Day 59 – Mary Calkins
It was really fun to go back and read another paper I found from my 1998 history of psychology course. The paper on Mary Calkins introduced me to the ways women’s history (White women’s history) was still being erased in clinical psychology. It’s funny, I was just talking with someone today about how challenging writing can be, and I was reminded that all the writing I did for my doctoral program really helped me gain confidence as a writer. I’ll include the essay below.
While it’s easy to find out information about Mary Calkins now – Wikipedia was not launched until 2001 – in 1998 you had to go through stacks of books in the library to find her. I’m glad it’s a lot easier now. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t mean we have stopped having the story of White supremacy and the marginalization of people of color and their importance and contributions as the primary story told across a variety of disciplines. I’m becoming more and more aware and sensitive to it, the more I write and read.
Fast forward 20 years (from 1998), and we have Leah Gipson and her colleagues (Gipson, et al, 2021) presenting at the Critical Pedagogies in the Arts Therapies: Restoring and Re-storying the Disciplines conference in 2018, the history of art therapy’s erasure of the contributions of African American art therapists such as Cliff Joseph (see also Stepney, 2019).
We must do better!!
Gipson, L., Norris, M., Amaral, L., Tesfaye, J., & Hiscox, A. (2021). What are you all going to do to keep Black women in art therapy?. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3200
Stepney, S. A. (2019). Visionary architects of color in art therapy: Georgette Powell, Cliff Joseph, Lucille Venture, and Charles Anderson, Art Therapy, 36(3), 115-121. DOI: 10.1080/07421656.2019.1649545
1. There have been numerous men and women who have impacted the field of psychology in this century who have not been mentioned very often in psychology. Some who come mind are Noam Chomsky, Karen Horney, Kurt Lewin, and Robert Yerkes. Choose one of these figures or another individual whom you believe has had a significant impact on psychology. Describe this person's contribution to the psychology and justify your choice of him or her as an important contributor to the field.
The woman I would like to introduce into this conversation is Mary Whiton Calkins, one of the foremothers of psychology. Mary Calkins lived from 1863-1930, and spent all of her teaching years at Wellesley College. She was also the first woman president of the APA, the 14th president voted in in 1905. Yet despite her early influence and accomplished and prolific writing, she did not represent the beginnings of a partnership between women and men in defining and representing the field of psychology, and somehow, despite the fact that women have been integral to the discipline of psychology, their presence within our historical accounts is minimal. In some respects, I believe we can learn as much from the lack of impact which Mary Calkins had on the field of psychology as we can from her contributions.
I would argue that Mary Calkins is less known and was less able to have an impact on psychology for three significant reasons. First, as a woman, her impact was limited due to the limited professional and academic opportunities afforded her. Secondly, she advocated a philosophical approach, fueled by a communal mentality, at a time when the field was turning to a more “scientific” model. And lastly, her contributions have been lost due to a pervasive invisibility of women’s contributions to academic fields of study (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1986), not to mention history as a whole. Bohan (1993) speaks quite compellingly about the relative invisibility of women within the field of psychology. She wonders what has contributed to this phenomenon, what the impact on the field has been and what it would mean for the field of psychology to recognize the impact women have had, and/ or not been allowed to have, on the field. What basic assumptions about the field would have to be questioned and how might the field be changed by the recognition and acknowledgment of women’s contribution to psychology?
Women, Education and Psychology at the turn of the century
Middle class, white American women had limited academic opportunities during the late 1800’s when Calkins was recruited to introduce the first scientific psychology lab at Wellesley College. Graduate education was in fact quite new to American universities in the late 1800’s. In 1876 there were only 389 students enrolled in graduate programs. By 1890, there were 3,382 graduate students in the US, 409 of them were women (Scarborough and Furumoto, 1987, p. 25). Understanding a woman’s “place” in the late nineteenth century means understanding that there were popular doubts, at the time, about whether women were even educable, and about the effects of education on women. Would they become ill - develop weak digestion? Would they become “functionally castrated” by indulging in their intelligence (Scarborough and Furumoto, p. 4)? Or even worse, could education cause their reproductive organs to atrophy (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1986, p.37)?
Mary Calkins had to overcome many cultural stereotypes, and was circumscribed by many cultural realities, throughout her life. As a young college educated woman she was expected to either involve herself in social welfare or teach at a women’s college (Diehl, 1986/1988). “Exclusion from the research universities, then the centers of professional activity, necessarily limited the women’s research activities as well as their interaction with the leading figures in the emerging field of psychology. There were, however, personal advantages for faculty at the women’s colleges (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1986, p.40)”. One of the major sources of influence, which prominent psychologists at the time had, was the supervision, training, and affiliation they had with upcoming scholars through supervision of their graduate work. This opportunity was rarely afforded to women. One is only to look at the influence of teachers such as James and Wundt to see the impact of this work (see Benjamin et al, 1992).
In addition, women of Calkins’ time had circumscribed social roles. Calkins was forced to choose between marriage and motherhood, and her career. Wellesley, like other institutions of the day, did not accept married women on its faculty. Calkins lived with her parents throughout her life, and although they were quite supportive of her career and educational endeavors, her role as the unmarried daughter who cared for her parents continued to limit her opportunities. In 1905, she was offered a position at Barnard and Columbia, where she would have been able to teach graduate courses, but declined the offer because she felt it would be “harmful” to her parents to force them to relocate (which they were willing to do) because of her (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1986, p.40).
Calkins, lastly, did not receive the recognition she deserved with regards to her education. In the fall of 1890, Calkins began to attend graduate courses at Harvard and Clark, after a year and a half of petitioning to various institutions and faculty. Her family supported her education and, in fact, her father, a Congregational minister, personally met with the President of Harvard to convince him to allow his daughter to attend graduate seminars, due to the considerable opposition to coeducation at Harvard. Calkins studied psychology and philosophy, and continued to pursue both fields throughout her life, albeit under the umbrella of psychology. At Harvard she studied with William James and the philosopher Josiah Royce, and at Clark she participated in the psychology lab under the direction of Edmund Sanford. In 1892, she returned to Harvard to study in the lab of Hugo Munsterberg, and in 1895 completed the requirements for a Ph.D. Despite being enthusiastically recommended for the degree, Harvard refused because she was a woman. In 1902, Harvard instituted through Radcliffe, a means of offering women who attended the graduate seminars at Harvard a Ph.D., a Radcliffe Ph.D., and offered one to Calkins. Calkins refused. She viewed the Radcliffe solution as “Harvard’s device for continuing to deny recognition to women as legitimate students entitled to a Harvard degree (Scarborough and Furumoto, 1987, p. 50)”.
Calkins’ philosophical approach to psychology
Calkins’ entree into psychology came about through Wellesley’s invitation to her to establish their first psychology lab. The “new” psychology of the 1880’s “identified itself as a laboratory science dedicated to investigating mental phenomena (Scarborough and Furumoto, 1987, p. 7)”. The American Psychological Association (APA) was born in 1892, and the field of psychology was still quite in flux and inchoate. The move within the labs, towards experimentation and away from “mental philosophy”, generated much debate. Calkins worked early in her career to contain the growing split within the field in her work. She began her studies with an investigation into memory, and developed a technique she has come to be known by, the invention of “paired associates”.
Calkins saw the purpose of experimental studies as necessary for supplementing a purely introspective study of the nature of consciousness. Between 1890 and 1920, psychology was to encounter a major paradigm shift. While it started out, more or less, as the study of consciousness it appeared to quickly turn into the attempt to explain consciousness away, particularly with the advent of behaviorism. Samuelson (as cited by Furumoto, 1991) goes on to hypothesize that studies of consciousness were seen as a resistance to the orderly change psychologists were attempting to create in the lab and even may have been a threat (p.58).
In a recent review of Calkins’ experimental research (Madigan and O’Hara, 1992), it was discovered that many experimental effects which she discovered, through her doctoral work and which she published immediately, soon became unknown and unacknowledged. Many of her findings were rediscovered and recognized, as fundamental to our understanding of human learning, later by others. One cannot help but wonder how not receiving a Ph.D. impacted Calkins. She did not publish further on memory after her doctoral work and turned her attention to theoretical interests in introspection and the concept of self.
Calkins became the first woman president of the APA. She also was the first to offer a direct response in print to Watson’s article (1913/1988) expressing her “radical disagreement with the thesis of the uselessness of introspection” as the behaviorists viewed it. She believed that “a self is observed in every act of introspection” (Hilgard, 1987, p.506). While she agreed with Watson’s criticism of the limitations of objectivity with regard to the method of introspection... she maintained its usefulness as a method of psychology, She expressed a strong desire to expand the subject matter of psychological study to a concern with real people in the real world, and redirect Watson’s interest in behavior to address a functionalist approach (mental functions and adaptive processes). “Mary Calkin’s view was more nearly prophetic of what psychology would become half a century later than was Watson’s narrower position” even though behaviorism eventually predominated.
As Calkins’ career advanced, she felt that psychology had arranged its experiments to exclude inquiry into the self. “She came to question the atomistic, impersonal conception of the subject matter characteristic of this approach” (Furumoto, 1991, p.70). In 1915, she wrote, “in view of the relative paucity of introspective studies and of the preoccupation with relatively impersonal experiences, and in view, also, of the directions given to introspecters and the preconceptions on which these directions are based it is perhaps more surprising that the self has played any role at all in technical psychology than that many psychologists should fail to record its presence” (Calkins as cited by Furumoto, 1991, p.58).
Calkins remained intensely committed to the psychology of the selves, and Furumoto proposes that this commitment can be understood in part, because of her association with the community of women at Wellesley. I also wonder if it is because of her equal interest in philosophy. She came to see classical experimental psychology as out of touch with what she understood to be the fundamental subject matter of psychology - the self in relation. Ultimately, she was interested in the “reality and importance of selves in everyday experience (Furumoto, 1991, p.70)”. Reading the many reviews of her life and work it is not emphasized enough that she was ultimately concerned with the self in relation. It wasn’t until I read the introduction to the fourth edition of her book, “A First book in Psychology” (1927) that I really understood this. She opens with her definition of psychology not merely as a science of consciousness, but “as science of the self in relation to, or conscious of, its environment (p.1)”
The invisibility of Calkins’ contributions
One of the provocative questions raised by Furumoto and Scarborough (1986) and Furumoto (1991) is the question of the impact which working among a community of women scholars had on Calkins’ work. Did the isolation from her male counterparts allow her a certain freedom to pursue work which did not “singlemindely adhere to scientific rationalism, specialization, social science objectivity, or hierarchical association (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1986, p.40)”? Or did her isolation marginalize her work and cause her to “resort to transdisciplinary and theoretical strategies of claiming scientific authority (Abir-Am and Outram as cited by Furumoto, 1992, p. 181)”.
Calkin “explicitly recognized and vividly described several basic phenomena of immediate memory” for which she was not credited. Was it her removal to the labs of Wellesley that stunted her impact? Was it the continued difficulty she would have experienced as a scientific psychologist? Women were barred from the professional meetings of experimental researchers instituted by Titchener (Furumoto, 1992). How did her research methods or scientific attitude reflect her dissatisfaction with experimentation which was more interested in prediction, rather than description or explanation? Did the exclusion of women from association with the experimentalists prevent the discussion and influence of women’s view? She felt that introspection could be secured through experimentation, yet one wonders to what extent this challenged psychology’s move to a positivist paradigm?
Bohan (1993) argues that “the tacit assumptions underlying positivist psychology have acted to marginalize women and their work (p.75)”. She proposes that “the construction of knowledge (of psychology and gender) creates, sustains, and validates attitudes and practices that render women and their work less visible (p.75)”. Bohan notes that women ask new questions, provide new interpretations, and suggest different theoretical approaches than men yet because of their invisibility in the construction of a history of psychology, not to mention their explicit exclusion, they have had a limited impact.
Conclusion
Calkins’ lack of impact seems as important to recognize as her contributions to the field of psychology. I’d like to conclude with the last insight I gained into the subtle ways in which our historical, and constructed (Bohan would add), accounts of psychology have and continue to serve to contribute to less visibility of women within the field. Our basic method of documentation has contributed to a kind of invisibility of women within the field. “The citation format prescribed by APA contributes to women’s invisibility in psychology by making it impossible to identify women’s work, thus permitting the presumption of male authorship (Bohan, 1993, p.74). As such I have included both first names and last in my reference section.
Some people have referred to this era in psychology as the “feminization” of the field. More women are currently enrolled in psychology programs than men. How will we learn from our review of the history of impact of women on the field, to allow for the acknowledgment of the contributions of many groups which have been traditionally marginalized in our work? Our renewed interests in the philosophy of science, in qualitative approaches to psychological research and in understanding the self in relation all seem to have had been interests shared by Mary Whiton Calkins.
References
Benjamin, Ludy, Durkin, Maureen, Link, Michelle, Vestal, Marilyn, and Acord, Jill (1992). Wundt’s American doctoral students. American Psychologist, 47 (2), 123-131.
Bohan, Janis (1993). Women at center stage: A course about the women of psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 20 (2), 74-79.
Calkins, Mary (1927). A first book in psychology (4th rev. ed.). NY: Macmillan.
Diehl, Lesley (1986/1988). The paradox of G. Stanley Hall: For of coeducation and educator of women. In L. Benjamin (ed.) A History of Psychology: Original sources and contemporary research. (p.295-310). NY: McGraw-Hill Publ. Co.
Furumoto, Laurel and Scarborough, Elizabeth (1986). Placing women in the history of psychology: The first American women psychologists. American Psychologist, 41 (1), 35-42.
Furumoto, Laurel (1991). From “paired associates to a psychology of self: The intellectual odyssey of Mary Whiton Calkins. In G. Kimble, M. Wertheimer, and C. White (Eds.). Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, Vol. 1, pp. 57-72. Washington, DC: APA and Hillsdale, NJ: LEA Publ.
Furumoto, Laurel (1992). Joining separate spheres - Christine Ladd-Franklin, Woman-scientists (1847-1930). American Psychologist, 47 (2), 175-182.
Madigan, Stephan and O’Hara, Ruth (1992). Short-term memory and the turn of the century: Mary Whiton Calkins’s memory research. American Psychologist, 47 (2), 170-174.
Samuelson, Franz. (1988). Struggle for scientific authority: The reception of Watson’s behaviorism, 1913-1920. In L. Benjamin (ed.) A History of Psychology: Original sources and contemporary research. (p.407-424). NY: McGraw-Hill Publ. Co.
Scarborough, Elizabeth and Furumoto, Laurel (1987). Untold lives: The first generation of American women psychologists. NY: Columbia University Press.
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