Once behind the scenes, now in the fore

Women have made great advances, but they are still underrepresented in departments of psychology.

In 1900, few graduate programs accepted women or allowed them degrees. Today, the tables have turned dramatically. In psychology programs across the United States, more women than men are earning doctorates and, overall, women are playing a major role in psychology, both in academic and in nonacademic settings.

Women's success to date is due in part to the pioneering efforts of female psychologists in the early 1900s who overcame substantial barriers and discrimination to further the field. Christine Ladd Franklin, perhaps the first major American woman psychologist, was denied a degree from Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s, though she had earned it. Regardless, she later became one of the foremost theorists in color vision in America.

Another woman, Mary Whiton Calkins, was not allowed a psychology doctorate degree from Harvard, though she had earned it. Calkins had developed her own psychological theory called self-psychology. She invented the method of paired associates learning--the procedure in cued verbal learning where two syllables or words are paired together in learning and one of the pair is presented in recall, requiring the subject to produce the second of the pair. It was one of the fundamental learning methods of psychological research in verbal learning.

Calkins went on to head the psychology program at Wellesley College and in 1905 was the first woman to be elected APA president. She also served as president of the American Philosophical Association in the same year, something no other psychologist has achieved.

Cornell University was one of the few programs that did grant degrees to women. One woman, Edward B. Titchener's first doctoral student at Cornell, was Margaret Floy Washburn, who in 1894 was the first woman in America to receive a doctorate in psychology. Washburn later became head of the department of psychology at Vassar College and would become known for her book, "The Animal Mind" and for her motor theory of consciousness. She was also an editor of the American Journal of Psychology for many years and was elected APA president in 1921.

Behind the scenes

Because earning a degree did not guarantee a career in academic psychology for women, many opted for therapeutic and other nonacademic positions. For instance, Grace Fernald joined William Healy's Juvenile Psychopathic Institution in Chicago in 1909. Other women entered allied professions, particularly those dealing with child development. Some others were able to gain recognition through research projects and books written with their spouses. An example is Lois Barclay Murphy, who published with Gardner Murphy the influential "Experimental Social Psychology."

Others, like Leta Hollingworth, gained international reputations largely independently of their spouses' contributions. Still, the male spouse's career was typically considered first. By the time Leta Hollingworth received her doctorate in education in 1916, she had already written a book and several scientific papers. Involved in clinical work for many years, she is said to have been highly influential in the founding of the American Association of Clinical Psychologists in 1917.

Hollingworth later joined the education faculty at Columbia University and researched and wrote widely on developmental psychology. Her 1920 book, "Psychology of Subnormal Children" is a classic of its type, although she remains best known for her work on intellectually gifted children, particularly "Gifted Children," published in 1926.

Mary Cover Jones, another female psychologist who gained her degree in the 1920s, remains famous for her "Little Peter" experiment on the deconditioning of fear in an infant---an experiment patterned after the work of her mentor, John B. Watson. Its report is a founding document in what would later become behavior therapy. Jones contributed widely to the literature of developmental psychology, particularly adolescent psychology, often collaborating with her spouse, Harold Jones. She was also involved in the Oakland Growth Study and other significant programs on development. But like so many other degree-holding women of the time, she put her spouse's career above her own.

Progress

After World War II, the culture slowly began to change. Co-education had become the norm in the 1930s, and the granting of degrees to women became commonplace. Another major change after the war was an increased emphasis on clinical and developmental psychology. When APA reorganized in 1946, the association admitted a wide range of applied societies within its divisional structure. Those applied societies were more heavily female than the ranks of academic experimental psychology. As psychology has continued to shift toward social science and applied psychology, the numbers of women have continued to increase.

The names of women are found across all branches of psychology in this century and its leadership today. Among the contributors are Eleanor Gibson, Edna Heidbreder, Mary Henle, Carolyn Sherif, Florence Denmark, Anne Anastasi, Janet Taylor Spence and a legion of others.

With the growing success and acceptance of women in psychology, we must not forget, however, that there is still much to be done. While women are in the majority in terms of graduate and undergraduate majors, including the doctoral level, they are still underrepresented in department of psychology faculties. This is gradually changing, however and the next century will soon see a more equitable representation of women at all levels and in all aspects of the field.

Further reading