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Prominent Women in American Psychology The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman (Darwin). Darwin's professional assumption of the intelligence of women greatly exemplified the defining opinion of the day when psychology was in its developmental stages. However, many women went to great lengths to disprove and banish this thought. One such woman was Mary Whiton Calkins. Calkins is perhaps best known for becoming the first woman president of the American Psychological Association, a feat unheard of in her time. Unfortunately, the road to achieving this feat was paved with many obstacles and discriminating persons.
Mary Whiton Calkins was born on March 30, 1863. She was born in Buffalo, New York, to Wolcott Calkins, a Presbyterian minister, and was the eldest of five children. The family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, when Mary was seventeen and built a home there that she would live in until her death. Her father was fundamental to Marys education, designing and supervising her schooling, well aware of the sparse opportunities available to women. In 1882, she was allowed to enter into Smith College with advance standing as a sophomore.
Unfortunately, her sisters death in 1883 permanently influenced her thinking and the following year she stayed at home and received private lessons. She reentered Smith in the fall of 1884 as a senior and graduated with a concentration in classics and philosophy. In 1886, her family moved to Europe for sixteen months. Here, she was able to broaden her knowledge of the classics. After returning to Massachusetts, her father arranged for an interview for her with the president of Wellesley College. There, she was a tutor in Greek beginning in the fall of 1887 and remained in that department for three years.
Fortunately, a professor in the Philosophy department noted her talent for teaching and convinced her to consider the new field of Psychology. In order for Calkins to be able to teach Psychology, she had to study for at least one year in a Psychology program. However, she faced many problems reaching this goal. First, there were few Psychology departments in existence in 1890. Second, by being a woman, she was highly unlikely to be admitted to one of these programs. She was advised that the best chance she had to succeed was to study abroad.
She promptly dismissed this idea and began to look for other options. She seriously considered the University of Michigan, where she would be studying under John Dewey, and Yale, where she would be studying under G. T. Ladd.
However, these too were dismissed. She finally settled on Harvard, one of the few universities that boasted a laboratory. Calkins first introduction was a promising one. She had received a letter from William James and Josiah Royce stating that she could sit-in on their lectures on a strictly informal basis.
She contacted the president of Harvard expressing her desire to sit in on these lectures but was rejected on the grounds that her presence at these lectures would receive an angry reaction from the governing body at Harvard. In response, Marys father petitioned Harvard requesting that his daughter be granted admission to these lectures. The president of Wellesley College also wrote a letter on her behalf stating that she was a member of their faculty and this program was suited to her needs. Harvard finally approved the petition on October 1, 1890. However, it was noted that Miss Calkins was being afforded this privilege and was not entitled to registration and was not a student of the college. Ironically, when she arrived for her first lecture with James in the fall, she was the only person in the class.
This fortunate turn allowed her somewhat of a private tutoring session with one of Americas most prominent Psychologists. In addition to her lectures with James and Royce, she began studying experimental psychology under Dr. Edmund Sanford of Clark University. Mary Calkins returned to Wellesley College in the fall of 1891 as an Instructor of Psychology under the department of Philosophy. Her first year back, she established a psychological laboratory at the college.
In 1892, Calkins was once again allowed to sit-in on classes at Harvard, this time under Hugo Munsterberg in his laboratory while he was visiting the college. She conducted several experiments while under Munsterberg and invented the paired-associate technique. This was a suggested classification of cases of associations dealing with studying memory. Her technique was later refined by G. E. Muller and included in Titchners Student Manual, taking full credit for it himself.
Calkins continued her research under Professor Munsterberg until October of 1894, at which time Munsterberg wrote to the president of Harvard requesting that Mary be admitted as a candidate for the Ph. D. On October 29, 1894, Harvard refused. The following year, she presented her thesis, An experimental research on the association of ideas to Professors Palmer, James, Royce, Munsterberg, Harris, and Dr. Santayana. All agreed that she satisfied the requirements for her degree, but alas, it was denied.
In 1895, Calkins returned to Wellesley College and was named an Associate Professor of Psychology and Philosophy. She was promoted to Professor in 1898. She continued to do research and completed hundreds of papers that were published in both journals of psychology and philosophy. In addition, she wrote four books and essays concerning the religiousness of children and the philosophical treatment of time as related to causality and to space. Perhaps her most profound contribution to psychology was her system of self-psychology; as she called it, a reconciliation between structural and functional psychology. This field dealt with space and time consciousness, emotion, association, color theory, and dreams.
She held that the conscious self was the central fact of psychology (But 1). Her first basic definition of her psychology is as follows: All sciences deal with facts, and there are two great classes of facts-Selves and Facts-for-the-Selves. But the second of these groups, the Facts-for-the-Selves, is again capable of an important division into internal and external facts. To the first class belong percepts, images, memories, thoughts, emotions, and violations, inner events as we may call them; to the second class belong the things and the events of the outside world, the physical facts, as we may name them The physical sciences study these common and apparently independent or external facts; psychology as distinguished from them is the science of consciousness, the study of selves and the interfaces-for-selves. Mary Whiton Calkins when on to become president of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918 (Harrington). In a 1908 list of the leading psychologists in the United States, she was ranked twelfth.
In 1909, Columbia University bestowed a Doctor of Letters degree upon her and Smith College followed with a Doctor of Law degree in 1910. In 1928, she was made an honorary member of the British Psychological Association. However, she rejected an honorary Ph. D. from Radcliffe in 1902 based solely upon the sexist attitude that was still prevalent at Harvard.
Harvard still has not issued any degree in honor of Calkins and holds that if feels there is no reason to award the degree. Another notable pioneer in the area of women in psychology was Margaret For Washburn. Although not much is known of her earlier years, we do know that she was admitted into Columbia University as a hearer in 1891 (monadnock). While at Columbia, she was a student of James Cattle. In 1892, Washburn went to Cornell where she majored in psychology under E.
B. Titchener. She began her advanced study in psychology after graduating college and received her Ph. D. in 1894.
In 1912, she became a member of the council of the American Psychology Association. This was quite an honor considering that only three women were allowed to hold that position during the first forty years of the American Psychological Associations existence. In 1921, Washburn was named President of the American Psychological Association. She was also elected to the International Committee on Psychology and to the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1929. She also became only the second woman up until that time to be admitted into perhaps the most prominent scientific society in the United States, the National Academy of Sciences, in 1931.
She was considered by some as the most prominent woman in academic psychology. She taught philosophy and psychology at Wells College and published two books including one major textbook. She was active in organizational psychology's activities on regional, national, and international levels. She was highly motivated, had a strong positive self image, and had the important ability to fraternize with her colleagues. Washburn was confronted with a problem that many women still face today: to pursue a career or to devote her life to marriage.
She chose the former and established herself as a prominent member within the psychological community. She contributed such things as problems of social consciousness, problems of revived and ideated emotions, the role of movement in the development of mental life and work on animal behavior. She showed us that humans react to the conceived mental acts much like animals respond to the behavior of other animals. She also translated Wundts Ethical Systems (Harrington). Another prominent woman in American psychology that holds a place in history because of her first is Christine Ladd-Franklin. She was foremost a psychologist, a logician, a mathematician, and at times an aspiring physicist and astronomer.
However, unlike the previous two psychologists mentioned, Ladd-Franklin was surrounded by powerful and intelligent women. She was born on December 1, 1847 in Windsor, Connecticut, the oldest of three children to Eliphalet and Augusta (Niles) Ladd, who were both from colonial New England. Kitty, as she was sometimes known, also had two half-siblings from her fathers second marriage. As a toddler, Christine accompanied her mother and aunt to womens rights lectures, one of which was given by Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
Kitty's mother died when she was only twelve years old of pneumonia, at which time she moved to Portsmount, New Hampshire. There, she spent her adolescent years with her fathers mother. Ladd-Franklin received two years of her schooling from Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. While there, she followed the same course track as the boys who were preparing to go to Harvard and in 1865, she graduated as valedictorian of her class. Upon graduation, she entered Vassar College, against the wisdom of her family. However, she did convince her grandmother that an education was her best opportunity because of her slim chances at marriage.
She believed that women were of an overabundance in New England and her commonplace looks rendered her unlikely to marry. Her grandmother agreed. She entered into the second year at Vassar College in 1866, financially supported by her aunt. After only one year, she withdrew and took a teaching position in Utica, New York. During her year off from school, it is presumably said that she practiced piano, read in three or four languages, worked problems in trigonometry, and collected 150 botanical specimens. After one year of teaching, she returned to Vassar and completed her degree.
During the next nine years, she was an instructor of science and mathematics in secondary schools in several states. However, she wrote, Teaching I hate with a perfect hatred I shall not be able to endure it another year. She promptly applied to Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student. Unfortunately, Johns Hopkins was not traditionally open to women. However, James J. Sylvester, a contributor to Educational Times was familiar with her work and urged the university to admit her.
In 1878, she was admitted with the understanding that she would only attend his lectures. This was lifted one year later when acknowledgment of her work was shown and she was given the stipend of a fellow. However, the formal title fellow was withheld from her. She was also denied regular admission, having her name recorded by a special note rather than being on the traditional list of students.
Ladd-Franklin is perhaps best known for her theory of color vision (Ragsdale). She assumed a photochemical model of vision and postulated three stages of molecular differentiation, presumably associated with three stages of evolutionary development (Harrington). The paper resulting from this study appeared in the first ever volume of the American Journal of Psychology in 1887. During the academic year of 1891 - 92, her husband, Fabian Franklin took a sabbatical and she accompanied him to Europe.
Here, she was able to continue her vision research in the Gottingen laboratory of G. E. Muller. This feat, however, was not without obstacles. Women were not allowed to enroll at German universities and she was only accepted after her persistent requests for admission. Luckily for her, Muller was an accommodating man and repeated lectures for her individually for her that she was not allowed to attend.
After leaving her husband to care for their daughter in Gottingen, she traveled to Berlin and was admitted into the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz and the lectures of Professor Arthur Konig. It was rumored that she was admitted into these institutions only because the sense that foreign women were far less of a threat, since they would return home and not expect to teach in Germany. Ironically, after working with the three above mentioned men, Ladd-Franklin rejected both the three-color theory of color vision supported by Helmholtz and Konig, and the three opponent-color pairs theory supported by Muller. After completion of the equivalent of her Ph. D. , she requested a position at Johns Hopkins in 1893.
Only the year before, she had presented her color vision theory to the International Congress of Psychology in London. However, she was denied a lecturing position at Johns Hopkins and continued her independent work. From 1901 to 1905 she was an associate editor for logic and philosophy in Baldwins Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. Finally, in 1904, Christine was allowed to lecture one course per year at Johns Hopkins.
She retained this position for five years on a year-to-year basis. In 1910, her husband attained the position of associate editor of the New York Evening Post (he had given up his teaching position in 1895) and they left for New York. While in New York, she continued to lecture part-time at Columbia University from 1912 - 1913. She also lectured at Clark University, Harvard University, and in 1914, at the University of Chicago. Despite the opportunity to teach one or two positions at these prominent universities, these appointments were a struggle to obtain and she often lectured without pay.
In her mid-sixties, Ladd-Franklin began writing to E. B. Tichener, who was twenty years her junior, concerning his insistence on banning women from the meetings of his Experimentalists group. Naturally, she did not gain acceptance (Ragsdale).
In 1926, Christine Ladd-Franklin finally received the Ph. D. that she deserved from Vassar. At eighty-two years of age, on March 5, 1930, she died at her Riverside Drive, New York City home. Perhaps one of the best known names in American psychology is that of Karen Horney. Born Karen Clementina Theodora Danielson just outside of Hamburg on September 16, 1885, she was the daughter of a sea captain.
As one might expect, this left open the possibilities of many roads of development. Karens father was a deeply religious, zealous, uptight Lutheran that prompted his children to call him the Bible thrower because, according to Horney, he often did. Her mother was from an aristocratic family and was reportedly interested in fortune telling and secular heroes. Understandably, her parents had an unhappy marriage that was only compounded when her fathers four children from his previous marriage were around.
Remarkably, her parents did manage to stay together for twenty years. Horney's childhood is somewhat questionable. Although Horney claims that her father much preferred her older brother, Berndt, over her, her father managed to bring her gifts from all over the world and even took her on three long sea voyages, something quite unusual for sea captains to do in those days. Because of the deprivation of her fathers affections, she became quite attached to her mother and became as she put it, her little lamb.
At the age of nine, Karen changed her entire outlook on life. In her own words, If I couldnt be pretty, I decided I would be smart. She became ambitious and at times, even rebellious, not adhering very well to compromise. Also during this time, she developed somewhat of a crush on her brother. Embarrassed by her obvious attentions, he pushed her away. This rejection led to her first bout with depression problem that would plague her for the rest of her life.
In 1904, her mother (who was 19 years her husbands junior) divorced Karens father and left with her two children in tow. Two years later, she entered into medical school at the Universities of Frieburg and Gottingen, and Berlin, against the wishes of her parents and the opinion of polite society. While in school, she met Oscar (sometimes spelled Oskar) Horney and in 1909, the two married. Later, this marriage was thought of as a marriage of security. After all, not many men who had a Ph. D.
in political science and money were interested in marrying women who had the ambition that she did. Much like Freud predicted, she married a man that was quite like her father. In 1910, Karen gave birth to Brigitte, the first of three daughters. Following that, in 1911, her mother died. These two events put great strain on Karen as she prepared to enter into psychoanalysis. Worried that her daughters would rob her of her golden freedom and would not allow her true potential to surface, she left many of the parenting duties to her husband and Oscar spent much more time with the children (Sonoma).
Because of the likeness in personality that Oscar had with her father, Karen did not intervene when her husband disciplined her children. Rather, she considered it a good atmosphere for her children to encourage their independence. She also put all of her daughters in psychoanalytic treatment to advance their growth. The analyst often spoke of penis envy, which the girls did not comprehend. Years later, she changed her perspective on child rearing (Boeree). In 1923, Oscars business collapsed and he developed meningitis.
That same year, her beloved brother died of pulmonary infection at the age of 40. At this period in her life, she became so depressed that she swam out to a sea piling during a vacation with thoughts of committing suicide. In 1926, at the age of 41, Karen moved out of Oscars house. Four years later, she and her daughters moved to the United States, eventually settling in Brooklyn.
At this time, Brooklyn was considered an intellectual capital due to the influx of Jewish refugees from Germany. It was in Brooklyn that she was introduced and became friends with Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan. After the demise of her marriage, she had affairs with Hans Liberal, Erich Fromm (from 1931 -early 40 s), and had numerous affairs with students and clients that were much younger than her (Sonoma). Despite her many defeats in her personal life, she was quite successful in her professional life. In 1910, she entered into analysis with Karl Abraham, an experience that changed her life forever. However, at the end of analysis, she was still afflicted with chronic fatigue and depression.
She later commented that the biggest failure of her analysis with Abraham was the failure to deal with her compulsion to move in and out of relationships with men. She emerged in 1917 as a Freudian. Horney became a founding member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920. Her approach to treatment at this time was quite unusual: she had a sliding scale. She believed that a person should receive some treatment regardless of income and payment. After emigrating to the United States, she was invited to become the associate director of the newly founded Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in 1932, by Franz Alexander.
She later became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and in 1941, organized the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She served as dean for this organization until her death in 1952. She was also the founding editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (Paris). Horney is also well known for her associations with other psychologists, most notably, the Zodiac Five: Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, Abraham Kardiner, and herself.
Very little is know about this group other than many theorists in the area of psychology brought their ideas to this club to critique their theories. Horney was one of the biggest proponents of Freud's theory, but also one of its opponents. She tried to modify orthodox ideas about feminine psychology while still staying within the framework of Freudian theory. In addition, she tried to redefine psychoanalysis by replacing Freud's biological orientation with an emphasis on culture and interpersonal relationships.
She disagreed violently with Freud about penis envy, female masochism, and feminine development in her many essays. However controversial these ideas were when they first appeared, the soon were ignored until they were republished in 1967. Karen strove to show that women have their own biological constitutions and patterns of development separate of those of their male counterparts. She argued that psychoanalysis regarded women as defective men because it is the product of a male genius (Freud) and a male-dominated culture. To counteract Freud's penis envy, Horney developed womb-envy in which men are envious of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, the breasts, and suckling, which gives arise to an unconscious tendency to devalue women (Paris). Neurosis Feelings and attitudes Instinctual drives or object determined by culture relationships Driven by emotional Ego concept without initiative Compulsive drives but Compulsive drives but not Psychoanalysis Seeking self-realization Avoids self-realization Help from analysis to Love for the analysis Inner Conflicts Abilities to be a decent Repressed or repressing Man can change Disbelief in human goodness Chart adapted from web Horney also believed that parental influences and other socializing forces contribute substantially to how a childs personality evolves (1 w).
Horney did agree with Freud that children would hold in hostility toward their parents for fear of pushing their parents away (geocities). In addition, she developed her mature theory in which individuals cope with anxiety p...
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Research essay sample on Prominent Women In American Psychology
