosophy and away from the psychological trend towards behaviorism.

Her theory held, in contrast to behaviorist views then and now that the conscious self is of central importance in psychology. Calkins felt that her psychology could relate, if not directly but indirectly, to other models of psychology. As Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis was gaining popularity, she felt that self-psychology could interpret all of his discoveries, and she wrote, "self-psychology is finally at the core of every one of the psychoanalytic systems. Not only does the conscious ego play a role, if only a minor role, on the psychoanalytic stage, but even the unconscious closely studied turns out to resemble nothing so much as a dissociated self" (Benjafield, 1996). Calkins died in 1930 with two honorary degrees in the field of psychology: one from Columbia University, and the other from Smith College.

Leta Stetter Hollingworth, Helen Thompson Woolley, and Mary Whiton Calkins were three powerful and very influential women involved with the development of the discipline of psychology. All three contributed to different fields within the discipline that have meaningful and lasting effects on the way research is performed today, and how psychologists view the findings of that research. These women paved the way not only for other female psychologists, but for women pursuing the professions in general as well.

References

Benjafield, John G., (1996), A History of Psychology, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 76-

77.

Benjamin, L.T. Jr. (1975). The pioneering work of Leta Stetter Hollingworth in the

psychology of women. Nebraska History, 56, 493-505.

Minton, Henry L. (2000). Psychology and gender at the turn of the century. American

Psychologist, 55, 613-615.

Scarborough, E. & Furumoto, L. (1987). Untold lives: The first generation of American

women psychologists. New York: Columbia University Press.